Forests

‘This Is A War In The Woods 2.0’

April 9, 2021 Brendan Strain, Vancouver Island CTV News. Resist! Canada, Fairy Creek, Forests, Timber Industry

Port Renfrew - “Activist headquarters” is an encampment just outside of Port Renfrew, Vancouver Island. That is where the fight to prevent 200 hectares of ancient old-growth forest from being cut down continues. “We haven’t been served (with an injunction), no,” said Molly Murphy, one of the many people calling the encampment home on Monday. The injunction was granted by the B.C. Supreme Court on April 1. It orders the demonstrators to take down the blockades that they had set up to prevent forestry company Teal-Jones from accessing its logging operation in the area. “We’re waiting for Teal-Jones to serve the injunction and then the police need to enforce it,” said Murphy. “That’s kind of what we are waiting for.”

Fairy Creek Blockade Demonstrators Call In More Protesters

April 5, 2021 Julian Kolsut, Chek News. Resist! Canada, Fairy Creek, Forests, Timber Industry

The blockade has been in place since August 2020, organized in part by members of the Rainforest Flying Squad, to stop the logging company Teal-Jones from building a road into the Fairy Creek area and prevent old-growth logging. Demonstrators say they are extremely disappointed with the decision, and that now is the last chance to save the area. “This is the last stand, literally last stand of old-growth. Ninety-seven per cent of the forests of British Columbia are tree farms,” said Shambu. “The last time trees were saved, it took how many arrests to make that happen [in the Clayoquot protests]?” Protesters say due to the Easter weekend, they expect a big boost in numbers of around 150 people showing up by early next week.

Government Offices Occupied Across Nova Scotia

April 1, 2021 Robert Devet, Nova Scotia Advocate. Resist! Canada, Environment, Forests, Hunger Strike

Kjipuktuk (Halifax) – After 23 days Jacob Fillmore is ending his hunger strike in support of a temporary clearcutting moratorium on Nova Scotia Crown lands. He made the announcement during a well-attended rally at Province House, the third one in as many weeks. “I am feeling increasingly weaker, especially mentally things are getting harder and harder,” he told an appreciative and grateful crowd. This fight is far from over. As I take a step back folks across the province are stepping up,” he said. “If asking politely doesn’t work, we are not afraid to resort to peaceful nonviolent direct action. When I started my hunger strike, I was in despair. I saw the destruction of the environment happening around me and I could not figure out how to change it.

The Fairy Creek Blockaders

March 27, 2021 Serena Renner and Zoë Yunker, The Tyee. Resist! Blockade, Canada, Forests, Police

Simon Frankson emerged from his sleeping bag at 4 a.m., just in time to join the fray. The day before, a balmy afternoon in early August, he and about a dozen campers had studied a satellite photo of the area: a mountainside sheathed in deep green cedars and Douglas fir trees, many of them hundreds or thousands of years old, in a watershed known as Fairy Creek in the southwest corner of Vancouver Island. The telling grey stripe of a logging road was creeping up from the left side of the image. It was the same kind of road that has, over the past century, made way for logging companies to cut down 80 per cent of the ancient forest on an island larger than Belgium.

British Columbia Urged To Protect At-Risk Old Growth Forest

March 17, 2021 Canadian Press, Vancouver Island News. Create! Biodiversity, Canada, climate crisis, Forests

The most at-risk ecosystems should be set aside from logging while British Columbia shifts its forestry policies toward a more sustainable system, says a forester who helped write a provincial report on old-growth forests. The report last April co-written by Garry Merkel urged B.C. to act within six months to defer harvesting in old forest ecosystems at the highest risk of permanent biodiversity loss. “There (are) some of those ecosystems targeted for harvesting right now,” he said in an interview this week, six months after B.C. released the report and pledged to implement the recommendations from the panel of two independent foresters who were commissioned to write it. “I do share the impatience of a lot of folks.”

An Effective Low-Tech Way To Slow Climate Change

February 26, 2021 Beverly Law and William Moomaw, The Conversation. Create! Carbon Capture, climate crisis, Forests

Protecting forests is an essential strategy in the fight against climate change that has not received the attention it deserves. Trees capture and store massive amounts of carbon. And unlike some strategies for cooling the climate, they don’t require costly and complicated technology. Yet although tree-planting initiatives are popular, protecting and restoring existing forests rarely attracts the same level of support. As an example, forest protection was notably missing from the US$447 million Energy Act of 2020, which the U.S. Congress passed in December 2020 to jump-start technological carbon capture and storage. In our work as forest carbon cycle and climate change scientists, we track carbon emissions from forests to wood products and all the way to landfills – and from forest fires.

Scientists Demand Stop To Tree Burning As A Climate Solution

February 16, 2021 Andrea Germanos, Commondreams. Resist! Biomass, climate crisis, Energy, Forests

A group of over 500 international scientists on Thursday urged world leaders to end policies that prop up the burning of trees for energy because it poses "a double climate problem" that threatens forests' biodiversity and efforts to stem the planet's ecological emergency. The demand came in a letter addressed to European Commission President Urusla Von der Leyen, European Council President Charles Michel, U.S. President Joe Biden, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, and South Korean President Moon Jae-in. The signatories—including renowned botanist Dr. Peter Raven, president emeritus of the Missouri Botanical Garden—reject the assertion that burning biomass is carbon neutral.

Forest Service: Cutting Snags To Eliminate Endangered Species Habitat

January 22, 2021 Chuck Burr, Culturequake. Educate! Biodiversity, Endangered species, Federal Government, Forests

It is an intentional act to seek out and cut large diameter dead trees to prevent them from becoming spotted owl and other endanger species habitat. Annual census of known spotted owl trees are conducted. Owls must be seen living in the trees. If the owls are scared off by nearby clear-cutting, road building, or the tree is downed, the habitat is delisted as critical and may now be clear-cut. If there are no potential habitat trees, owls are prevented from moving into an area. This is an intentional act. Cutting large diameter dead trees is being conducted on gated locked Forest Service and BLM lands. Only staff and contractors can access these areas with vehicles. Not during clear-cuts, the trees are found, cut and left. Small diameter non-habitat trees are skipped.

Many Overheated Forests May Soon Release More Carbon Than They Absorb

January 18, 2021 Bob Berwyn, Inside Climate News. Educate! Carbon emissions, Carbon sequestration, climate crisis, Forests

The last decades have been filled with dire warning signs from forests. Global warming has contributed to thinning canopies in European forests and to sudden die-offs of aspen trees in Colorado, as well as insect outbreaks that are killing trees around the world. In many places, forests are not growing back. New research shows that Earth’s overheated climate will alter forests at a global scale even more fundamentally, by flipping a critical greenhouse gas switch in the next few decades. The study suggests that, by 2040, forests will take up only half as much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as they do now, if global temperatures keep rising at the present pace.

P&G Investors Challenge CEO Over Forest Destruction Concerns

October 14, 2020 Stand Earth, Popular Resistance. Resist! Forests, Paper, Proctor and Gamble, Shareholder activism

Washington - In a shocking move by Procter & Gamble’s shareholders that defied the company’s own recommendations, two-thirds of Procter & Gamble (P&G) shareholders voted “yes” at the company’s annual meeting on Tuesday, October 13, to pass a proposal on forest sourcing and impacts. The vote is a clear indication that despite repeated insistence from company executives, the world’s largest consumer goods company is not doing enough to deal with the financial threats of deforestation and forest degradation in its supply chains.

The New Faces Of BC’s Old-Growth Activism

September 21, 2020 Serena Renner, The Tyee. Resist! Canada, Forests, Indigenous Peoples, Logging

Torrance Coste’s dusty Nissan XTerra disappears in a cloud of grey dirt. He’s checking out recent logging activity around Carmanah Walbran Provincial Park on southern Vancouver Island for the Wilderness Committee. I’m trailing behind, trying not to blow a tire, lose his taillights, or get run off the road. Another logging truck smokes past — the eighth so far this morning. It’s stacked with old-growth hemlock and a red cedar at least a metre thick. A few minutes later, we’re stopped by a pile of tree carcasses blocking the road. Active logging. No entry.

With Global Heating, Expect Inferno Seasons In The American West

September 14, 2020 Peter Kalmus and Natasha Stavros, LA times. Educate! California, climate crisis, Forests, Wildfires

More than 3.1 million acres have burned in California this year — some 3% of the state — with many wildfires still at zero containment and months of fire season left to go. This far exceeds the previous record set in 2018, when 1.7 million acres burned, including the town of Paradise. These raging fires, some exacerbated by the blistering heat last weekend, are the direct result of climate change. The planet is currently 1.0°C to 1.2°C (about 2°F) hotter than it ought to be. This excess heat is entirely due to humans, mainly from burning fossil fuels and destroying forests.

Clear-Cuts: Cause Hot Catastrophic Wildfires

September 12, 2020 Chuck Burr, Culture Quake. Educate! climate crisis, Forests, Logging, Wildfires

Pack billions of the same-age trees close together, wait for dry-lightning or another ignition source, and you have an unnatural firebomb. The cause of thousands of annual catastrophic hot fires around the world are tree farms created by timber industry clear-cutting and fire suppression to prevent timber inventory loss. I have seen it happen. About five years ago, driving home on Interstate 5 North of Lake Shasta, a dry-lightning storm began. It looked like the finger of God came down as lightning struck a conifer and it burst into smoke.

Fairy Creek Blockade Expands To Protect Rare Old-Growth Forest

September 1, 2020 Saul Arbess and Joshua Wright, Focus on Victoria. Resist! Blockade, Canada, climate crisis, Forests

In the midst of an ongoing climate emergency, logging of the ancient rainforests continues at an unfettered rate. The amount of old-growth forest logged each day on Vancouver Island is equivalent to 32 soccer pitches according to the Wilderness Committee. These forests are not only vital for carbon sequestration, but also fundamental for the integrity of complex, interconnected ecosystems that support keystone and culturally significant species, such as salmon. Alarmingly, less than one percent of largest stature forest was found to be remaining on the Island according to the scientific report BC’s Old Growth Forest: A Last Stand for Biodiversity recently authored by Dr Rachel Holt, Dr Karen Price and David Daust.

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