To the editor:
When I first heard of British Columbia, it was in a road movie in the early 80s featuring a happy traveller on his way to Alaska. The movie showed pristine wilderness, beautiful rivers, impressive waterfalls, forests and unparalleled outdoor opportunities. This is what drew me to Canada and I have lived in Brantford, Ontario and Kamloops before finally making it to Terrace in 2012.
I was late! When I arrived in Kamloops in 2006, the steelhead run in the Thompson River was reduced to 800 fish, and it dwindled down to less than 200 over the next six years. At the same time the city was exploding in all directions with new lanes being added to the highways.
The Skeena River valley left me impressed and the places looked exactly like that 80s movie - slopes covered in forests, rivers full of fish, wildlife and sparse traffic.
But this was soon eroded, too. Huge clear cuts started to show up. Bornite Mountain, Copper Mountain , Zymacord, Kleanza, Williams Creek, Lava Lake, Exstew, Dasque, Kalum, Cedar and Beaver valleys, The loggers invaded the area of Fiddler Creek and clear cut huge slopes all around leaving Hwy16 travellers with an eye sore.
They continue building new roads and wrecking the place. The Copper is a world renowned steelhead river, but it is now destroyed and flowing brown in the winter. Removal of vegetation led to huge fluctuations in water levels over the season and many fish runs collapsed. But fishing aside is only a side effect of a much bigger problem.
A look on Google Earth would disclose that most of the old forests are now gone. They have been cleared systematically over the past 50-plus years with the help of ever advancing technologies. There is not much left to save, but the idea still is to take it all. I asked a representative of BC Timber sales years ago as to what portion of the vegetation in a river valley would need to be left to let the ecosystem function properly. He was taken aback. They did not intend to leave a single old tree standing.
Most of the cut blocks are bare with no trees growing in them. The blocks where something grows contain small trees of little ecological and climate protection value. If anything, most of those blocks become tinder boxes waiting for the correct combination of weather events to start a fire at our doorstep. You will find huge piles of dried wood , metal ropes, old machinery parts, drums of oil. In some cases you find abandoned equipment - water trucks, yarders, and ETVs. Once deactivated, roads collapse in sections due to culverts plugging up, water running on them and eventually causing a slide. With the soils washed out and much of the biomass stripped, chances of the forest ever recovering are slim to none.
But isn't the forest a renewable resource? So the industry tells us.
In my home country we have a tree as old as the country itself - 1,320 years.
A forest is not a tomato plantation that one grows and harvests each year. A forest is build over millennia. It is the base of our own existence. It absorbs the rain and acts as a big water reservoir, regulating the water flows in the valley, it protects the top soil, regulates the water temperature and is a factory converting CO2 into oxygen! Forests sustain the climate we are used to, let us breathe, provide us with food and are the basis of biodiversity.
While our human population grows and our CO2 emissions constantly increase, logging diminishes the abilities of the forests to help us.
How can we advocate for the protection of the rainforests in Brazil, if we as a rich and developed nation are in such a rush to sell our trees to Asia? How can we have a supernatural British Columbia, when the heart of it is gutted out and the result is visible by everyone from space?
We should be the ones setting an example of sustainable existence and taking pride in it. Time is running out.
Jules Jelev,
Terrace, B.C.
