Chapter 25 Let us conspire with the forests

After the fire dragons rampaged across the province in 2017, they returned the following summer. Even more land was burned—1.35 million hectares—but 2017 remains the second worst year for fires and still holds the record for the largest number of people driven from their homes: sixty-two thousand.

The costs of suppression alone totalled $568 million, making 2017 the most expensive fire year in BC’s history.89 And as Robert Gray, a fire ecologist based in Chilliwack, points out, the indirect and additional costs of fires of this magnitude can run up to thirty times the direct costs of fire suppression.⁹⁰

BC lost 53 million cubic metres of saleable timber,⁹¹ equivalent to one year’s allowable cut, worth somewhere between $6 and $7 billion.⁹² Eleven wood-processing mills in the Cariboo-Chilcotin closed during the fires at a cost of $2 million per facility per day of shutdown.⁹³ Three hundred buildings burned. The provincial cattle industry lost over four hundred thousand hectares of rangeland (approximately a million acres). Thousands of kilometres of fences were incinerated. Many of the thirty-five thousand cattle in the fire-affected regions went missing.⁹⁴ The province spent $6.9 million a day to cover travel, shelter and food expenses for the evacuees.⁹⁵ Smoke from the Interior drifted down to the Lower Mainland and caused emergency room visits to spike by more than 20 percent as people sought help for respiratory issues.⁹⁶ In the spring of 2018, floods developed because fire-ravaged lands were not able to contain rain and melting snow. The floods forced five thousand people to leave their homes again.⁹⁷

A report by Canadian scientists at Environment and Climate Change Canada and the University of Victoria, published in December 2018, concludes that human-caused climate change has increased the risk of catastrophic wildfires in British Columbia.⁹⁸ This is not something we can easily fix. Nevertheless, according to Ray Travers, a forestry consultant who lives in Victoria, we can improve the resilience of our forests. In a long phone conversation, he suggested I look at Sweden for inspiration.

Sweden has about 40 million hectares of forest, British Columbia 60 million. Ray told me that they have the same amount of commercially viable forest land—22 million hectares—sometimes called “managed forest.”⁹⁹ In both places, people have deep feelings about trees. “The Swedish constitution grants Swedes allemansrätt, ‘the freedom to roam.’ It gives all members of the public free access to nature and wilderness, including forests and water, even though most Swedish forests are owned either privately or by companies.”¹⁰⁰ In British Columbia, in 1993, twelve thousand people protested logging in Clayoquot Sound. A thousand people were arrested but ultimately the protesters were successful in protecting the old-growth forests.¹⁰¹ I myself treasure memories of visiting Meares Island, a Clayoquot Sound treasure, home to some of British Columbia’s most ancient trees. Over a thousand years old, they are impossibly gnarled and twisted, the very epitome of “old,” and yet they sprout fresh needles every spring and flaunt an array of bright green ferns in their crevices.

Since the turn of the last century, the Swedes have been thinking about how to preserve their forest resources. In 1903, Sweden passed its first modern forestry act to secure the supply of wood. Between 1950 and today, the standing volume of Sweden’s trees has tripled from 1 billion to 3 billion cubic metres. Sweden achieved this despite the fact that it cuts more timber than we do—85 million cubic metres annually.¹⁰² The thriving industry employs a hundred thousand people.¹⁰³

When logging began in BC in the late nineteenth century, environmental concerns, species protection and preserving something for our children and grandchildren were not top of mind. The annual volume of timber harvested in the province increased from 1900 on, peaking at almost 90 million cubic metres in 1987. In 2010, it dropped to 50 million cubic metres, due to the pine beetle epidemic. By 2015, it had recovered some, but the harvest is not expected to return to the heady days of 1987 ever again.¹⁰⁴

Sawmills were shuttered due to a lack of timber supply even before the fires of 2017 and 2018. “Between 1990 and 2015, the number of large- and medium-size sawmills in BC declined from 131 to 70,”¹⁰⁵ Bob Williams, a minister in both the Barrett and Harcourt governments, wrote in 2018. When I spoke with Ray Travers, he said that he expects more mills and companies to go. West Fraser, which has twenty-four mills in BC, also has thirty-eight in the US and recently bought a dozen more there. “They’re leaving,” Ray said. “It’s not surprising at all when all you’ve got left is wood that’s financially not viable—on steep ground or remote.” No wonder the number of people directly employed in our forests has dropped from eighty-five thousand in 1997 to sixty thousand in 2016.¹⁰⁶ And as Ray predicted, in 2019 more mills announced closures and indefinite curtailments. Vavenby, Quesnel, Kelowna, Chasm, Prince George, Mackenzie, Maple Ridge, 70 Mile House and Fort St. James were just some of the places affected.

We can learn much from Sweden’s careful stewardship—the way it extracts value at every stage of the lifespan of a forest. There, stands are periodically thinned to increase the yield and create a higher-value product. The “thinnings” are not discarded but processed in various ways. Ray says they are the source of 30 percent of Sweden’s wood. When mature trees are finally harvested, the branches and tops are used by the biomass industry, which turns them into chips and pellets, mostly used to generate heat. Nothing is wasted. In BC, we don’t thin our trees, nor do we make much of an attempt to use the branches left on the ground after a tree is felled. Sweden enjoys a revenue stream we don’t have.

Swedish forests have been resilient in the face of fires. Like BC, Sweden had a very hot and dry summer in 2018. People were evacuated and cows died because of the drought. But here’s the interesting part: only twenty-five thousand hectares burned. “This is far more than we are used to,” writes Torbjörn Johnsen.¹⁰⁷ Yet the amount is dwarfed by the comparison to what went up in smoke in BC—over a million hectares.

In Sweden, 50 percent of the forest land used for logging is owned by individuals and 25 percent by private-sector companies. (Churches, non-profits, the state, state-owned firms, and local and county councils own the rest.) The individual holdings are often small, around fifty hectares, and frequently part of multi-generational farms.¹⁰⁸ In BC, the Crown owns 95 percent of our province. “That’s a big difference between Canada and Sweden. When you’re operating over there, you’re operating on the land your grandparents operated on,” Ray Travers said. It may be that in Sweden private forests are husbanded more carefully than our publicly owned Crown land. It may also be that the small woodlots attached to family farms with pastures have a beneficial patchwork quality.

But I kept thinking about Gary Filmon’s report and the recommendation to remove brush from the forest floor. In twelve years, the ministry dealt only with eighty thousand hectares, 8 percent of the problem. However, in Sweden, a quarter of Sweden’s energy needs are met with biomass,¹⁰⁹ largely derived from logging residue.¹¹⁰ The waste has value, so the Swedes have no problem collecting it, thereby reducing a fire hazard.

BC already uses some waste wood by turning it into pellets that can be burned; 90 to 95 percent comes from the scraps and sawdust that accumulate at mills.¹¹¹ Very little comes from the thinning of trees or from the brush and limbs left over from logging. Gordon Murray, the executive director of the Wood Pellet Association of Canada, would like to change that. “We rely on trying to buy it [wood waste] from the logging companies after they finish harvesting. They just burn it. We’re out there just begging the government to give us access to it, to private companies to give us access to it. And, you know, all this burning that the government is now saying that they’re going to be doing. I mean—this is a crime, an absolute crime. They’re burning up material that our industry could use.”

In the US, the Little Hoover Commission, a bipartisan oversight group that advises the California legislature, recommended turning to the biomass industry to help prevent fires in California.¹¹² I asked Jens Wieting, a senior forest and climate campaigner for Sierra Club BC, whether we should do this too. “It all depends,” he said, “on how much is being removed and what it is. A natural forest always has some dead timber and woody debris and that’s very important for insects, for birds. It should not be removed. But if there’s logging and some wood waste, it makes sense to use part of it for local energy use. Some removal of biomass from the forest is appropriate in moderation and if it is carefully planned. Some areas should be kept cleaner to reduce the risk of fire. But it must be done carefully and not across a vast area.”

Rethinking our approach to biomass is one way of making our forests less flammable. Robert Gray, the fire ecologist I mentioned earlier, is trying another approach: studying a 1.3-million-hectare tract of forest near Quesnel to help us learn from the past. “There’s actually a group of us in the scientific community who are looking at restoring landscape resilience,” he explained in a phone conversation. “What we find is that historically on those landscapes, especially out in the Cariboo or Chilcotin, there were a lot of disturbances but they were small. Because of that, we didn’t have these big blowouts because the landscape was much less vulnerable, not only to wildfires, but also to insects.

“We had a lot of recovering forests that didn’t have a lot of fuels, a lot of deciduous hardwoods, a lot of grasslands, and a lot of areas that had burned multiple times and that just didn’t have any fuel on them. A good chunk of that landscape was really in a kind of a basically non-flammable state. And we exclude fire for a century and now we have a landscape that’s primed to carry fire for distances. We have to adopt those historic patterns but also keep an eye to climate change and restore a lot of those patches—those basically non-burnable or low-flame patches. Some of that involves prescribed burning. Some of it is conversion to hardwoods.” (Pines are eight times more flammable than deciduous trees.¹¹³ Aspens, on the other hand, make such good firebreaks they are sometimes referred to as “asbestos forests.”)

According to Robert, “The research tells us that upwards of 40 percent of that landscape needs to be in these really low-flammable states.” Once the restoration is achieved, he believes we will see the size and severity of fires decrease. “That’s what we’re after: more resilient landscapes.”

Forests are the lifeblood of many BC communities. They are also at the front line of our fight against global warming: “I often say we cannot save the climate without saving the forest and we cannot save the forests without saving the climate,” Jens Wieting said. A mature healthy forest can inhale tonnes and tonnes of CO₂ and sequester it safely for centuries. Not too long ago, BC forests were a major carbon sink, but they have now become a source of CO₂—a disturbing development.

Jens showed me a provincial government report where I could see this story unfold.¹¹⁴ In 1990, BC’s forests inhaled 101 million tonnes of CO₂ more than they released because of decaying leaves and rotting wood. Wildfires, slash burning and decomposing forest products (like paper, pallets) added 41 million tonnes of CO₂ to the atmosphere. The net effect was 60 million fewer tonnes of CO₂ in the atmosphere. This fully compensated for the 56 million tonnes BC residents emitted through burning fossil fuels, industrial processes and agriculture.¹¹⁵ Not so long ago, thanks to our metabolically active healthy forests, BC was carbon neutral—actually carbon negative.

From 1990 to 2000, our forests faithfully absorbed over 100 million tonnes of CO₂ every year. But in 2001, as the effects of the pine beetle epidemic began to be felt, those great lungs started to falter. In 2003, BC forests sucked in 81 million tonnes of CO₂. But goosed by the wildfires, forest emissions added 5 million tonnes of CO₂ to the atmosphere. Our woods shifted from a carbon sink to a carbon source.

And then there was 2017, when the wildfires pumped out a record-breaking 177 million tonnes of CO₂. If we take into account our other forest-related absorptions and emissions for 2017, we see that the total emissions coming from this sector was 203 million tonnes of CO₂.

Our forest emissions in 2017 were equivalent to the annual carbon dioxide exhaust from 44 million passenger vehicles—almost double the Canadian passenger fleet.¹¹⁶ They eclipsed BC’s emissions from burning fossil fuels, and from industry and agriculture—64 million tonnes in 2017.¹¹⁷ That doesn’t mean, however, that the steady pulse of CO₂ discharged by the burning of fossil fuels is insignificant. Because carbon dioxide is a stable molecule, those annual emissions have accumulated in the atmosphere and contribute to the destabilization of our climate and the warming of our world. But forests, which could be our great ally in fighting climate change, are now so stressed that they are adding to the problem. You can see this in the following graphs on page 259.¹¹⁸

On the coast, the fastest, surest way to keep forests as an ally in the fight against climate change is to protect our old-growth trees from clear-cut logging. According to Jens, coastal forests can store over 3,670 tonnes of CO₂ per hectare, one of the highest rates on earth.¹¹⁹ Carbon accumulates in soil and other plants as well as in trees. Around the world, old-growth forests may account for as much as 10 percent of the global uptake of CO₂.¹²⁰ As Jens explains, “Almost 70 per cent of the carbon stored in a tree is accumulated in the second half of its life.”¹²¹ Yet we have failed to preserve this important resource. Between 1990 and 2015, Vancouver Island’s old-growth rainforests declined by 30 percent, three times faster than primary forest loss in tropical rainforests.¹²² “Shockingly, about half of the carbon stored in these ecosystems is lost due to clear-cut logging from exposed soils and large amounts of wood left behind,” Jens writes.¹²³

The economic value that the old-growth rainforests provide by inhaling CO₂ is now recognized. In 2016, coastal First Nations signed an agreement with the Province of British Columbia that allows them to sell carbon credits for ending destructive logging practices in the rainforests. Instead of earning money by selling timber, they earn it for storing carbon. So far, the decreased rate of logging has resulted in the reduction of 2.2 million tonnes of CO₂ emissions annually.¹²⁴ This innovative arrangement could provide a model for further agreements to protect our forests and their capacity to absorb CO₂.

In less than thirty years, BC went from being a carbon sink to a carbon emitter.

Furthermore, the old-growth forests are singularly resistant to fire. You can easily see how those shady woods would keep the ground cool and moist. But there is more going on than meets the eye, as Peter Wohlleben tells us in The Hidden Life of Trees:

Coniferous forests in the Northern Hemisphere influence climate and manage water in other ways, too. Conifers give off terpenes, substances originally intended as a defense against illness and pests. When these molecules get into the air, moisture condenses on them, creating clouds that are twice as thick as the clouds over non-forested areas. The possibility of rain increases, and in addition, about 5 percent of the sunlight is reflected away from the ground. Temperatures fall.¹²⁵

As well as protecting these magnificent stands of ancient trees, we can accelerate the regrowth of forests decimated by insects or fires. Over the next four years, a Forest Carbon Initiative supported by BC and the federal government will put $290 million toward this goal, according to Werner Kurz at Natural Resources Canada. Timber companies are obliged to replant after they have harvested, but burned sites are usually left to regenerate on their own. Werner explained that if they are replanted, they become carbon sinks more quickly. We can also fertilize forests to speed up growth, although this has to be done carefully, as not all stands will respond. “Assisted migration” is another strategy for creating forests more resilient to global warming: “You take a tree species,” Werner explained, “and move it northward by twenty to fifty kilometres, or maybe upslope by a few hundred metres. It is already accustomed to the new climate it is likely to experience in its lifetime.”

“Hedging your bets” by planting a mix of conifers and deciduous trees is a sound principle for creating resilience in a situation that is inherently uncertain. It is also a sound principle in relation to carbon capture. A recent international study involving sixty researchers and 150,000 trees compared plots planted with between one and sixteen species. After eight years, the scientists found that the least diverse plots absorbed forty tonnes of CO₂ per hectare, while the most diverse plots took in more than twice that much—106 tonnes of CO₂.¹²⁶ Heterogeneity should be our by-word.

Suzanne Simard, a professor of forestry at UBC, discovered an underground mycelial network that links the roots of paper birches and Douglas firs. This may help explain why carbon absorption increases when a stand of trees is more diverse. Simard writes:

Douglas firs were receiving more photosynthetic carbon from paper birches than they were transmitting, especially when the firs were in the shade of their leafy neighbours. This helped explain the synergy of the pair’s relationship. The birches, it turned out, were spurring the growth of the firs, like carers in human social networks. Looking further, we discovered that the exchange between the two tree species was dynamic: each took different turns as “mother,” depending on the season. And so they forged their duality into a oneness, making a forest.¹²⁷

In 1896, Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish physicist sometimes called “the father of climate change,” estimated how much we could expect the surface temperature of our planet to rise if the amount of CO₂ in our atmosphere increased.¹²⁸ Were the draftees of the early Swedish Forestry Act aware of this? Had they heard of climate change? Did they consider that preserving forests might mitigate its effects? I was interested to note that Arrhenius received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1903, the same year the Forestry Act was passed in Sweden.

We have taken our forests for granted. They were vast and must have seemed indestructible to the early settlers whose fires H.R. MacMillan decried. In two generations, he said we lost “700 billion board feet [1.65 billion cubic metres] of merchantable timber,” about twenty-five times today’s annual allowable cut. Suzanne Simard and Peter Wohlleben made me realize that forests are subtle places with many secrets. And now we stand at a crossroads, where we may lose them, just as we are beginning to understand what they are. To echo our lumber baron once again, “There is no record in history of such a loss.” The forests are essential in our fight against global warming. They inhale our exhalations of CO₂, sequester them and grow to the sky. It behooves us to remember that we inhale their exhalations. I saw one study showing that thirty trees are needed to offset the annual oxygen consumption of an average adult.¹²⁹ The word “conspire” is from the Latin conspirare, con- “together with” and spirare, “breathe.” Let us conspire with the forests, then. Let us preserve and protect them for our mutual benefit.