WESTERN REPORT:
Whose Trees Are These Anyway?
by John Betts

Just a few years ago the BC forest industry was among the most profitable forest sectors on the planet. Considering the current disaster, that fact is a lesson in how unreliable the past can be in predicting the future. Historically, when economies or whole civilizations succumbed to another unforeseen catastrophe, leaders would try and make sense of their predicament through reviewing the omens and portents that had brought them to their regrettable condition. Some negligent priests might have lost their heads. A few other unfortunates might be sacrificed to confirm the general consensus of where the causes laid. Then things would return more or less to normal until the next surprise.

Today our superstition takes a different tack. We use analysts and economists to make sense of current events. Predictably, much has been said lately of the perfect storm of circumstances that has led to this present crisis: a collapsing US housing market; a strong Canadian dollar; and a beetle plague. Compelling as these factors are they suffer from being convenient, particularly if they are taken as the main agents of the current mess. They in fact may be symptoms of a deeper problem announcing itself.

To get some idea of what that deeper circumstance might be, it is important to watch the lines along which things fracture. One obvious fault line is how silviculture obligations can be abdicated by failing licensees and absorbed by silviculture contractors and nurseries. This has led to the untenable circumstance of contractors having stewarded the resource out of their own pockets after restoring or enhancing the public asset through planting or stand tending only to go unpaid by their bankrupt or cash-strapped forest company clients. Nurseries face a version of the same problem as they grow seedlings for clients that may not be able to pay for them at the nursery gate or may renege on their commitments. 

The question becomes whose seedlings are these? It is an unambiguous question that deserves an unambiguous answer; one critical to all of us in the silviculture service supply chain as we head into the uncertainties of the 2008 BC forest sector. But it is not just the interests of the silviculture business community that need an answer to the question. The public needs to know that its forest asset is being stewarded for the long term and not exposed to the short term imperatives the present market vagaries and restructuring dictate.

The answer is, of course, the trees belong to the Crown as does the land. Notwithstanding the role of the various licensees and other renters of the resource, ultimately the province must steward the public’s asset. This means anticipating the predictable outcomes of the current changes and ensuring at least interim measures to make sure the forest sector continues to grow seedlings, plant them, and pay those who make it their business to perform those activities. Otherwise these businesses and the critical services they provide will be sacrificed to the apparent ambiguity of those who in practice are responsible for forest management in BC. 

The WSCA conference will be held February 5-8, 2008 at Sun Peaks Resort. The conference theme is The Turmoil of Transition; Making Sense of BC Forestry Today and into the Future. The disintegration of the historical BC integrated forestry firm, a world class province-wide ecosystem crash, and now another deep ebb in lumber markets could be the making of a perfect storm for forestry in BC. Is it a destructive setback or a dramatic movement forward? Join us at the conference to uncover the answer.