Spotted Owl and Mountain Caribou Endangered in British Columbia

The Hon. Pat Bell, Minister of Forests, Mines and Lands, makes a poor apologist for forest certification (“Rigid environmental standards used in forest certification”, The Vancouver Sun, Letters, December 24, 2010). Under his watch the Spotted Owl population--I can see some of their former habitat from my kitchen window here in Coquitlam--went from 33 breeding pairs in 2003 to none in 2007.



Meanwhile, the Central Selkirk Mountain Caribou population in the mountains behind my cabin went from an estimated 265 in 1996 to 85 in 2006, while across Arrow Lake in the Monashees, 10 were counted in 1994 and seven in 2006. Mr. Bell and his colleagues have decided that the Monashee population, along with two others of the eight in the province, are not worth including in the recovery plan.

Spotted Owls and mountain caribou need old growth forests, but the recovery plans for both of these species begin with the premise that timber supply may not be affected. The national report on the state of the forests that Mr. Bell mentions speaks of “sustainability,” which means something that you can do forever, but two features of BC forest management are not sustainable: old growth forest is being cut and not replaced, and the annual cut is higher than the “long run sustained yield” level.

This level is calculated as the tree growth rate minus the natural decay and the losses due to insects and fire. In a 1994 federal report (Chapter 19 Threats to diversity of forest ecosystems in British Columbia. IN L.E. Harding and E. McCullum, editors, Biodiversity in British Columbia: our changing environment), I wrote that the forests were already being harvested above the sustained yield level, and that the losses due to forest fires and insects were likely to increase because of climate change. Since then, the annual cut has been reduced, but not to below the long run sustained yield level. Meanwhile, the insect losses have increased by an order of magnitude, and we have had several record years of forest fire losses. I also noted in 1994 that climate change could affect the tree growth rates, some stands declining because of drought, and some increasing because of higher temperatures or moisture. That this has since occurred is known, but not in enough detail to accurately revise the long run sustained yield calculations, which were rendered obsolete by the increasing insect and fire losses. Meanwhile, during Mr. Bell’s tenure, the Ministry of Forests inventory and research branches have been decimated. Sustainable? Not yet.