WESTERN REPORT
by John Betts

Lately I’ve been getting calls. What makes it interesting is that they’re coming out of the blue from members of the general public; they’re not foresters, they don’t work in the forest industry, and they’re mostly from the Lower Mainland or out of province. “What’s going on?” they ask me, “I just drove to the Interior and the trees are all dead.” Of course they know there is the mountain pine beetle and it kills trees. But they “had no idea it was like this.” They are not alone in having no idea, not just about how extensive the plague is, but about what we are doing about it. Because that really is the question behind the question about what is going on. 

As a species we don’t do well with environmental catastrophe. It is simply too unsettling and deeply traumatic. Ask anyone who has ridden out an earthquake, or had to evacuate their home in front of a forest fire. No wonder people want to believe the massive environmental insult of billions of trees dead and dying across the province is being taken care of. It’s what humans tend to do. We need to believe the world is ordered and predictable. This makes it all the harder to tell my callers that as far as I can tell there is no coherent or comprehensive response to what they’ve seen. 

This summer, two major reports were released by the provincial government addressing the state of the forests and the timber supply in areas affected by the beetle infestation. Likely there was considerable fretting beforehand about the possible effect of these reports. The political class and many of their professional optimists are very averse to creating anxiety, it seems. But what was most disturbing to me was not the reports’ distressing forecasts and options we face in many communities, but the absence of any urgency or a convincing strategy to enhance the prompt re-emergence of the once vigorous forests we depend on.

Of course, I tell my callers I am biased and perhaps not someone to rely on for an unprejudiced perspective. Then they surprise me by saying they expected that. This suggests they are more sophisticated in their understanding of how things work than I thought. That’s confirmed by the questions they ask. Innocent of any ideological drift, the tone and tenor of these callers’ queries may represent a growing segment of the public that genuinely wants answers and is prepared to sift through the commentary to make up their own minds. As I wade through the thicket of contradictions and paradoxes that make up a decent reply, I find them still with me at the end. Apparently this sampling of the population is not averse to complexity nor is it as indifferent to forestry as I may have thought.

We seem to live in an age when the least probable events drive the agenda. The mountain pine beetle is a good example. Is there a public groundswell out there gaining force, that improbable as it may seem today, may someday force our leaders into the boldness the present situation demands; something they have so far avoided? Or by believing this am I just exhibiting that human tendency to avoid the bad news?