Decades later, I never expected to be back on the blockades or fielding calls again from concerned customers of British Columbia forest products. When I was arrested by the RCMP with other forest defenders at a blockade in Fairy Creek last month, I had just visited one of the most beautiful old-growth forests I have ever seen. These old-growth forests on Pacheedaht and Ditidaht territories, on the west coast of Vancouver Island in British Columbia, are among the last of their kind anywhere in the world. I was astonished to see yellow cedars more than a thousand years old. The ancient giant trees that are iconic around the globe are not only the pillars of these rare temperate rainforest ecosystems – they are part of the most carbon-rich forests on earth. Standing among these giants, there is no question that they are worth more than any dollar amount their felled lumber can deliver. It’s clear why Indigenous leaders, scientists and their allies are risking their safety and freedom to defend them.

Civil disobedience is a last resort, especially in the middle of a pandemic. When it comes to old-growth forests in British Columbia, it is no secret how desperate we are. More than 97% of the original large, old forests that stood in this province prior to colonization and the advent of industrial logging have been destroyed. But even more shockingly, the majority of what remains is still unprotected and open to logging. In the case of forests on Ditidaht and Pacheedaht territory, those old-growth forests are still standing thanks to the tireless efforts of forest defenders, but they remain at imminent risk.

On June 9, B.C. Premier John Horgan publicly accepted a call from Pacheedaht, Ditidaht and Huu-ay-aht First Nations to defer old-growth logging in parts of their territories, including areas in Fairy Creek and the Walbran. Hogan called the two-year deferral “monumental.” While it’s an important development, it has not stopped the chainsaws.  The new deferral leaves critical old-growth forests in the area – and in fact, all across B.C. – open to logging. Elder Bill Jones has asked forest defenders to stand their ground and continue protecting these ancient trees. As arrests continue, it is clear that without broad bans on old-growth logging, the situation will only escalate. Elsewhere, many First Nations, including most recently the Squamish Nation, have publicly demanded old-growth logging deferrals or declared moratoria on old-growth logging in their territories.

At Fairy Creek, the logging company in question is not a stranger to the controversy of logging old-growth forests in B.C. Teal Jones, headquartered in Surrey, ships wood products to a variety of locations and sectors, including lumber for building and shingles for siding. As tensions mount around the remaining old-growth forest and the lack of government action, customers of Teal Jones and other old-growth logging companies (including Canfor, West Fraser, Western Forest Products and Interfor) should expect a sharp increase in scrutiny on their sourcing. Many home- and office-supply and building companies, including Home Depot and Staples, have policies against sourcing from endangered forests after long campaigns from Stand.earth (then known as ForestEthics) and our partners. Now is the time for builders, home supply stores, and pulp and paper customers to be proactive and commit to ending any purchasing sourced from at-risk old-growth forests. If they don’t hold themselves accountable, our movement certainly will.

In my experience, what customers of wood and paper products want is certainty. Certainty that the forest products they buy are harvested sustainably and don’t come from endangered-species habitat, endangered ecosystems or increasingly rare old-growth forests and certainty that they will not become embroiled in controversy such as what is unfolding in British Columbia.

Photographer TJ Watt captured images of old-growth trees before and after logging in Vancouver Island’s Caycuse Valley in the spring and fall of 2020. Caycuse Valley is not protected by deferrals being applied to other areas of Fairy Creek.

Provincial and federal governments in Canada have a vital role to play in delivering that certainty. B.C.’s NDP government was elected on a promise to implement the recommendations of an expert panel on old growth, which included immediate logging bans in at-risk old-growth forests like the ones at Fairy Creek. But Premier Horgan and his government have instead faltered on their promise, with recent deferral announcements leaving the vast majority of old-growth forests on the chopping block.

Both B.C.’s and Canada’s commitments to large-scale nature protection and bold climate action are seriously undercut when some of the most carbon-rich forests on the planet are being clearcut. The provincial and federal governments need to collaborate to ensure protection of our remaining old growth and threatened species habitats. They have the funds and the tools to support Indigenous stewardship initiatives and land-use visions, as well as a just transition for workers and communities away from old-growth logging. All they need is the political will, and growing marketplace concern and the escalating actions at Fairy Creek and across B.C. will give it to them one way or another. To date, 222 people have been arrested while standing up for these ancient, giant trees.

Almost 30 years ago when I was on my first blockade at Clayoquot Sound, I knew that the solutions to these issues would be difficult. But I never thought that all these years later, we would still be fighting to defend irreplaceable old-growth forests – only now, even fewer stands of these ancient trees remain. This must be the last time. We owe it to our grandchildren and their grandchildren to leave a liveable world, one where they can walk through an old-growth rainforest and crane their necks up at the treetops in awe.

Tzeporah Berman is the international program director at Stand.Earth, chair of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Committee, and  an Adjunct Professor of Environmental Studies,  York University.

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COVID-19 is not the only curve we need to flatten. Building back better means also bending and flattening the curve on greenhouse gas emissions.

Building back better means prioritizing communities, companies, industries, plans and infrastructure that protect what we have – biodiversity, stored carbon, ecosystem services – and stopping or winding down those that do not.

The focus on tree planting is a very Canadian approach – we don’t want to rock the boat on existing industries. But let’s be clear: our forest policies mirror European policies from the 1960s, while our agricultural policies look like those from the 1980s – neither of which focused on maintaining ecosystems as the foundation of resiliency. Europe is now scrambling to undo these effects – to rewild.

Last month, in a new study in Nature on “irrecoverable carbon,” scientists detailed the vast stores of carbon that are being released and cannot be restored by 2050. The study calls for the next generation of protected area networks to safeguard critical ecosystems with high, irrecoverable carbon stocks.

A groundbreaking report released in early May commissioned by the UK treasury assessed the economic value of biodiversity, and concluded that current high rates of biodiversity loss pose a major risk to our economies and our way of life. Just as diversity within a portfolio of financial assets reduces risk and uncertainty, diversity within a portfolio of natural assets – namely, biodiversity – directly and indirectly increases nature’s resilience to shocks, reducing risks to the services on which we rely.

Boreal forests store more carbon per hectare than any other forest type on Earth, other than mangroves. Yet every year logging companies clearcut 400,000 hectares – almost a million acres – of boreal forest. That’s a rate of seven NHL hockey rinks per minute.

Research in British Columbia has shown that after a clearcut, there’s a minimum 13-year window during which the logged and replanted area does not sequester carbon, and it can take more than a hundred years for forests to recover to their pre-harvest state. This analysis suggests that clearcutting is preventing forests in B.C. from removing an additional 26.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year from the atmosphere.

Canada’s primary forest loss is amongst the highest in the world.

Maintaining older, biodiverse forests draws down carbon levels and helps buffer imperilled ecosystems against the impacts of climate change. Protecting intact forests also makes nearby communities more resilient to climate impacts such as drought, floods and wildfire.

In April, Stand.Earth released an investigative report on Canada’s growing wood-pellet industry. Pellets are heavily subsidized and touted by our governments as a climate solution. However, growing the wood-pellet export industry in Canada doubles down on carbon emissions: first by instantly releasing a forest’s stored carbon at the smokestack, and second by further degrading forests, which are a critical ally in the fight against climate change.

In the words of scientist Bill Moomaw, professor emeritus at Tufts University and the author of several Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, “If we let some of our existing natural forests grow, we could remove an additional 10 to 20% of what we emit every year; instead, we’re paying subsidies to have people cut them down, burning them in place of coal, and counting it as zero carbon.”

Listen to the science.

We need to focus on protecting high biodiversity areas and carbon-rich primary, intact and old forest landscapes. For example, we are still allowing logging in critical caribou habitat (to make toilet paper) when our own scientists have said we need to protect those same forests.

This needs to stop now.

By supporting Indigenous Guardian programs, employment centred on land restoration, and economic diversification in forest communities, we can create more jobs. Canada could be a global leader and also make progress on reconciliation by committing to reach a 30% protected area target, with a majority of those lands integrating existing Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area (IPCA) proposals already submitted through Canada’s Target 1 process.

It is time to reimagine the wood-products industry in the same way that we are starting to reimagine the energy and oil sectors. We can add jobs and economic vitality with a value-added job strategy. We can build furniture, make things we need and create consistent employment in forest communities. And we can stop shipping raw logs and wood pellets while clearcutting the forests that are our planet’s carbon pools. We can explore alternate fibre supplies, recycled fibre and agricultural waste.

Rather than maintaining existing practices, which are still designed to ensure maximum extraction, we need to update forest practices to reflect adaptation science and ecosystem-based management that maintains or restores original forest complexity. This model can also transform forestry from boom and bust cycles, to add good jobs with built-in longevity: selective logging in forest ecosystems, investment in second-growth milling, and Forest Stewardship Council–certified logging will employ more people.

We need to get honest about industrial impacts on our forests and carbon accounting. A recent report from Wildlands League revealed that Canada is underreporting our rates of deforestation. New numbers show that approximately 21,700 hectares are deforested each year in Ontario due to roads and landings imposed by forestry in the boreal forest (roughly equivalent to 40,000 football fields). This is seven times greater than the reported deforestation rate by forestry for all of Canada, and these findings undermine the claim of “near zero deforestation” in Canada.

We also have a broken carbon accounting system when it comes to terrestrial carbon. We are not properly accounting for emissions from logging old forests or the methane emissions from peat and soil disturbance. A recent University of Waterloo paper looked at peat and soil disturbances from seismic lines used in oil and gas exploration in Alberta alone and found that these undocumented emissions would boost Canada’s national reporting of methane in the category of land use, land-use change and forestry by about 8%.

Instead of tearing down nature, we need to rebuild our systems and protect the abundance we have.

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In an online roundtable Wednesday, experts urged the federal government to dramatically scale up its support for nature-based climate solutions.

The approach would not only contribute to the country’s effort to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions; it would protect nature, create jobs, provide additional income to struggling farmers and promote reconciliation with Indigenous communities, a white paper produced for the session by Ralph Torrie of Torrie Smith Associates and Céline Bak of Analytica Advisors concluded.

Currently, Canada is one of only a few major economies that do not incorporate the value of environmental services provided by forests, wetlands and farms into their agricultural policies.

The session on forestry and farming was hosted by Corporate Knights as part of its seven-part Building Back Better event series. It was held amid growing calls for the Liberal government to ensure that its planned post-COVID stimulus program serves to accelerate the country’s transition to a low-carbon economy.

“Because forests and land can sequester carbon and because of the sheer scale of Canada’s land mass, nature-based climate solutions can have a material impact on both the climate and biodiversity crises,” the authors wrote in their discussion paper.

They noted that the Liberal government proposes to set aside 30% of Canada’s land and 30% of oceans for conservation by 2030.

The white paper proposed a number of measures to scale up the current efforts to plant trees, return marginal farmland to nature and reduce the use of fossil-fuel-based fertilizers on farms.

The measures include:
• $4 billion over 10 years to support farmers in converting 10 million acres of marginal agricultural land to forest, grassland or wetlands. The conservation initiatives would sequester 22 million tonnes of GHG emissions annually and create 5,600 jobs annually.
• $16 billion over 10 years to increase the planned federal tree-planting program from 200 million trees annually to one billion. Planting an additional 800 million trees annually would generate 15,000 jobs a year and reduce emissions by an average of 30 million tonnes between 2020 and 2050.
• $200 million over 18 months to provide incentives for farmers to reduce their use of nitrogen-based fertilizer. The transition would reduce farmers’ costs and increase their incomes while creating 2,880 jobs and cutting GHGs by 3.75 million tonnes annually.

In the fight against climate change, government investment in nature and biodiversity is an “essential component that needs to happen, but it is not getting much attention,” David Martin, chair of WWF-Canada, told the virtual roundtable.

Typically, the climate debate has centred on the production and use of energy, and how Canadians can transition off fossil fuels. But agriculture accounts for about one 10th of the country’s GHG emissions, with the majority of that total traceable to production of beef and overuse of nitrogen fertilizer.

“As farm inputs increase, so do farm emissions,” said Darrin Qualman, director of climate crisis policy and action for the National Farmers Union. While financial incentives are important, governments must also support additional agronomists who can work with farmers to reduce their dependence on high-cost fertilizers, he said.

The Canadian forestry sector is already gearing up to meet the Liberal government’s promise to plant 200 million trees a year on land that is not currently forested. (The forestry sector is responsible for replanting where they have cut.)

To increase that planting to one billion trees a year would require a massive commitment to the supply chain – from the nurseries to land owners to the workforce – said Rob Keen, executive director of Forests Ontario. “In order for [the industry] to make that kind of investment, they need a 10-year window of funding,” he said. “It can’t just be a year-by-year line item in the budget.”

While tree planting is an important part of the strategy, governments have to pay at least as much attention to “protecting what we have,” said Tzeporah Berman, international program director for Stand.Earth, an environmental organization.

Practices like clearcutting forests for toilet paper and using wood pellets to generate electricity along with the lack of paper recycling initiatives turn Canada’s forests from a carbon sink into a source of emissions, she noted.

The paper industry’s recycling effort was stalled when municipalities began sending their used paper to Asia, said Magali Depras, chief sustainability officer at Quebec-based TC Transcontinental. Now that Asian nations have stopped taking our waste, Canada has an opportunity to recommit to the circular economy, in which makers of consumer goods reuse recycled raw materials.

Valérie Courtois, of the Indigenous Leadership Initiative, said the government’s focus on nature-based climate solutions has to include Indigenous communities who are already leading the conservation effort.

Her group runs the federally funded Indigenous Guardians program, in which local people monitor ecological health, maintain cultural sites and protect sensitive areas and species.

If the government is going to meet its target of conserving 30% of the land, “it needs to work with Indigenous people, and we are poised to do that,” she said.

Shawn McCarthy writes on sustainable finance and climate for Corporate Knights. He is also senior counsel for Sussex Strategy Group.

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