Dear Editor,
Throughout history, defenders and protestors had to resort to unsanctioned acts to gain lawful rights and freedoms- because its law, doesn’t make it right.
Clear-cut industrial logging crown forests has failed BC taxpayers. Not only are commercial deforestation actions causing dirty drinking water, floods, droughts, wildfires, missing salmon, extirpated caribou and biodiversity loss, all this collateral damage is still not maintaining logging jobs, providing trees to local mills nor supporting vibrant forestry communities. After decades believing logging is king, we need to know it does not support our economy with any resource extraction nostalgia or benefits of the past. Only 1.9% of BC’s entire works force remains in forestry, only 2.69% of provincial GDP is gained from province-wide landscape destruction, logging ranks 15th in industries, well behind tourism. Only a handful of northern logging communities still have trees, numbers are dropping daily.
The most insulting yet lesser-known fact of today’s trickle-down economics is government privatizes all the profits and socializes all the risks and clean up from our logging licensees, including annual handouts for timber industry nearing $1million, daily! These include four subsidies; Forest Management, BC Hydro, Carbon Emissions, Loss of Carbon Sequestration Capacity plus gifts masquerading as grants from Forestry Enhancement Society. Indeed, forestry is not paying the bills, folks. We are.
I acknowledge and appreciate Fairy Creek defenders and all other old-growth protesters who gather to protect our remaining primary forest; as old-growth panel author, Dr. Gary Merkel, fears, before we log every last stick.
–Taryn Skalbania, Peachland, BC
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