Re: Pellet sector not to blame for forestry problems.
In his letter, David Elstone’s absolution of the forest industry is history by omission, a version that does not withstand closer scrutiny.
What Elstone fails to tell readers is that the forest industry made its own bed and is responsible, not for the mountain pine infestation itself, but for the way in which it chose to log dead wood and where.
The forest ministry’s own records show that the industry did not log only dead trees but also plenty of live trees in its salvage operations, often more valuable tree species than beetle-infected lodgepole pine.
Additionally, the ministry’s records of cutblock layout and of permit dates indicate that the forest industry deliberately first logged infested pine forests closest to their mills thereby making worse the problem of finding timber economical to log at a later date.
Perhaps these two facts give rise to an alternative version of events to that portrayed by Elstone and explain how the forest industry exacerbated the timber supply crisis of today.
As to Elstone’s trumpeting of a recent study that found that 85 per cent of the B.C. pellet industry’s fibre supply comes from byproducts of sawmills, we are left asking: Who financed the study? Drax? Who provided the data? Drax? And why didn’t the forest professionals who authored the study use the same data sourced by Ben Parfitt from official government records?
Finally, Elstone is vexatious to impugn Ben Parfitt for saying that the date on which infestations began was in 2009. This is obviously a reporting or editorial error, not one made by Ben Parfitt, who wrote a major documentary titled “Battling the Beetle" in 2005.
Anthony Britneff
Victoria
