The B.C. Prosecution Service says it has withdrawn contempt charges against 11 old-growth logging protesters accused of breaching a court injunction during blockades at Fairy Creek on Vancouver Island.

Spokesperson Gordon Comer says prosecutors were in court Tuesday to enter the withdrawals, and the service is reviewing other cases in the wake of a ruling that acquitted protester Ryan Henderson earlier this year.

Comer says the Crown is reviewing the remaining cases that were impacted by the Henderson decision in February, which tossed out the charge of criminal contempt because of the RCMP's failure to properly read the injunction to people arrested during the protest.

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After two and a half years, I finally got to get back out on Long Island in Willapa Bay! The barge tours held by the Friends of Willapa NWR, as well as Refuge staff, were put on hold due to the pandemic. But small-group outdoor activities are basically considered to be very low risk these days, so instead of several dozen people getting on the barge and going around to the southwestern side of the island to take the shortcut to the Don Bonker Cedar Grove Trail, we instead were shuttled over in small informal tour groups of less than a dozen at a time to the dock just on the other side of the water. It meant a longer hike--two miles to get to the cedar grove trail--but it was a perfect day for it weather-wise, with just a smattering of rain in the morning to green everything up, and then cool and mostly overcast the rest of the day.

There's nothing quite like the grove--almost literally. Almost the entirety of the Willapa Hills have been clearcut at least once over the years to fuel the endless demand for timber, which means almost all of the ancient cedars and Sitka spruce that once covered the land were taken down. Boeing is situated in Seattle, BTW, because they wanted all the old growth spruce for early planes, which is why they're often scarcer than old growth cedar.

Yet here on Long Island, most of which was also clearcut to include as recently as the 1960s, 274 acres of old growth cedar remain, and former Washington congressman Don Bonker was a huge champion for saving this special place from similar devastation. You can still see dozens of cedar trees, some of which are a thousand years old, that remain as a testimony to what greed and ignorance stole from this land. We have only fragments of the grand forests that were once here, but as I walked along the trail that went through younger forests--some consisting of nothing more than thin, close-growing "doghair" young trees--I imagined what it must have been like for this entire island to be the same as the grove.

Many of the ancient cedars, like the one at the center of the photo, have multiple leaders--the top portion of the trunk that continues to grow upward. Because the island is so close to the ocean just on the other side of the Long Beach Peninsula, and the grove is high on the island, the tops of the trees frequently break in the heavy winds characteristic of our winter storms here. Multiple breaks throughout a tree's lifetime are not uncommon.

I got to spend several hours on the island, more than I've been able to in the past. Guests had the choice to either self-guide, or to go along with volunteer tour guides like me. My group hovered around six people, and the individual members changed throughout the day as people wandered off or joined in. But it was pleasant, and I got to share some of my favorite things about this place with guests. Plus there were all three colors of banana slug--perfectly ripe (yellow), overripe (yellow with black spots) and banana bread time (black)!

Prepare for a summer of highway disruptions in Vancouver and Vancouver Island, warns climate change protest leader 

Twenty-one-year-old Simon Fraser University history student Zain Haq has spent nine days in jail, been arrested numerous times, threatened a hunger strike and now helps lead a band of climate-change activists intent on ending the logging of old-growth forests in B.C. by annoying the hell out of people stuck behind their highway blockades.

“The plan is to keep escalating until the government agrees to a meeting to discuss legislation to stop old-growth logging,” Haq said Monday, the day on which 14 protesters were arrested and one hurt during the blockade of three major highways.

“Every single day we will be disrupting the highways in multiple locations, both on the Island and in Vancouver. It will be on the scale of today or larger.”

On Tuesday, Save Old Growth members targeted B.C. Ferries’ Horseshoe Bay terminal as part of its ongoing campaign. Protesters blocked westbound lanes of the Upper Levels Highway, causing major delays in both directions.

Three people were arrested, said the group, which vowed to continue disrupting major infrastructure and highways until the government passes legislation to end old-growth logging in B.C.

Haq was born in Karachi, Pakistan, and said his climate-change activism was influenced by deadly flooding and heat waves in the region when he was young. His primary concern is food security.

The intense yet amiable young man is also influenced by his history studies, in particular the civil rights movement in the United States.

“We have been looking at history and seeking inspiration from past movements,” Haq said.

Thank you for proposing to protect old-growth national forests from commercial logging. Our old-growth trees are critical for wildlife, people and public health, and this is a big step toward preserving them for future generations. Please ensure that the final plan does not include exceptions that allow continued logging of old-growth for commercial gain and please consider including protections for mature trees in the final policy. Old-growth should be protected from logging in all ecosystems, including in southeast Alaska. The only exceptions should be for protecting public health and safety, including protecting communities and infrastructure from wildfire, to comply with statutes or regulations and for culturally significant uses. If old-growth trees must be logged for these reasons, they should not be sold to timber companies. Instead, they should be left in the forest to continue as part of the ecosystem just as if they had fallen due to natural disturbances.

Today and yesterday I walked amongst these magnificent creatures whose homes are the Northern California and Oregon coast regions. For thousands of years, indigenous people lived in harmony with the redwood forests. In 120 years, American people, capitalism, greed and disregard for the environment, slaughtered 95% of these creatures while also destroying the fragile ecosystems dependent upon their existence.  

A matter of facts, rebels and leaked documents: Competing Romania illegal logging fact-finding missions advance amid rumours EU infringement could be dropped

Article supported by an IJ4EU grant for independent reporting

by Crina-Gabriela Boroş

(Photo: Clearcut in Natura 2000 site from where FSC-certified wood is being exploited in Fagaras mountains, Romania, May 16 2023. Clearcuts are illegal in Natura 2000 sites. Copyrighted - all rights reserved.)

‘These guys are approving logging without any idea whether that logging would damage a key habitat or a species!’

This is the reason environmental activists quote when asked why they’re winning court cases against public authorities permitting logging in Natura 2000 sites in Romania. Yet, despite EU infringements and complaints, saws are louder than birds in protected forests. In a pre-European Parliamentary election year, are current facts sufficient for the EU to take Romania to the European Court of Justice?

Just days ago, a European Parliament Petition (PETI) delegation visited Romania following an illegal logging complaint, as well as a list of other habitat destruction complaints that have forest destruction as common denominator. Delegates chose a press-proofed route to witness that “everything was well and under control” in Romania’s forests, as Environment Minister Barna Tánczos would tell them in his welcoming speech.

Stopped from witnessing what PETI does, we accompanied rebel MEPs and environmental activists to allegedly protected sites to observe “unfolding crime” and reveal a catalogue of forest management irregularities.

LORDS OF TIMBER is a project supported by an IJ4EU grant for independent reporting, managed by the European Journalism Centre and the International Press Institute. This is one article in a series exposing aspects tied to EU’s “famous” “environmental” infringement.

Notorious

“Romania faces several challenges with respect to the implementation of the nature protection Directives”, an EU Environment Commission (DG ENVI) official said just a few weeks ago, “but this is the famous one!”. She means the illegal logging matter raised by the Commission.

EU’s infringements database is, in fact, chokablok with environmental charges against Romania, like pus leaking from a wound that won’t heal.

Read the article in full on PRESSHub - https://presshub.ro/a-matter-of-facts-rebels-and-leaked-documents-competing-romania-illegal-logging-fact-finding-missions-advance-amid-rumours-ue-infrigment-could-be-dropped-273480/

LORDS OF TIMBER is a project supported by an IJ4EU grant for independent reporting, managed by the European Journalism Centre and the International Press Institute. This is one article in a series exposing aspects tied to EU’s “famous” “environmental” infringement.

[...] The organizers are calling on the Willamette National Forest and the Biden Administration to drop the proposed timber sale in light of the significant impacts that it would have on the climate, drinking water, and community safety. The action comes less than six months after President Biden signed Executive Order 14072 on Strengthening the Nation’s Forests, Communities, and Local Economies, which directs his administration to create stronger protections for public forests in an effort to mitigate the climate crisis, and only weeks after environmental groups sent the Forest Service an ultimatum to reconsider the sale.

Tongass Nat. Forest Protected

Tongass Forest Bans Logging Roads

Logging roads are banned in the Tongass National Forest as the Biden administration restores protections cut by former President Trump. Alaska’s Tongass National Forest is the largest national forest in America, and has been the center of decades of fighting between environmental protections and commercial timber interests. In 2020, Alaska state leaders persuaded the Trump administration to undo…

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“... The Kwakiutl First Nation has a long history of hereditary governance shaped by matriarchal lines, and rooted in an ongoing potlatch tradition, where every family clan and its line of descendents has a head Chief. It also has a band council administration established by the Indian Act which is elected by the community. Knox says recent tensions around old growth point to the importance of respecting hereditary jurisdiction.“The government divided us with the Indian Act,” he said. “Back in the day when we all shared the resources, we had our own laws.”...”

“... Last November when the logging was still active, the Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw Hereditary Chiefs Confederation issued a cease-and-desist order addressed to Lemare Lake Logging’s CEO, Eric Dutcyvich, Western Forest Products and the Kwakiutl band council.

If you do not cease the aforementioned activity legal counsel will be secured to uphold our laws against you,” the letter read in part.

Two days later, the band council responded with legal notice written by Rory Morahan of Morahan & Company law offices, stating that the order was invalid and that “the elected Chief and council have the sole authority and jurisdiction, on behalf of the Kwakiutl band council, to consider resource extraction within the traditional territories and the lands described in the Douglas Treaty.”...”

So on the surface this looks like a good thing. After all, we need mature and old-growth forests as they're havens for species dependent on that habitat type, and they are also exceptionally good carbon sinks compared to younger, less complex forests. (A big, old tree will still absorb and hold more carbon than a new, quick-growing one, and in fact for the first twenty or so years of its life a tree is actually carbon positive, releasing more than it absorbs.)

However, timber industries are trying to paint mature forests as fire hazards that need to be thinned out due to an abundance of plant life. They also tend to oppose leaving snags and nurse logs in the forest as "fuel", because they'd rather salvage what lumber they can from a freshly dead tree. So of course they're trying to push for cutting down trees as the solution to climate change's threat to mature forests.

Large, old trees are generally better adapted to surviving a fire simply by sheer size. Some have other adaptations, such as deeply grooved bark that can create relatively cooler pockets of air around the tree to help it survive, and the branches of older, taller trees of some species are higher up the trunk, away from lower-burning fires. And those old trees that survive are often important for helping to restore the forest ecosystem afterward, from providing seeds for new trees to offering wildlife safe haven and food.

When timber companies come in and log a forest, even if they don't take all the trees, they leave behind all the branches and twigs and just take the trunks. This creates a buildup of fine fuels that burn very quickly (think the twigs and paper you use to start a campfire), while removing coarse fuels that take longer to catch fire. In fact, an area that is subjected to salvage logging after a fire is much more likely to burn again within a few years due to all the fine fuels left behind by salvage logging.

Another factor is that not all forests are the same, even at similar ages. Here in the Pacific Northwest, as one example, the forests east of the Cascades live in drier conditions with slower plant growth, and low-level wildfires that can clean out ladder fuels before they pile up too high are more common. In those locations prescribed burns make sense.

However, the fire ecology of forests on the west side is less understood; because lightning storms are less common and the climate is wetter, fires just don't happen as often. And west-side forests are simply more productive, with denser vegetation that grows back quickly after even large fires like 2017's Eagle Creek Fire in the Columbia River Gorge. Historically speaking, west-side forests get fewer, but larger, fires. So the prescribed burns and other strategies employed for east-side forests aren't necessarily a good fit.

Finally, mature forests are much more biodiverse, and support many more species than a monocultural tree plantation. As climate change continues to affect the planet, mature forests and other complex ecosystems are going to become increasingly crucial to protecting numerous species, to include those dependent only on those ecosystem types. Thinning may seem like a great idea at first, but even if it isn't as destructive as clearcutting it will still damage a forest in ways that will take years to restore.

We really need to be wary of the narrative that thinning is the only way to curb climate change's effects on mature forests. It's a more complex situation than that, and we need to prioritize preserving these increasingly rare places as much as possible.

yippee

Save Oregon's Old Growth

By oregonwild.org Did you know that the Willamette Forest has the highest carbon rich forests in the US?

Last week, US Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack announced a set of policy recommendations that the Forest Service will be pursuing in response to President Biden’s executive order calling for the protection of mature and old-growth forests. Vilsack’s policy guidance boils down to one thing: more logging. Rather than protecting our forests that store massive amounts of carbon and provide critical habitat for endangered wildlife, Vilsack is making excuses to cut them down at an even faster rate.

The Forest Service’s Secretarial Memorandum claims that a majority of our mature and old-growth forests on federal lands are already in a protected status, but this is demonstrably false. Oregon Wild and our allies across the country in the Climate Forests campaign can point to thousands of acres at risk right now of being logged. In fact, just last week I toured the Flat Country logging sale right here in Oregon where I saw acres of mature trees over a century old. These forests are on the verge of becoming old-growth, and projects like Flat country would mean that they are reduced to stumps. 

Secretary Vilsack’s memo hides behind bad science and places the blame for our rapidly-vanishing mature and old-growth forests on climate-driven wildfire without first recognizing that the Forest Service logging methods are truly the #1 threat to our forests.

President Biden’s Executive Order should have signaled an end to “business as usual” logging of mature and old-growth forests on federal lands, but it’s clear that we, and the Biden administration, cannot trust the Forest Service to steer this ship.

Tell the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management that they must act now to protect our forests on federal lands and allow for a meaningful public engagement process. 

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