Author Archive for: AFA

For a few hours last month Big Lonely Doug was a little less lonely. On may 25, a group of climbers and environmentalists scaled the giant tree, which was confirmed as Canada’s second-largest Douglas Fir earlier this year.

“It’s a humbling experience exploring the tops of centuries-old trees and in a place no human has been before. I hope the novel images that come from this initiative to climb and document the largest trees and grandest groves in B.C. will help to raise awareness… about these highly endangered ecosystems,” said T.J. Watt of the Ancient Forest Alliance.

View gallery at: https://www.timescolonist.com/news/local/gallery-tree-climbers-scale-big-lonely-doug-1.1118808

"The only evident plan [of the BC government] is to keep the rates of timber harvesting unsustainably high, thereby making the eventual collapse of available timber even more painful for forest-dependent communities, a policy based on the premise that it is better to have more jobs today and none tomorrow rather than fewer jobs today and some tomorrow.
…the government is preoccupied with rewarding an oligopoly of companies with exclusive timber rights over public forests within quasi-private timber farms (Tree Farm Licences)
In its zeal to justify further enclosure of The Commons and increased corporate control over the commoners’ timber, the government’s twisted thinking becomes so bent that it defines mountebank politics."

"TFLs have always enabled monopolistic corporate control of our public forests and, over the long term, have not maintained the public benefits that were promised when they were awarded. The sorry state of BC’s coastal forests and coastal forest industry, where the majority of current TFLs exist, provides all the evidence needed to reject the creation of any more TFLs…"