There are those who want to keep on logging until the last tree is cut, no matter the repercussions; at the other end of the spectrum are those who say we have cut enough and now is the time to stop.
While neither view is practical or realistic, there are some good reasons why people have come to these conclusions. We only must look at the past few years to understand why.
The industrial forest sector, and the future of B.C.'s forests were dramatically changed in the early 1990s. A mountain pine beetle outbreak started in Tweedsmuir Park and spread outside of the park and across most of the province. Although the government of the day had the opportunity to address the initial outbreak by harvesting and prescribed burns, they bowed to public pressure and let "nature" take its course.
Nothing was done to stop the pine beetle attack from growing until it was too large to contain. Over the past 25-plus years, roughly 50 per cent of the commercial-sized pine was attacked and died. Of that, about 60 per cent of B.C.'s lodgepole pine was harvested.
Once the outbreak grew to the point that it became unstoppable, the government and the ministry of forests had to change the laws governing timber harvest, to allow forest tenure holders to harvest more pine.
The changes were to give forest companies priority to harvest the dead and dying pine and salvage some economic value from these trees before they became worthless, recognizing that they never would be worthless, in the true sense of the word.
Love or hate those decisions, what we see and live with today are the result of that direction. Roads and public access were created to most all of B.C.'s pine stands.
The only pine areas not accessed were in parks, protected areas or where the trees were not of commercial quality.
Economic objectives took precedent over other forest values. The general assumption was that dead trees and dying forests were not of great value for values such as big game winter ranges, small fur-bearers and trappers, viewscapes along our travel corridors or watershed management.
Fast forward to today. The pine beetle epidemic has become a distant memory. Now, we must pay another economic price, as the volume of timber available to sustain the current size and configuration of our manufacturing plants is not there.
Plant closures, mostly based on lack of wood fibre, and curtailments, based both on fibre availability and the selling price of the commodity, have become regular announcements.
But it isn't just about the lack of pine that drives all of these announcements.
The removal of the timber harvesting land base for other reasons compounds the timber supply shortage. As new parks, conservancies, sensitive areas and other harvesting restrictions are created, less and less land is available to grow the trees that our mills need to survive.
A smaller forest industry is also what others wish for, and especially for those who believe that no industry should exist, when it has negative impacts on other resources.
This is nothing new, but there is now a renewed effort to ensure this happens, and that coincides with government reviews of the legislation regulating forest practices.
It will be public sentiment that sways this government as to what new legislation they will bring in to regulate our forest industry. In saying this, one needs to look no further than our grizzly bear management strategy as the example they follow - if the average person thinks harvesting bears is bad, then it must be; if the average person thinks harvesting trees is bad, then it also must be.
So which will it be?
Management by opinion, or management in support of rural B.C. and those who derive their living from our forests?
Will decisions involve local people making local decisions on how our public lands are managed or will it be dominated by big money NGO's funding well-orchestrated PR campaigns to continue the quest of making B.C. the biggest park in the world?
-- Evan Saugstad is a former mayor of Chetwynd and lives in Fort St. John.
