The mountain pine beetle infestation in British Columbia is growing, threatening the province's $15 billion timber industry and thousands of jobs, Daniel Girard reports
DANIEL GIRARD / WESTERN CANADA BUREAU / TORONTO STAR
PRINCE GEORGE, B.C.—At first glance, it's a spectacular Canadian snapshot worthy of a tourist brochure: brilliant fall colours against the backdrop of lush green countryside, a multitude of fresh, clear lakes and snow-capped mountain peaks.
Trouble is, it's not fall; it's summer.
The yellows, reds and greys of the trees are not a result of any change of the seasons but a sign of the destruction wrought by a pest ravaging the forests of British Columbia.
The colours represent the stages of deterioration of the dead trees that are victims of the largest infestation of mountain pine beetle ever seen. It now covers 7 million hectares — nearly the size of New Brunswick — or about 40 per cent of the forests in B.C.'s north-central region. By 2013, it's forecast to have killed 80 per cent of the area's pine trees, the most dominant species of commercially harvested wood in a $15 billion-a-year forest industry.
It's been called the biggest natural disaster in Canadian history.
"It's absolutely overwhelming," says Bob Clark, a former forest district manager who is the so-called beetle boss, B.C.'s point man on the epidemic.
"It's kind of like an eighth wonder of the world," Clark says during a recent flight over the hardest-hit area.
The beetle, which is about the size of a grain of rice, is endemic to the region. It destroys mature lodgepole pines — 60 years and older — by boring in, eating out the inner bark as it lays eggs, and introducing a fungus that impedes the water flow and dries out the tree.
Warm, dry springs and summers allowed the beetle to flourish in the late 1990s. Prolonged winter cold snaps — minus 40C for a week or more — which kill off the beetle have failed to materialize in recent years, as have sharp drops in temperature in the fall, when the insect has yet to build up its defences for the long cold season ahead.
Exacerbating the problem is the fact that in the past 40 years forest fires have been fought much more effectively. That, and the more than threefold increase over the past century in mature pine forests in B.C., has increased the amount of habitat in which the beetle can thrive.
"There's no real way of stopping this," Clark says. "It's most likely we'll just have to let it play itself out."
The implications are enormous. B.C. has greatly increased the amount of timber that can be cut annually — to the chagrin of environmentalists — to make use of the wood before the bug renders it worthless. The result is that 60 years' worth of pine may be logged in the next 15.
While that has prompted a boom in activity in traditional sawmills as well as the development of new technologies to use the increased wood supply, it also raises huge economic and environmental concerns. Once all the affected trees are logged, forestry activity in some areas will be halved, raising the spectre of some 58,000 job losses, the devastation of forest-dependent communities and a sharp reduction in B.C.'s GDP.
More logging has some environmentalists raising concerns about the integrity of the region's ecosystem, and fewer mature trees means there's less foliage available to help Canada meet its obligations under the Kyoto climate change accord on greenhouse gases.
Earlier this summer, officials in Alberta said they were rushing to burn a couple of thousand infected trees in a provincial park in the northwestern part of the province before the pine beetles could spread. Specialists say if it continues to move east, the pest could hit the Jack pines of the boreal forest, which spans the width of the country.
"The fact is this is not just a B.C. problem, it's a Canadian one," Clark says. "This is like flesh-eating disease — it may be on your foot but that's attached to the rest of your body."
B.C. has pledged more than $150 million in the past year to fight the mountain pine beetle, including reforestation and softening the impacts on communities. It has also signed a $1.65 million agreement with Alberta to battle the spread of the bug at their boundary.
The federal government announced in March it was committing $100 million to the pine beetle fight, although B.C. Forests Minister Rich Coleman said earlier this month that was little more than a "down payment" and the province wants $1 billion over 10 years.
Geography professor Greg Halseth says while the pine beetle infestation is massive, will eventually result in job losses and threatens the survival of some communities, it's not going to wipe out the B.C. forest industry.
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`It's most likely we'll just have to let it play itself out'
Bob Clark, B.C.'s `beetle boss'
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"It's not about to become a past tense in our economy," says Halseth of the University of North British Columbia in Prince George, 800 kilometres north of Vancouver. "It's still going to be huge, but there are some serious questions that have to be answered about it."
At least two coalitions of communities in hard-hit north-central B.C. have recently formed to respond to the looming drop in timber supply. They hope to develop more diversity in the region long dominated by the forestry sector.
While most forecasts are that there will be significant job losses in the forest industry, the communities are at the early stages of trying to replace them. Along with looking at such things as mining and tourism, there are schemes to develop small businesses, enhance the education and training of residents and ensure key infrastructure is well maintained.
"We're very confident that we will still have a life after the beetle," says Len Fox, mayor of Vanderhoof, a town where about two-thirds of the population of 5,000 depends on forestry. "But we're also realistic and, if we start today, we've got 10 years to find solutions."
Fox, interim chair of one of the new coalitions, says in addition to working to retain its share of forestry jobs, the communities are also looking at the potential for oil and gas development, expanding agriculture and focusing more on tourism in the form of hunting, fishing and first nations heritage, he says.
"This has really given us a wake-up call," he says.
The mountain pine beetle kills a tree within weeks of first boring into it. But the wood remains structurally sound — and thus, commercially viable as lumber — for years after the beetle has moved on.
However, with so many trees being killed by the beetle, sawmills in the region are running at full tilt, saturating the market for lumber. With the amount harvested skyrocketing, there's a push to find more uses for it, a sort of use-it-or-lose mentality.
One company may build oriented strand board plants to press wood panels from the fibre of dead trees. Another is hoping to operate as many as four facilities that will turn the trees into pellets to fuel energy plants in Europe.
"We're not about to throw up our hands and walk away," says Doug Routledge of the Council of Forest Industries, which represents about 85 per cent of the production in B.C.'s Interior. "We will evolve and innovate as we always have in the past."
Technology is allowing mills to use dry and cracked trees that were once bypassed. More advanced planning and management lets firms determine the quality of the wood they are harvesting and even trade with other firms to ensure the right log gets to the right mill.
The simple equation, Routledge says, is that with proper forest management, lumber companies should be able to harvest a high percentage of the affected trees. And because the law requires those firms to replant what they log, that will result in the industry — and the communities and jobs it supports — rebounding more quickly than many expect.
Critics contend that since the province first announced its strategy to combat the pine beetle four years ago, forestry companies have enjoyed more relaxed environmental and planning guidelines and sharp cuts in the prices they pay to log trees on crown land.
Despite talk of solid environmental stewardship and community economic diversity, the B.C. Chapter of the Sierra Club of Canada says the result is the opposite — towns are becoming more dependent and the ecosystem will suffer from mass salvage.
Native leaders worry it's their communities that will not only suffer more in the long term, when the amount of logging is reduced, but also will not get in on the current boom.
Poverty among natives on and off reserves in the north-central region of B.C. has deepened amid chronic unemployment, substandard housing and social problems. At the same time, B.C. forest companies outperformed those in the rest of the world in 2004, posting a record $1.5 billion in profits despite the increased Canadian dollar, and the problems of the softwood lumber dispute and the mountain pine beetle outbreak.
"We've got an epidemic of poor Indians and they've got record profits," says Chief Larry Nooski of the Nadleh Whut'en Band about 120 kilometres west of Prince George. "We're tired of handouts and managing our poverty. We want fairness and equity."
In addition to getting more licences to log, Nooski says natives want to form partnerships with forest companies on new sawmills and more specialized plants that will benefit the firms but also provide jobs, skills training and a future for young natives in the area.
Bob Clark acknowledges B.C.'s battle against the pine beetle is lost. But he says that the fight to mitigate the economic and social pain it inflicts, among first nations and other communities, is only just beginning. And, he insists, that fight can be won.
"We shouldn't apologize for being aggressive," Clark says. "We have to do all we can to try to contain the damage that's being done and reduce the impact it causes on people.
"Those are battles that we can still win by throwing everything we have at it."(*)
