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A symposium which will focus on the beetle epidemic, as proposed for Quesnel this fall, is a good idea. Such a gathering will allow serious people to come together to develop a long term strategy to deal with a serious problem. Industry, government, the environmental community, tourism operators First Nations, labour, and all other affected people from the Chilcotin Cariboo need to be there. If dangerous, outmoded ineffectual thinking such as logging parks is left behind, this meeting will be free to explore a variety of new innovative strategies, as a look at the other side of the story shows.

We have finally realized that we cannot "stop" or "control" this devastating beetle epidemic. Only natural forces can do that. Based on this understanding, a new set of strategies is emerging in the forest industry, the tourism industry and those groups concerned with the effects on Biodiversity.

The present method used by the forest industry is to salvage log those trees that are currently under attack, but not yet dead. This is called "Green attack". The second tier cutting is in dead trees which have either just died: "Brown attack" or have lost their needles: "Gray Attack". The difficulty with this method is that it continues to create even-aged stands that will be vulnerable in the future. One way to avoid this is to shift harvesting into healthy areas of forest and select out the older trees before the beetle approaches these stands. This will create a more uneven age class structure , thereby reducing future beetle risk.

This strategy makes sense when we realize that it is impossible for us to log all beetle-killed wood anyway. In the last epidemic in the Chilcotin, less than 50% of beetle-killed trees were ever logged. The same will be true this time given the lack of capital to create new infrastructure, lack of markets and lack of time to build the roads and other facilities necessary to cut in the farther reaches of the plateau. This attack is much larger, more widespread and the sheer volumes ( three times the annual provincial cut at this point) involved make the thought of logging any significant percentage of it out of the question.

The Tourism industry sells viewscapes and unaccessed area as part of its product. Landscapes that were 60 to 90 percent killed in the epidemic of the late eighties provided viable tourism product throughout the period. For example, the southern shore of Charlotte Lake is both a viewscape and a flight corridor. During the height of the attack, there was a couple of seasons of brown, then a lot of grey spires, and now the understory has taken over to the point where the forest looks natural to the untrained eye.

From the start to the end of the infestation, the landscape provided tourism product because some parts were left alone and other portions were carefully logged with the tourism values in mind. Since limited and/or no access was created there is not a control problem and the tourism product remains as saleable as it ever was. This is not to suggest that we put "no harvest zones" in place. It is simply saying that the combination of careful logging and leaving some areas to go through their natural cycles will give interim financial income until the next logging chance occurs in fifty to eighty years.

So, when deciding where and how to log beetle attacked forests or other areas, the forest and tourism industries need to sit down and develop a plan which works for both economies. This will be increasingly important in the next decade as timber harvest falls off and communities are looking for ways to open new business opportunities.

The creation of even-aged stands is also a problem for Biodiversity. If the timber harvest is moved into non-beetle areas it will provide more structure and function for forest animals to live in years to come. This might be the most controversial discussion as it may involve logging Old Growth Management Areas set aside under the regional land use plan, The CCLUP.

These new ideas need to be explored. It is the only way the communities of the Chilcotin Cariboo will have a fighting chance to retain and diversify their economies, both now and for the future. The symposium is a natural place to do this, and it needs to happen soon.

- Dave Neads

More articles in the series, The Other Side of The Story

Cariboo Chilcotin Conservation Society
Unit 201, 197 2nd Ave North Williams Lake, B.C., V2G 1Z5
Phone/Fax: 250 398-7929 • ccentre@ccconserv.org • Coordinator: Marg Evans

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