The company that holds the forest license that would allow logging to two stands of thousand-year-old cedar deep in the Duncan River valley says that the trees will stay standing – for now. “There seems to be no official old growth management plan for this area and that means what’s left can be on a hit list whenever. That needs to change.”
BC Timber Sales (BCTS) has decided to drop the cutblock known as the Roberts Creek headwaters ancient forest from its future harvesting plans, BCTS planning forester Norm Kempe has confirmed. After Elphinstone Logging Focus (ELF) “managed to elevate the issue in the public’s eye,” Kempe said his office was contacted by “a number of individuals” requesting the cutblock be permanently set aside
"Decade-old government documents show that an area being logged near Cathedral Grove on Vancouver Island was identified by Ministry of Environment biologists as critical winter habitat for deer that had to be protected. Environmental groups have been protesting the logging in recent weeks, arguing that a 40-hectare patch on Mt. Horne is an important wildlife corridor. But Island Timberlands is permitted to log there because the government took the land out of Tree Farm Licence (TFL) 44 in 2004, putting it under a private land management regime that allows the company to decide what’s best for wildlife."
"Scott Fraser, NDP MLA for Alberni-Pacific Rim, said that when the land went to Island Timberlands, the agreement was cast aside. “These areas were supposed to be left,” said Fraser, who has been working since 2006 to protect the land, including the Port Alberni watershed. “I have so many outraged constituents, including retired loggers who have never seen this kind of forest activity.”
MLA Scott Fraser for Port Alberni-Pacific speaks up on Cathedral Grove and how the BC government's own biologists opposed deregulation of the old-growth areas intended to be reserved for wildlife - many of which are now being logged by Island Timberlands.
"With the recent announcement that two sawmills in the communities of Quesnel and Houston will close with the loss of more than 430 jobs, the time has come to face an unpleasant but necessary truth. Our forests are so depleted as a result of the unprecedented Mountain Pine Beetle outbreak and more than a decade-long logging frenzy in response to it, that we cannot possibly sustain the sawmilling industry that we currently have. The provincial government has known for years that this would happen, yet did nothing of consequence to prepare for it. Worse, it now appears to be using the unfolding crisis to set the stage for the virtual privatization of British Columbia’s public forests, a move that it knows full well most members of the public oppose."
“Cathedral Grove is B.C.’s iconic old-growth forest that people around the world love – it’s like the redwoods of Canada. The fact that a company can just move to log the mountainside above Canada’s most famous old-growth forest – assisted by the B.C. government’s previous deregulation of those lands and their current failure to take responsibility – underscores the brutal collusion between the B.C. Liberal government and the largest companies to liquidate our ancient forest heritage.”
"People on Vancouver Island fear a stand of old-growth Douglas Firs near Cathedral Grove is about to be logged.Conservationists have seen evidence of a logging road being built into the patch of forest. 'We have already lost 99 per cent of the old growth coastal Douglas Firs.'”
"Conservation groups are demanding forestry company Island Timberlands abandon plans to log old-growth forest on the perimeter of a Vancouver Island provincial park. The company is building a logging road to a site that sits 300 metres from the border of MacMillan Provincial Park, best noted for a protected stand of old-growth trees within the park known as Cathedral Grove."
Extremely rare groves of oldgrowth Coastal Douglas-firs, of which only 1% remain, constitute much of these contentious forest lands, they say. "These corporate private lands were previously regulated to public land standards for over half a century in exchange for the BC government's granting of free Crown land logging rights to the companies," said Ken Wu, executive director of the Ancient Forest Alliance. "What has happened is that the regulations on private lands were removed recently, while the companies were still allowed to keep their Crown land logging rights."
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