Cowichan Research Forest To Be Clear Cut?
I’ve recently had a chance to explore the fate of a research site in the Cowichan area. You’ll find some images from our visit in the Gallery. Below is an article that gives some background. If this interests you, let Michael know. Together we may still be able to have this important research site preserved.
Stephen Hume
Special to the Sun
Wednesday, July 27, 2005
DUNCAN - Once a vital community of 1,500 South Asian, Japanese, Chinese and European forestry workers founded in the Cowichan Valley in 1917, Paldi still invokes yearning in those who remember. Today, it’s a name on a minor secondary road through dusty scrub.
On the north shore of Cowichan Lake, Youbou, founded in 1913, struggles to survive promoting itself as a retirement and recreational destination.
Across the lake, Caycuse is an emaciated ghost of the community that thrived from 1927 to 1998. It’s famous — or infamous — as the place where in 1959 loggers proudly cut down a Douglas fir that was 1,266 years old.
Just to put that tree in context, it took root before most of the countries which now define Europe did. Britain was a gaggle of nations with names like Hwicce, Powys, Mercia and Bernicia.
I thought about that fallen tree — and the exhausted resource communities of the Cowichan Valley, which once produced enough timber each year to build 25,000 houses — when I pulled over to examine a big sign near Paldi Road.
It boldly proclaims the Cowichan Valley Demonstration Forest, set up under something called a Green Gold Grant paid for by federal and provincial taxpayers to show off enlightened forest stewardship.
The forest, according to the sign, flanks the Cowichan Valley highway and surrounds Cowichan Lake. The object? “To provide … an outdoor classroom of forest management practices and to foster respect, understanding and appreciation of the forest resource.”
The sign mentions a root rot demonstration area, examples of site rehabilitation, a wild flower reserve, restored salmon spawning habitat, examples of commercial thinning, an ecological research station and multi-use recreational sites.
Well, former forest ministry science and technical officer Michael Copland says the public is about to get an education in stewardship values, all right.
He says the province has licensed clearcutting rights to the demonstration forest — which he says the government now tells him was never official, anyway — including the research stand where he spent $25,000 in provincial funds designing, surveying, mapping, gathering and analysing data for a study. Irreplaceable data will be lost when the logging goes ahead, he says.
Copland says his study compared yields from long-term sequential thinning of a timber stand (cutting selectively five times over 150 years) to short rotation clearcutting every 37.5 years over the same period (the strategy favoured by government and forest companies whose investors demand quarterly
results.)
What he found, he says, is that sequential thinning not only increased the volume of wood, it dramatically increased quality and value. Short rotation clearcutting yielded $6.30 per cubic metre, long rotation sequential thinning yielded $71.50 per cubic metre. I checked to make sure I’d heard right. I had.
However, when Copland asked permission to publish his findings as a scientific paper and use the study as the basis for further research toward a PhD in forestry, he says he was told by ministry officials he could not publish and that all his research belonged to the ministry.
I’ve heard this story before. A few years ago, a provincial biologist questioned the calculation of grizzly mortalities used to justify trophy hunting. His study was suppressed. He’s no longer with government.
Nor is Copland. The University of British Columbia and B.C. Institute of Technology science and resource management graduate is now pursuing an education degree from Malaspina University, where he says he’s just made the dean’s honours list, by the way.
Which brings me back to the fate of Paldi, Youbou and Caycuse, all transformed into semi-ghost towns by our short-term, rip-and-run attitude toward the forest resource.
Not to mention the demonstration forest, which, I note, the forestry museum that’s a favoured destination for school classes, the regional district and a fistful of websites pumping the region’s scenic and recreational values all cite in promoting the Cowichan Valley for tourism. Clearcuts around the
lake — gosh, I bet they’ll be popular tourist attractions.
First, we betrayed our duty to the primeval forest and the creatures which rely on it, then we betrayed the forest workers and their communities, now we’re betraying even the vision of science-based sustainable stewardship and multiple use. What’s left to betray?
shume@islandnet.com
© The Vancouver Sun 2005
