If natural forests are ‘self-willed, self-managing, and self-replacing’ to respond and adapt to disturbances like fire and pest-outbreaks, should we be logging more as some suggest? Or should our approach be more precautionary?
This week, Michelle Connolly from Conservation North takes us back into the forests of British Columbia. She breaks down for us the severity of B.C.'s industrial logging impacts that her organization has documented through spatial mapping. While logging is advertised as a necessary means to manage B.C.’s forests, including for pests and wildfires, we unpack why fire and pests are actually part of the natural forest cycle.
Learn more about Conservation North on their website and check out the Seeing Red map.
Make sure to check out the show notes on the podcast webpage for more links and helpful resources.
You can help this community grow by sharing the podcast with your friends.
If natural forests are ‘self-willed, self-managing, and self-replacing’ to respond and adapt to disturbances like fire and pest-outbreaks, should we be logging more as some suggest? Or should our approach be more precautionary?
This week, Michelle Connolly from Conservation North takes us back into the forests of British Columbia. She breaks down for us the severity of B.C.'s industrial logging impacts that her organization has documented through spatial mapping. While logging is advertised as a necessary means to manage B.C.’s forests, including for pests and wildfires, we unpack why fire and pests are actually part of the natural forest cycle.
Learn more about Conservation North on their website and check out the Seeing Red map.
Make sure to check out the show notes on the podcast webpage for more links and helpful resources.
You can help this community grow by sharing the podcast with your friends.
Welcome to the Clear Cut. Hi, I'm Janet Sumner, Executive Director at Wildlands League.
Kaya Adleman:And I'm Kaya Adelman, Carbon Manager at Wildlands League.
Janet Sumner:Wildlands League is a Canadian conservation organization working on protecting the natural world.
Kaya Adleman:The Clear Cut is bringing to you the much needed conversation on Canadian forest management and how we can better protect one of Canada's most important ecosystems, as our forests are reaching a tipping point. Okay, welcome back to the podcast, janet.
Janet Sumner:Thanks, Kaia.
Kaya Adleman:It's been a week.
Janet Sumner:It has been a week I've been to Africa and back here we are.
Kaya Adleman:Yeah, that's crazy. How long were you in Africa for? Again, it's not even like three full days.
Janet Sumner:Almost no time, you know, talking to the FSC folks about some of the things I think about forestry. So anyway, but we weren't working on forestry in Africa, it was more just talking about conceptual ideas.
Janet Sumner:So yeah very, very short visit and not good for the climate, but sometimes you have to go somewhere to have a conversation with people who are making decisions and thinking about big issues, and that was that was my purpose. So happy to back on Terra Firma here here in canada and doing the podcast in a very uh, climate friendly way, just uh, talking to people across the country rather than having to fly all over the place on zoom.
Kaya Adleman:You're no, uh, harry and megan yeah, they're flying all over the place, those guys yeah, I've, I've.
Janet Sumner:You know, I I don't think I've ever been even remotely considered to be a Harriet Megan. Well, that's not. I'd have some shared roots in the sense that I was born in the UK but never, ever, ever been considered in the same breath. So that's okay though. Well, anyway, let's get down to it. This is an interview with Michelle Connolly.
Janet Sumner:I've been a big fan of the work of Conservation North for a number of years and I contacted her when we started doing, or when we had finished our work on logging scars and they were doing some work around mapping cumulative footprint, and you're going to get a chance to hear about that and try to figure out where are the areas that have not had an industrial logging footprint yet, and she talks about that in this episode.
Janet Sumner:So I'm really grateful to her for coming on and speaking about that.
Janet Sumner:It was definitely one of the reasons that I wanted to reach out to her because, while I've been about that, it was definitely one of the reasons that I wanted to reach out to her because, well, I've been trying to talk to groups across Canada on who else is doing work like logging scars, and we have a future episode coming up where we talk a little bit about this, but one of the things for Canadians is it's very difficult to make decisions about our forests when we actually can't see the true impact of what's happening in our forests.
Janet Sumner:We have to trust that when people say, oh yeah, we're replanting all those trees and they all come back, whether that even happens and it might not be through any ill intention but we don't know, we can't see it, we can't monitor it and, frankly, there's nobody out there necessarily doing that. In Ontario they measure it when it's at free to grow, but this cumulative disturbance footprint in a British Columbia context and they've used that to try and find a way to say well, here are the forests that are remaining, that are still natural or, with that, do not yet have an industrial footprint. So that's one of the things that I'm looking forward to as we talk to her about over the next two episodes. It's one of the things that I'm looking forward to as we talk to her about over the next two episodes.
Kaya Adleman:Yeah, I don't know For our listeners who do pay attention to forestry in the news. You might actually know or recognize Michelle Connelly from the BBC Panorama journalistic investigative. Sorry, I think it's investigative journalism series on television that came out in 2022. She was talking to the reporters from the BBC about some of the biomass production that's going on in British Columbia that we talked about on our last few episodes with Stand on Earth and we get into it a little bit in not this episode, but the next episode as well. And sorry, I really hate to do this, but I'm going to throw in one more British royalty joke that I'm going to borrow from my dad. So this is stolen and it's probably going to be painful, are?
Janet Sumner:you saying this is a dad joke? Are you telling the audience get ready, buckle up. It's a dad joke.
Kaya Adleman:Yes, it's a dad joke, and it's not just a dad joke, it's a my dad joke, so it's even worse. So the BBC Panorama is, you know, they're always delivering terrible news. They're delivering terrible news about Canada's forests, and it's also the program that revealed that King Charles was being unfaithful to Princess Diana. So just terrible, terrible stories coming out of that television series.
Janet Sumner:So therefore, since we know that that was terrible news, we should also know that this is terrible news, right?
Kaya Adleman:Yes, exactly.
Janet Sumner:And your dad told you that joke.
Kaya Adleman:Yes, he did.
Janet Sumner:Thanks, David my dad's named David too. Maybe it's a David thing.
Kaya Adleman:It is Lots of dads named David, but yeah. Dave, Dave, Dave in our dad jokes.
Janet Sumner:Yeah, he tells dad jokes, so maybe that's it, maybe it's. They should be reframed as dad jokes as opposed to Dave, or David jokes as opposed to dad jokes dad jokes as opposed to David, or David jokes as opposed to dad jokes.
Kaya Adleman:Yes, I like that. But yeah, I'm quite excited for this episode. We get into a lot of really interesting stuff. Talk about the work of Conservation North, like Jana just mentioned, and then we'll also get into the underlying frame of forests in BC and what the government, what the provincial government's policy, looks like. So quite excited to get into it.
Janet Sumner:Yeah, and we won't dive in in the first episode, but the second episode also. Make sure you listen to this one as well, because Michelle's going to talk about the recent report that they did with a UK group on how old-growth forests are being used for making wood pellets and some of the best old growth out there. She also unpacks a little bit about what's happened after the old growth report came out of British Columbia. And then the other thing that I find really interesting about what she talks about is many of the environmental groups have very much focused on old growth and she started to identify how this might be a problem, because if you only protect the sort of area around an old growth but you don't protect the whole forest, you haven't necessarily protected that ecosystem or that range of species and range of ages of the trees. So it's going to be a great conversation with her and, yeah, I'm excited to dive into it. Hey, kaya, it's another episode of the Clear Cut and we are very fortunate to have Michelle Connolly here. I'm looking forward to this. How?
Kaya Adleman:about you. Yeah, me too. I'm looking forward to it. We're going back to British Columbia. I feel like we haven't been there in a while, so it's very exciting.
Janet Sumner:I know we don't even have to leave our chairs. You're in Montreal and I'm here in Toronto, and we can actually zoom across the country and get what's going on in British Columbia from the people who are working there. And Michelle Connelly is one of those, and I've been a big fan of her work and certainly a big fan of the Conservation North work for quite some time, and so it's just a. I think one of the treats of this podcast is we get to sit down with some of the people that we think everybody should sit down with and just kind of have you know, an hour of conversation with them, and so, whether it's, you know, harvey Locke, or whether it's David Flood or now, michelle Connolly, this is a fantastic opportunity to hear from some of the people who are experts in the field.
Kaya Adleman:Yeah, michelle, welcome to the podcast.
Michelle Connolly:Thank you both. That's really kind, kind things to say More than deserving.
Janet Sumner:So, michelle, we're going to just start with asking you to give us a little bit of background on who you are, why you do this work, and maybe something a little bit about you and who you are, just so the audience can maybe get a three-dimensional view of Michelle Connolly.
Michelle Connolly:Sure. So I have an undergraduate degree in the natural sciences and a graduate degree in forest disturbance ecology and I consider myself pretty literate in the field of ecology. I think what started my interest in nature and protecting it must come from growing up at the edge of a community north of Edmonton. You know our place was right at the edge of town and I spent a lot of time when I was growing up in an ecosystem that I now know is called Aspen Parkland, so it's kind of prairie with clumps of aspen. That's the habitat I grew up in and spent a lot of time in as a child. I didn't have a great home upbringing so I spent a lot of time outside, and when I think about it now, I think that's why I developed a pretty close emotional connection to nature. So I did most of my schooling within a forestry department At the time.
Michelle Connolly:Enrolling in a forestry program was how you got exposure to natural history, ecology and you get to spend time outdoors learning. The other option for me would have been to spend a lot of time staring into microscopes and I just didn't want to do that. I would say that my position on protecting nature was already well informed when I well formed when I registered and started taking classes. There was a time when I considered going into forestry as a professional and I decided against that after a short period because going down that road, at least in BC, requires you to view forests as a commodity and I was unable to do that. So, um, the, the culture of forestry, the need to manage, uh, really didn't, didn't work for me. In my opinion, it's modern humans that need managing, not nature, not forests.
Michelle Connolly:So I've worked for governments, academia and environmental groups. For the most part I worked briefly for the BC government doing forestry tenure administration. I worked with the federal government and First Nations on a marine protected area. I worked as a field technician for many years, again indulging that need to spend time in nature. I worked in an entomology collection at a university and I volunteered for environmental groups of all kinds, from the confrontational and radical to more mainstream ones. So I try and do paid work that aligns with my values. But it would be difficult to have a paid job that aligns exactly and that's why I started Conservation North.
Janet Sumner:That's a fascinating history. I spent quite a few years working for the pembina institute, based out of drayton valley. Now, I didn't work um, I wasn't based out of drayton valley, but I spent a lot of time going up to drayton valley for meetings etc and over a five or six year period um having the the great opportunity of going there. So you probably know most people don't know where Drake Valley is, but I bet you do which is not far from Edmonton.
Michelle Connolly:Yeah, that's right yeah.
Janet Sumner:Yeah, and I also spent about seven years going back and forth working on oil caribou conservation planning in and around Edmonton. So that's Edmonton, a great stomping ground. Maybe we can. You talked about being a technician. I forget the term you used, but I just wanted to, because people hear these terms and they may not know what it means.
Janet Sumner:And I have a vague idea of what it means, or I think I know what it means, but being a technician means you're out in the woods, right? You're out there stomping those grounds, is that? Is that correct, or am I?
Michelle Connolly:Yeah, the projects? I was, yes, so when I worked as a field technician, I was generally helping on either government or university students doing their projects, and so they would hire a bunch of us to go and help them collect data in the field, so information about the behavior of animals or the, you know, the patterns of vegetation on the ground. So, yes, it is, it's outdoor work. I've worked in, you know, forest fire field work, vancouver Island, marmot fieldwork, my own research, which was on basically recovery after an insect outbreak in the inland temperate rainforest. You know insect surveys, pollinator surveys. So yes, those are the folks that do the outside work of collecting information, usually to support some kind of research.
Janet Sumner:Where are you based right now?
Michelle Connolly:Oh yeah, of course. So we're based in Klatelitene territory, so it's in north central BC.
Kaya Adleman:No-transcript um, and you guys do, in addition to forestry work, you do conservation stuff across all um, all kinds of fields and areas, right?
Michelle Connolly:uh, we most definitely do not do forestry work um our our work is based around essentially resisting forestry and primary forests.
Michelle Connolly:Yeah, so I can talk about conservation, or so. So we're a volunteer collective comprising academics, resource professionals, first Nations, forest industry workers, artists and the general public concerned with wildlife and biodiversity loss in north central BC. We recognize that communities of native species and their habitats have the right to coexist with humans, and we promote habitat protection by employing both kind of science and advocacy to change government policies on on land management. So I would describe us as an ecocentric or a biocentric group. So we think that primary forests ought to be protected for their own sake. So our main motivation for starting is that you know, all of us knew, we were aware that global wildlife populations have dropped precipitously in the last 50 years. I think that you know there was a study that came out that said that they've dropped 60% since 1970. Canadian mammal populations have dropped by over 40%. The province of BC has thousands of species at risk and we're in an era of biological annihilation is how the Living Planet Report from 2018 described it. Biologists tell me that everything we're bothering to measure is in decline, and the reason for this is habitat loss, and the most obvious habitat loss in our region is of natural forest. So a natural or a primary forest is one that's never been logged.
Michelle Connolly:So our work is about resisting forestry, ie logging and road building in natural forests, in primary forests, for the protection of remaining biodiversity. So I think according to the latest kind of global analysis on primary forests, about 80% has been degraded through roads and logging, so that means that about 20% of Earth's forest cover has never been industrialized. Some of that is in BC. The intensive forest management simplifies natural forest ecosystems in a big way and we realized that that's what we should be focusing on here if we actually want to protect wildlife, protect other life forms. So we've spent the better part of six years doing public outreach and we hear from retired logging contractors, foresters, sometimes truck loggers, hunters, trappers, anglers that are very unhappy with the rate and scale of industrial logging of our last primary forests, and over that time we've interacted with probably thousands of people opposed to logging the remaining natural forests, which is really interesting considering where we are.
Michelle Connolly:Even in northern BC, where our economy has revolved around the production of forest products, there's very little social license to log the remaining old growth but also other forms of primary forest, either for really high value products or pellets, which is, of course, an emerging problem. One of the things that triggered us forming our group is that we had the opinion that big environmental groups were far too moderate. They focus on what's politically achievable as opposed to what nature actually needs, which is to stop being annihilated. And so we formed the group so that we could say what we wanted to say anytime. So we're all volunteers and this is a labor of love. It's a vocation for most of us.
Janet Sumner:Wow, I love that history. One of the things that I think is also important is, while you might be saying some of the more radical things are the things that need to be said, the work of Conservation North, at least, seems to me to be deeply grounded in data and information and good science. So it's not what some people might think is that the more radical groups don't have a connection to the natural, to the sciences, and so that's not at all what Conservation North is. I've seen some amazing work coming out of you, and the thing that I was most attracted to what I discovered we were doing the logging scars report here in Ontario and I was trying to find out if anybody had done something similar or had looked at that kind of information across Canada, and I found the maps that Conservation North had done, and then I think that was the first time I contacted you, because I was really blown away by those. Can you maybe just talk about that mapping of cumulative footprint?
Michelle Connolly:Yes, of course. So we created the Seeing Red map about a year after we realized that it wasn't just old growth forests that are at risk in BC, it's actually all ages of natural forest or forest that's never been logged. So we wanted to better understand what the areas were that we wanted to protect, and to do that we had to map them out. So we enlisted the help of a really skilled GIS person and we acquired the publicly available logging, cut blocks data from the BC government, as well as roads data and basically all the data that indicate kind of a conversion of an ecosystem, and we pulled all that together, mapped it out and the negative space is the area of natural forests.
Michelle Connolly:So it's an interactive map that users can zoom in and out of. You can go to an area that you're interested in and see what the state of natural forests is. There you can see where the natural forests are, forests is there. You can see whether you know where the natural forests are and where the logging impacts have happened. We meant it to be a tool that community groups like ours can use to figure out what areas they need to defend if they want to defend them. So it is a very black and white image of forests in BC, but to us it enables us to know where the most valuable places are on the landscape to protect.
Janet Sumner:In terms of the data, and this is just something that I'm deeply interested in, because one of the things that we found with logging scars when we did it, there was a section we were doing which was ground truthing, which meant Trevor was going out and you know drone footage etc. And the resolution that we were able to get to was a 40 centimeter resolution, so we were able to see some of the logging roads, etc. Whereas if we just used the government data, that was going to give us a 30 meter resolution. So have you had any of that kind of challenge, shall I say, in a BC context, or what kind of data sets are you using that allow you to see the forest?
Michelle Connolly:Yes, so it's all been the publicly available data that's on the DataBC catalog. So in terms of the details of the quality of the data, we just accepted that we had that data to work with and that was the most straightforward way to map it. I'm sure there are issues with kind of the scale and resolution of the roads data, but we worked with what was available to us and it ended up being quite an effective way to communicate the cumulative footprint of industrial development across the province. I want to say one thing about your comment, janet, on being a science-based group. We are, and that's just because some of us have backgrounds in the natural sciences. We've been lucky enough to go to school and learn what it's about.
Michelle Connolly:Backgrounds in the natural sciences.
Michelle Connolly:We've been lucky enough to, you know, go to school and learn what it's about.
Michelle Connolly:But at the same time we really see science as just one way of kind of understanding how the world works, and so we understand its limitations as well and we certainly don't want to elevate it as really the only way of understanding things.
Michelle Connolly:But you're right that it's really. It's really enabled us to kind of interpret the information that comes out of ecology and to use that to kind of further our campaign work to protect natural forests. So you know, some of us are educated in the sciences, but I definitely wouldn't describe not having that as being a limitation for any groups that want to, you know, pursue local protection of their forests. In fact, I think a lot of the language you know from forestry and ecology can be kind of technocratic, and one of the things that we've tried to avoid is preventing the emotion in all of it. So I guess we try to strike a balance between using science to inform our work but also not squishing out all the feelings and emotions out of what we do, because of course that's a really important driver is simply our love for natural wild places.
Janet Sumner:Yeah, absolutely A hundred percent. I think it's the people who are the best advocates for the people, who know the land and, whether that's indigenous or local communities, who actually live and breathe that land. It's really important to be having that conversation and have them driving the outcomes and what they want to see. But I do like the Conservation North work that you've been able to publish because I think when you're trying to have that dialogue with the structures of power, you need to have the tools to be able to challenge conceptions and sort of present alternate views. And I've also been really pleased to see the rise of Indigenous knowledge and we did a great set of interviews with David Flood, who's an Indigenous registered professional forester. He just brings those two worldviews together. It's quite fantastic.
Kaya Adleman:Hey, are you liking the clear cut as much as we like making it? Your donation helps us bring more of these important stories to life. You can actually support our work by going to our website, wwwwildlandsleagueorg. Slash the clear cut, or you can click the link in the episode description below. Your support means the world to us. In the episode description below your support means the world to us. I really love the mapping work that Conservation North has put out as well, and I'm curious about the response that those publications have received and how that tool has been used to further the conservation work that you guys are doing.
Michelle Connolly:Yes. So I mean it was a very shocking thing for people to realize that industrial forestry had had such an impact on our landscapes. We got a very positive response from many people saying, well, no one's ever done this before, and so we're, as far as I know, the only group in BC that actually talks about primary forests as a thing. I would love to be wrong, but I'm fairly sure that we are the only group that actually acknowledges that natural forests of all ages are just as important as old growth. Obviously, old growth is particularly rare and vulnerable because the, you know, because the best lumber comes from them, but with the you get a sense that some people are just refers to the age of the trees.
Michelle Connolly:The concept of primary forest pulls in ethics a little bit. So primary forests are forests that have never been industrially managed. A lot of people wrapped up in, you know, the industrial forestry complex really see forests, natural forests as either, you know, unmanaged or about to be managed. My experience interacting with professional foresters here is that all primary forests are destined to be managed, that they ought to be managed, that they should be managed and can be managed and we can control the outcomes. So that's very much, uh, the belief system of professional forestry and um in in term, in you know, from my perspective, in my experience.
Michelle Connolly:So people are offended when you go. Actually, these places are natural and they ought to stay natural. Professional forestry is about managing, it's about controlling and and we believe that these places should be free of human management and control and that's an offensive thing to a lot of people, wrapped up in kind of professional forestry belief systems. So we did get some negative responses to our map and it would have come from a place of being offended by the fact that we're suggesting that some places ought to remain free of quote management, which, of course, is really just a euphemism for, you know, machine assisted industrial logging, right.
Kaya Adleman:Yeah, it's a very anthropocentric mindset, like very much placing humans first as opposed to looking at the ecosystems of the forests as a whole of my favorite papers was written by is by Holling and Mephi.
Michelle Connolly:So CS Holling, or Buzz Holling, was an ecologist from BC and he talked about command and control and the pathology of natural resource management. And it's all about how command and control management usually results in unforeseen consequences for both natural ecosystems and human welfare in the form of ecological collapse and social and economic strife. Man in control are suppression of fire and fire prone forests, the conversion of primary forests to production forests or plantations, the use of herbicides to kill anything that isn't a conifer, mechanical site preparation where you try and change like a wetland into a place where you can grow trees. So when you simplify complex systems, they lose their ability to bounce back from perturbations, and what they described is essentially like a belief system that humans can or capable of imposing our own will on nature and then it'll somehow magically do what we want it to do. And they point out the problems with that. So whenever I get the chance, I bring up that idea that the pathological need to command and control nature is actually what's leading to our annihilating of other forms of life.
Janet Sumner:Is underlying this? The belief system that if we manage these ecosystems that we can get our desired results. These ecosystems, that we can get our desired results. And I don't just mean like there's some belief out there that we can manage and actually keep caribou on the landscape. And there is some belief system out there that if we just get in there and we cut those old trees before they catch fire you know, there's these kinds of thought processes and a lot of times they're done as an experiment we don't actually have any science or any proof that those assertions are true.
Kaya Adleman:That's a limitation of science.
Janet Sumner:Sorry, so absolutely it is Kaya. And so I'm just wondering. Like we seem to be going along with this grand experiment that started and we adjusted. Every once in a while we changed some of the regulations or the guidance or whatever, but really underlying it all is some grander myth that we actually do control the outcomes and have certainty over them do control the outcomes and have certainty over them.
Michelle Connolly:Yes, and I have a lot of thoughts on that. It's absolutely been a massive experiment and that's why we're calling for a stoppage of this experiment. We need to take a precautionary approach at this point in time, and that's why our group points out that the only real reason oh sorry, the only real way to protect wildlife and other life forms is actually to make natural forests off limits to industrial logging, simply because we don't know how they work. We don't understand their complexity, their self-willed, self-managing, self-replacing systems, and we need to leave the ones we have left well alone, exposed to these arguments about how, because the climate is changing, we need to double down on our management, and that's the totally predictable response of this whole machine, and the antidote to that is we ought to zone out places where we absolutely can't go. We need to basically show some discipline and some humility at our own lack of knowledge about how mother nature works.
Michelle Connolly:Of course, the forestry industrial complex always has the answer, and their solution to everything is always just to log and replant right. There's basically two tools in that toolbox and our perspective is no, please continue to manage what we've already previously industrialized. Those are the places of opportunity that we might be able to improve what we're doing. Bc is, you know, most of our landscapes now, most of our productive forests are gone. See, is, you know, most of our landscapes now, most of our productive forests are gone. Those, those are areas of opportunity for quote management, for doing these experiments. But we really think that the time for experimenting in natural ecosystems uh, in in the sense, ie logging and then pretending we don't understand the consequences of that, the the era for that should be over, and that's why we're saying no, we actually need to just completely step back from areas that have never been industrially quote managed.
Janet Sumner:Yeah, wildlands has suggested something similar in Ontario and in a few places actually that the idea is, if the contention is forestry is sustainable, then sustain it on the existing footprint.
Michelle Connolly:Yeah, that's a brilliant way to word it.
Janet Sumner:Yeah, and then stay out of the areas that have yet to be touched, and once you can prove that you've actually been able to do that, then we might have another conversation. But at this juncture in time, especially with the collapse of nature and being on the verge of the sixth mass extinction, we need to be thinking about staying out of these intact areas, not only for nature's sake, but also because they're going to be our climate resilience. I mean, they are the places that are going to absorb carbon for us.
Michelle Connolly:Yes, absolutely, they are the places that are going to absorb carbon. For us, yes, absolutely. And you know, because a lot of these people just can't help themselves. They're proposing quote, better management. You know like, oh yes, we realize industrial clear-cutting was bad, so let's just do better logging, and that's not going to help. So let's just do better logging and that's not going to help. We don't have much faith or confidence in the ability of the people coming out of the system to, quote better manage forests. So alternative forms of harvesting, partial cutting, ecosystem-based management do not cut it, so to speak. Management, do not cut it, so to speak. We think those things belong in secondary forests and not primary forests. So you're always going to encounter people that just want to do better. But it's really just an extension of this totally uncontrolled experiment. They want to be able to continue experimenting in primary forests and for us, we say no. We say no, please do that in the places that have already been degraded.
Kaya Adleman:Would you say that's the state of the forests in BC right now? Is that the underlying frame is to continue to harvest and say that things are going to be better or that things are going to be improved?
Michelle Connolly:Yes. So people invested in industrial forestry are putting forth the idea that we can somehow improve these things by just logging natural forests better, and we we heartily disagree. We've seen this experiment play out, you know our whole lives, and it's failing. Mountain caribou populations are tanking. Fisher and our red listed Northern goshawk is in trouble. Bull trout are in trouble. All the signs are pointing to no. Humans are actually failing at quote managing forests, and so we actually need to step back right now if we're serious about protecting biodiversity. So the bc government has has made the, you know, stated that they want to, uh, prioritize biodiversity and ecosystem health is how they put it. So back in 2020, the BC government sent two foresters around BC to collect information about what the general public wanted to see when it comes to old growth, and they turned that into a report and that's turned into kind of a high level priority to do a quote paradigm shift. That's how the BC government describes it and out of that, they have started an initiative to prioritize biodiversity and ecosystem health.
Michelle Connolly:No-transcript, that's right. That was the old growth strategic review report, yeah, and we have a lot of criticisms about it and which I'm happy to to talk about. You know one. It, it's, it's. It's not a perfect report. There are some really good things about it, but there are also big warning flags that actually strongly hinted about, strongly hinted at what we're seeing now, which is, you know, mentions of logging in parks to deal with agents that are against forest health. You know, any appearances of the word forest health are a massive red flag to a group like ours that's focused on protecting natural processes and natural forests. The reports peppered with the idea that, you know, insect disturbances and fire are a massive disaster that we have to deal with by logging. So there were some really big red flags for us in that report and what we're seeing now. You know we've been pretty vocal about the problems with that report and the fact that we had to be really vigilant about the kinds of things it said, and now we're seeing the results of that.
Michelle Connolly:The BC government is using natural disturbances to argue for more logging and that really it really betrays the fact that they have no idea how natural forest ecosystems actually work and the value, in creating landscape heterogeneity, of all these different disturbances that happen. You know, like old growth, natural forests are like a big pod of boiling water. Forests get old and then they die and you get all these different ages across the different landscapes. That's how natural forests develop. Somehow we came to a situation and we were part of the problem too, because we were only focused on old growth forests for quite a while. We were, you know, we we thought maybe that protecting only the oldest age classes of natural forests would somehow protect wildlife habitat, and of course we were wrong.
Michelle Connolly:Forests exist in different ages. They, you know, they have disturbances like a severe fire or a severe you know defoliation or a spruce beetle outbreak, and then they are technically young and then they regenerate again and become old, and you need to leave opportunities for all of that to happen if you want to keep your biodiversity on the landscape. But unfortunately, most of the activism in BC and of course, like I said, I was part of this too, like I said, I was part of this too only ever focused on that one age class of natural forest. And we realized, you know, with the coming out of that report, with the pellet industry and the fact that the government was enabling, for example, logging in post-wildfire natural forests in forests that were considered lower value because they're not quite old growth, say the mature forests or younger, we realized, like, actually we're leaving big parts of the landscape vulnerable by not pointing out why all ages of primary forest are important, not just the oldest age classes. And of course, if you're progressively logging younger age classes of natural forest, you're using that, you're losing that potential for naturally regenerated old growth. So the trajectory is just that we one day will just not have any old growth left, because, you know, things happen and in our, in our local forests here, which are, you know, used to be spruce dominated, they're still spruce dominated.
Michelle Connolly:We have old growth spruce forests. The disturbance that inevitably happens in them is a spruce beetle outbreak. That is how those forests regenerate. Um, but uh, but we've been nuking them like there's no tomorrow, because we just a few years ago had, uh, you know, an increase in the population of spruce beetles, which is, of course, a native insect. It's part of our native biodiversity and um and logging targeted those forests, exaggerating how, what proportion was dead. But of course, even if it was all dead which is impossible, that never happens those forests would still have lots of value ecologically and of course, that's the mountain caribou habitat right there. So we've been steadily destroying those, those old forests that have been experiencing natural processes like beetle disturbances and annihilating them, annihilating the complexity and the structure that wildlife need, and now we're wondering why we're having problems with wildlife populations.
Janet Sumner:So one of the things that Michelle says that I really enjoyed is that she suggests that we've got to stop this massive experiment.
Janet Sumner:It removes a lot of ingredients and then tries to regrow trees, but it doesn't necessarily regrow that full complexity of, and richness of, species, and so she suggests that we need to take this precautionary approach, certainly at this time when we've got, you know, the six mass extinction on the horizon and and all of these species that are going extinct, and that BC is a hotbed of endangered species.
Janet Sumner:And if we're going to make this work, we actually have to leave the natural forests alone and not allow industrial logging to keep expanding into all of these forests, because we just don't understand the complexity in a forest, and I like the term that she used. She calls them a self-willed ecosystem. It's managing self-replacing systems and we need to leave these alone, and the way it was explained to me way back when I started at Wildlands League was that evolution is the driving force of change. To me way back when I started at wildlands league was that evolution is the driving force of change, and so I like her term about these are self-willed systems, that they are. All different kinds of elements are being driven in the forest by the forest. Yeah, it's fantastic.
Kaya Adleman:Yeah, that's, that was my main takeaway from this as well, and I guess, maybe to add onto that, that the government policy is really out of step with these ideas and the knowledge that we hold about how ecosystems actually function and how forest ecosystems function, and that provincial governments, essentially, are still treating forests as something to be managed which we've talked about a lot on this podcast and that the fact that we have to manage these forests because of these natural disturbances is just kind of an excuse to make arguments for more logging. Fires and pest outbreaks are natural management tools. And then there's also this idea that she talks about natural management tools. And then there's also this idea that she talks about or she uses the term natural forest to de-center old growth, because these natural disturbances that the governments are trying to manage for kind of drive what you said, janet are these like self-replacing systems, and that us continuously putting our fingers into the pot kind of just makes everything worse.
Kaya Adleman:And I guess another way to frame it is well, I was actually first introduced to Michelle when I started at Wildlands and I saw her give a presentation and she was saying you know, we can't control fires, we can't control pest outbreaks that impact our forests? Why not? Why don't we focus on the one thing that we do have absolute control over, which is the control we have on our industrial impacts and industrial disturbances to the forest? Really like that way to think about the kind of intricate and dynamic systems of the forest and how we treat them as humans.
Janet Sumner:Yeah, I think that this is exactly where I'm thinking we need to go as well. Is that, in the face of climate change, giving forests more ability and more space to adapt and change and respond to climate change, rather than trying to get in there and log the heck out of them as a solution to climate change? So I'm very interested in this next section that we're going to talk to Michelle. She's going to unpack even more and she'll talk about the biomass link a lot more and how her report has traced that. So I look forward to next week's conversation with you, kaya.
Kaya Adleman:Yeah, me too Looking forward to it.
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Kaya Adleman:See you next time.