British Columbia is logging its last old growth. Protesters are sleeping in the road to stop it. https://cheknews.ca/british-columbia-is-logging-its-last-old-growth-protesters-are-sleeping-in-the-road-to-stop-it-1340473/
#environment #OldGrowthForests #logging #foresty #nature #VancouverIsland #BritishColumbia
Not feeling a lot of Canadian pride with this kind of idiocy happening on a daily basis.
to be clear, I'm with the protesters.
@AnnieBuddy Me too!
@AnnieBuddy Money, money. It always comes back to money.
@CatherineBabault
why is it the same in so many places (very) long term damage for many, possibly irreversible, for short term profit for very few. And governing bodies allowing it because many voters don't care.
😠
@EregLoch They don't think about future generations, their children's children. It's infuriating.
@CatherineBabault Old growth takes many decades to recover, if ever. "New growth" replacement may be less profitable and more prone to wildfire. The moral is : leave it alone!
@CatherineBabault That really is a tragedy.
@CStamp It is.
Aug 5, 2026, 8:41 PM@CatherineBabault I'm up in Terrace. I see logging trucks every day - but there's not much going on - the raw logs are exported.
BC removed the penalty to encourage even more logging and raw log exports.
https://thetyee.ca/News/2026/04/30/BC-Quietly-Cuts-Penalty-Exporting-Unprocessed-Logs/
@CatherineBabault government and corporations know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
I will never understand why so many men take pride in destroying what is rare and beautiful.
@TheresaReason So many men are fucked, and I say that as a man. I don't know if its a power thing or what, obviously there's a wider cultural thing going on as well but yeah, its all madness. The limited liability corporation as a concept channels the absolute worst instincts of humanity, I reckon.
@krnlg so many men are good - they build and heal and love instead of destroy, harm and hate. But society since forever has encouraged men to some of the worst behaviors and called them manly and powerful and a lot of people aspire to be called that I guess?
Unfortunately those latter men are mostly in charge.
@TheresaReason Yes very true, can't argue with any of that!
“Once an old-growth forest is logged, it will require millennia before it has the structure, composition and function of the forest that was logged”
So let’s call it what it is: forest mining. Strip-mining vast swaths of land for a resource that cannot be replaced. Forestry flies under the public radar sheltered by the fiction that forests are renewable resources.
They are not.
@DavidM_yeg It is heart-breaking to see parts of the landscape on Vancouver Island. You look at mountain ranges and it's a patchwork of clear cuts and second-growth forests. I am not against logging, I use wood products every day, but I am for responsible logging. Stop logging old-growth forests, once they're gone, they're gone.
@CatherineBabault It's mad really when you put it like that. There's so much land with new growth forests where the old, actually important forests were already destroyed. But companies still lay waste to the irreplacable old growth because it gets them a bit more profit(??).. it really is insanity.
@CatherineBabault We here in the UK are currently importing wood from Canadian old growth forests to burn as "sustainable" fuel in ex-coal power plants (Drax). Like, what the actual fuck
@krnlg I read somewhere they use it for toilet paper too in the UK. I don't remember the source so I am not sure if it's true or not.
Aug 6, 2026, 12:41 PM@CatherineBabault @krnlg
Most Canadian toilet paper is old growth forest, gotta shop around:
@NMBA @krnlg @CatherineBabault
The percentage of a tree that can be used as premium lumber is smaller than most people realize - often about 50%. The rest is bark and off cuts that can be chipped or pulped (20-30%) and sawdust (15-20%) Paper, chip board, and even toilet paper are ways of using that waste material, and if power plants are burning pelleted fuel or processed biofuel, that’s made from compressed or processed sawdust.
Aug 6, 2026, 4:35 PM@DavidM_yeg @krnlg @CatherineBabault
It's better to utilize the "waste" than create slash piles to wastefully burn in winter, but I think the nutrients in bark would best feed the soils and act as mulch post-harvest to promote regrowth. Forestry can't keep removing nutrients without depleting the soil - farmers did that and now have to use fertilizers, which won't be reasonable at the scale of forests.
@NMBA Problem is though that by buying the sawdust to burn as pellets, it is adding profitability to an industry destroying the forest :/
Aug 7, 2026, 12:59 AM@krnlg
Until our govts stop the harvesting of old growth and native forests sawdust is a waste product from milling to produce the primary product (boards and such), and sawdust has few nutrients so might as well be pellets for non-urban heat as I'm unaware of any other good for that carbon (cheap sawdust particle board furniture just ends up in landfills or burnt with wood waste and then there's all the toxic glue emissions). Perhaps sawdust could be economically turned into biochar and put to a better use in agriculture.
@NMBA
I agree but it's harder to stop it when it is making more money. It's not like they're giving it away for free so really calling it waste is misleading already. Saying it is waste of one of the arguments Drax has deployed; it isn't waste because it has enough value it is worth shipping over the Atlantic to burn.
@krnlg @CatherineBabault Drax leadership includes a former BC politician who jumped ship to go work for Drax.
@CatherineBabault @DavidM_yeg We have been fighting for BC Forestry Reform for over 3 decades that I've lived in BC. My first arrests were at Clayoquot Sound in my teens. I can't believe we are still having to fight to protect old growth forests in BC, in 2026.
Aug 6, 2026, 12:43 PM@DavidM_yeg @CatherineBabault
A clearcut replanted with a monoculture isn't forestry either, it's industrial ag.
@DavidM_yeg @CatherineBabault One of the reasons why fossil fuels lobbyists have been so successful, even in the face of sustainable renewables, is that they persistently layer their strategies, in depleting backup resources like long-standing forests.
Divide and Conquer Strategy can cut both ways, though. So joining local and regional opposition, along with far more sustainable vital infrastructure policy, can still work.
It may have to be in the southern hemisphere > past tipping points...
@CatherineBabault And... Stupidity like that is why B.C. is on fire right now. You have to cut down old growth as part of the tree-thinning process or else you wind up with huge forest fires. This is an ancient practice of Native Americans, particularly from the California area. Until white people came along with our ignorance, there weren't forest fires in CA at all.
Here's a video that explains it much better than I can:
Aug 5, 2026, 10:03 PMThis drives me crazy because if old growth forest continues to be logged, it's going to be gone forever + the jobs would still be lost. Or we would lose the jobs now, have time to retrain, and we keep the old growth forest!
Logging in Canada took about 150,000 hectares over the last three years, and Carbon fueled climate change took 30 million hectares.
One year of catastrophic climate wildfires took more than a hundred years of logging trees.
Almost all of them are old growth, because most of the burns are whithout roads.
The heat that has made world forests into kindling, also killed 20,000 people in Europe in June.
Maybe visit.
Aug 5, 2026, 11:38 PM@CatherineBabault As far as I know, I’ve never seen an old growth, but I’ve always wanted to. The way things are going, I’m not sure I’ll ever get that opportunity. ☹️
@bobhenryphotos I'm sorry to hear that. There are some beautiful old growth forests in Washington State that I had the pleasure to visit and photograph. Hopefully you'll be able to go there one day.
Aug 6, 2026, 4:52 PM@CatherineBabault Thanks, Catherine. I hope so, too. Perhaps when I retire and can have plenty of time to slow down, take my time, and really enjoy the experience. I just hope they're not cut down in the next few years.
@CatherineBabault I support this ongoing battle against old growth logging in BC & am a veteran with old growth resistance camps. I don't support most of the people in this one. I know them.
A ton of funds were unaccounted for from StandEarth folks. It was a huge amount of funds. The same people involved with lack of financial transparency are involved with this.
@PhoenixSerenity That tarnishes the battle to save old-growth forests but let's remember that most demonstrators over the last decades are good people who won some of the battles and I am thankful to them for saving some old-growth forests on Vancouver Island and Haida Gwaii.
@CatherineBabault More lawsuits against government will be needed. I'm grateful for the activists & nonprofit organizations that have hung in for decades for old growth protections. It is a long battle for the ancient forests/ecological health💚🙏
@PhoenixSerenity @CatherineBabault our trip in June - at your suggestion - to Meares island was absolutely stunning. Very moving. I keep thinking of it. Cutting such a forest is unimaginable vandalism