Logging company Island Timberlands is putting its plans to harvest a roadside section of forest near the Alberni Highway summit on hold. They are pressing the pause button on the logging project after being hit with a wave of outrage from citizens in the Valley. Many say a roadside cut will destroy the beauty of the region and could affect tourism.
“We considered our plans over the weekend and now we are putting a temporary suspension on the harvest of the buffer along the highway,” Island Timberlands spokeswoman Morgan Kennah said in an interview Monday.
On Monday, Island Timberlands starts logging about 40 hectares of privately managed forest land beside a hilly section of Highway 4 known as the Hump. It tops out at the 400-metre-high Alberni summit, about nine kilometres east of Port Alberni.
As the dispute between Cortes Island residents and Island Timberlands escalates, activists are moving the debate to where it will hurt: the market.
A New Democratic Party government led by Adrian Dix would expand child care, reduce fees for seniors' long-term care, ban the cosmetic use of pesticides, put a moratorium on independent power projects, stop renovictions and create disincentives for exporting raw logs.
Cortes is very lucky to have forests like this because they are rare and quickly disappearing. Red legged frogs are rare too. They are provincially listed and declining in numbers. On Cortes Island, those rare forests are about to be logged, and the little frogs may be facing their last winter.
A big issue in the Cortes dispute is the extent to which our government regulates activity on private land. The private foresters claim they are governed by more than 30 acts and regulations. However, the environmentalists say companies like Timberlands are allowed to apply a model of “professional reliance” which means that there is little meaningful regulatory oversight. It’s a pity the current administration has all but forsaken its role as steward and peacekeeper in the woods. A measure of leadership would go a long way right about now.
The current impasse over logging on private land on Cortes Island is unique by B.C. standards. In a province where wars in the woods have often been bitterly waged, the Cortes standoff stands apart. Cortes environmentalists and Island Timberlands have been debating the company’s logging plans for about four years without coming to serious blows. The islanders are not trying to ban logging altogether, they are asking for Timberlands to adopt an ecosystem-based, selective logging harvesting plan that spares old growth.
Echo Lake is a spectacular, unprotected, lowland ancient forest near Agassiz, BC on the east side of the Lower Fraser Valley. It is in the unceded territory of the Sts'ailes First Nations band (formerly the Chehalis Indian Band). The area is home to perhaps the largest concentration of bald eagles on Earth, where thousands of eagles come each fall to eat spawning salmon in the Harrison and Chehalis Rivers and hundreds roost in the old-growth trees at night around Echo Lake.
The China Investment Corporation (ICI), one of the world's largest sovereign wealth funds, is set to become a powerful landowner in British Columbia if a $100 million deal with Island Timberlands, the second-largest owner of private forests in the province, goes through.
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