Starved of Hope
Where will you be when the beetle salvage ends? You’d best start planning now.
by Scott Jamieson
Hope makes a good breakfast, but a poor dinner. Consider that as we watch the BC Interior struggle with the ravages of the mountain pine beetle. Hope was fine when the little bugger first popped up in the early 90s, but almost 20 years and a full-blown salvage operation later, it’s time for something more substantial. As salvages go, the region’s lumber industry is doing an admirable job. It has ramped up sawmill production, opened up new sawlines and mills just to make use of the drier, degraded, and often smaller wood, and together with machine suppliers continues to develop new technology for scanning, sorting, drying, and above all, handling this brittle wood. This progress continues.
As for the rest, the beetle has won. As bureaucrats fiddled, an area much larger than Rome is likely to burn. While we hoped for that one killer winter of yore that would rid us of this hearty pest, the beetle basked in the relative warmth of one of the warmest decades on record. In the end, the beetle will do what generations of environmentalists could only dream of – dramatically reduce the annual harvest in BC by over 20% across the province, and by over 50% in some regions. It will take 10 more years or so to accomplish this daring feat, and the campaign will leave behind such a pockmarked landscape that only the most bitter Sierra Club campaigner would advocate such an aggressive tactic.
And then what? That is the question some ask, but far more prefer to postpone until the work at hand is done. It certainly doesn’t pay for publicly traded, BC-dependent forest companies to dwell too long on this riddle. Unless your company has an exit strategy for future growth outside of BC, it’s hard to convince shareholders you have a credible recipe for growth, and are thus worth investing in. Of course, if you have such an exit strategy, it’s hard to convince local stakeholders, employees, and government to make sacrifices today for your operations’ long-term survival. Try this out as a stirring call to arms – “Everyone, put your shoulder to the wheel, and half of you will have jobs when it’s over! ” Perhaps not.
Company executives are indeed between a rock and a hard place, but lest you spill all your tears on them, remember the affected communities, local loggers, First Nation partners, and forestry journalists whose publications start with the word “Canadian.” Otherwise known as fixed assets, at least the first three deserve a solution that will allow life after the beetle, and shareholders, have flown south.
Parachutes, not backpacks
At the Council of Forest Industries (COFI) annual general meeting in Prince George this past April, speakers and delegates alike suggested strategies to prepare for life After the Beetle (ATB). Depending on how you define time, there are no long-term concerns. These are forests after all, and will grow back regardless of what we do. It’s more the humanscale mid-term we need to worry about, the three to four decades between the day the last salvageable stand in your area hits the deck, and the stands we planted over the past few years are ready for harvest.
A lot of good ideas, and some bad, were thrown out both formally and between sessions. Given the stakes, it’d be a good idea to make sure the parachute we choose will at least open before impact. Here are just a few, and as you can see, we’d better have a long way to fall if we expect some of these to slow us in time.
Silviculture: Like Jack and his beanstalk, cast your magic seeds and your problems will be solved. Or so many believe. Plant aggressively, fertilize, tend, thin, prune, and maybe play Mozart to your trees, and just as the last of the current batch of pine trees are processed, we’ll be ready to harvest the next crop. Well maybe not, since typical rotations in the Prince George area are closer to 80-100 years than they are to 18. Realize also that just one letter separates extensive from expensive silviculture, and that the extra costs may not be recuperated two generations from now when it comes time to harvest. Higher yields and faster rotations could mitigate the mid-term AAC effects of the beetle kill, but only partly, and at significant cost.On ice: There are ways to draw out the salvage. We can store trees under snow or sprinklers, invest in internal scanning, re-wet trees for OSB, etc… It may make sense, but we are adding handling costs today in markets that will absorb few extra costs, and are extending the deadline from 10 years to at most 20. What about harvesting the logs now, and throwing them in lakes to be recovered when we need them? It all requires the landowner, in this case the BC government, fronting both stumpage and operational costs to protect its assets. Even then it would work only on a limited scale. We are talking about potentially 1.2 billion (that’s million with three zeros) cubic metres expiring over the next five or six years. How deep are BC’s lakes, and the government’s pockets? Let it burn: Okay, I didn’t say that, but I have been told many times that in the old days Mother Nature would have just roasted the bugs out in massive wildfires. Maybe, but try selling the idea of letting an area the size of New Brunswick burn clean. When I say burn, I mean using the increasing volume of beyond-salvage wood as fodder for bio-energy plants. I admit I like the theory, and certainly many of the government speakers liked it too. There will be many opportunities on this front. Still, much of this low-value timber will be in remote areas without road access, making it very expensive firewood in most cases, unless it is salvaged as part of a wider forest products economy. When the alternative is BC Hydro’s 6 cents per KWh power on the grid, how much can you spend to cut, haul, chip, and burn beetle kill salvage
Marketing 101: Are there courses that teach creative ways of spending taxpayer money? How else to explain the chunk of public change being spent to develop new markets in Asia and elsewhere for wood we won’t have. Think about it. The beetle problem in the short term is that we have too many logs in a bad market. This will be followed in the long term by having too few logs in what will almost certainly be much better global markets. So we invest now in long-term market development in the hopes that when the markets finally emerge, another jurisdiction with excess fibre can cash in? It’s me, right?
Clearly, there are no magic bullets. A viable forest sector will remain when the beetle is gone, albeit with less timber to choose from. With the likely exception of the last strategy, all of the above will help mitigate the drawdown of BC Interior AAC after the salvage. Timber is expected to become scarcer globally over the next 10 to 20 years, as it most certainly will in the BC Interior. Industry and government have their own agendas, but each forest community stakeholder must help decide how that temporarily reduced, but increasingly valuable public resource will be used, and how best to bridge the looming gap in fibre supply. And soon.
