Plan to allow logging of old growth forests draws criticism

Check out this Global News piece about conservationists’ disappointment with the BC NDP and their plans to auction off 1,300 hectares of old-growth on Vancouver Island, featuring Sierra Club BC’s Jens Wieting, and footage by AFA’s TJ Watt.

Keep in mind the statistics stated by the government are misleading. The BC government is combining the old-growth stats from Vancouver Island/South Coast – where very little has been protected (about 6% of Vancouver Island and 8% of the SW Mainland’s productive forests are in parks) with the Great Bear Rainforest, the northern rainforest where 85% of all the forests are off-limits due to a massive campaign of boycotts, protests, and negotiations for over two decades. To lump together the northern rainforest where regulations are strong (and where the trees are smaller and the forests are different) with the southern rainforest where the old-growth protections are sparse (and where the trees are much larger and the forests are generally more diverse) is disingenuous. When they say ‘55% of the old-growth forests on the coast are protected’ – the vast majority of that is in the Great Bear Rainforest, not on Vancouver Island where the conflict rages and old-growth logging occurs at a scale of about 11,000 hectares a year (in 2016) and where the forests are more highly endangered.

See the original clip here