Dear editor:
It drives me more than a little crazy to see the secret mapping produced by the BC Forest Service, uncovered by Ben Parfitt of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, that changed the status of priority protection old growth stands.
It hits especially hard in our region of Inland Rainforest, with very old forest. I guess it should be no surprise, as government has broken similar promises of improved forest management several times in the past. Anyone who has seen the province’s forests from the air or Google Earth must realize that we have already severely overcut the forest resource.
We have a major slow burn double emergency facing civilization from climate change, caused by too much CO2 and methane in the atmosphere, and loss of biodiversity.
There is no silver bullet to solve these big issues, but it should be obvious that continuing to remove old growth forest moves us in the opposite direction that we need to go. Intact forests absorb large amounts of atmospheric carbon, an opportunity lost by cutting them down.
Even more important, logging (especially clear cut logging) releases nearly all the carbon that was bound up in the trees and soil there in a very short time frame, a large influx of carbon into the atmosphere virtually overnight. It will take centuries to reabsorb as much carbon, time we do not have.
The first law of holes: If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.
Roy Howard
Dunster, B.C.
