Here is a thought-provoking speech from Corky Evans at the WSCA conference in Kelowna. Good listening for people interested in the political economy of forestry and the province in general. It is an interesting take on tenure, forestry, neoliberalism, globalization, and other interrelated issues. Some really compelling thoughts on measurement, governance, partisanship, resource management, and power. Although I find it borders on structural Marxist anlaysis, I think Corky sees the big picture more clearly than most. I think he does a good job of laying out the nature of one of BC's biggest problems, but like most he struggles to offer a clear way forward. Perhaps awareness can help fuel discussions that produce new directions, so I think it's worth a listen. It's a good 40+ minutes, so crack a brewski before it gets going.
http://www.vimeo.com/21201061
Interesting speech on BC forestry
Re: Interesting speech on BC forestry
Is it in text anywhere online? I'm at work and this dang computer won't let me view video...and I can't crack a brewski either...sad...
Expect delays.
Re: Interesting speech on BC forestry
Sorry, no text. I would have asked Corky for a printed copy if he had one. If you are interested though, I have the text from the keynote speaker from 2010 (Bruce Fraser, chair of the forest practices board). It is an equally interesting (albeit more optimistic) view of forestry 10 years in the future from the perspective of an Avatar alien. Pretty rich stuff from a retiring chair person with a PhD in biology, talk about transgenerational bridging. Anyways, until you can get video, I hope this text provides some grist for your intellectual mill.
What’s Next Pussycat?
Neytiri Looks at Earth in 2020
The movie AVATAR provides us an age-old story about indigenous populations living in harmony with nature being displaced by the avarice of more powerful colonial invaders looking to strip assets at the expense of the environment and the culture. This simple tale, told elegantly from a visual perspective, would seem overwrought in the modern world if we were not doing those terrible things any more. In fact we are continuing the onslaught daily as we displace Borneo natives to site dams and coal mines in Sarawak, displace subsistence rice farmers to create massive biofuel plantations in Sierra Leone, create a naval base on World Heritage Jeju Island in South Korea to the dismay of its residents or place mine tailings in BC Lakes over the objections of our own First Nations.
So, in trying to address the herculean task of forecasting “what’s next” for silviculture, and being constrained to deliver my remarks as an “after dinner” speaker, surely the meanest of speaking engagements, I sought extraterrestrial help. It seemed only appropriate to ask Neytiri, the Na’vi Princess from Pandora to help me with a forecast for earth as she in turn would have the assistance of the “Mother Tree” the source of wisdom for all living things. My only problem was that I did not speak the Na’vi language. As it happens, however, I was able to enlist the actress Zoe Saldana, who played Neytiri in the Avatar film. In conversation, Zoe remarked... “I will say that my "Avatar" character, Neytiri, has been the most challenging of my entire career - physically, mentally, and spiritually. It's the first time I played a non-human, I had to learn a different language, and it was hard to part with her at the end”
What follows, in her own voice, (in Zoe’s parallel translation from the Na’vi and to be conveyed in turn by me to the assembled silviculture contractors) is Neytiri’s reflection on the forest and foresters of earth.
Neytiri Speaks
“The future, although tantalizingly opaque to your human eyes, is eminently transparent to a Pandoran Na’vi - and here it is – as seen through our secret and sacred source, the bi-directional time-warping history generator we call “The Mother Tree”, the impartial guardian of all life on our moon Pandora.
Forestry, as earthlings had known it in their heyday of liquidating the sacred forests of their planet, has already passed. There are, of course, a few dinosaurs that have yet to make their trip to the tar pits of history, but that is their problem, not that of the resurging human guardians. The small and swift-footed mammals we saw scurrying unnoticed about the feet of the mighty, had a different problem. They had to rapidly re-tool the human enterprise to keep up with a swiftly changing ecological reality on their home planet. They were successful in that enterprise because they had to be and because it was just too much fun- and they do love to play! Besides, we certainly didn’t want them here on Pandora.
Picture your future, earthlings!
In 2010 human fascination with things global began to collapse. People were turned off especially by the enormous public debt incurred to provide diverting international entertainments and a cornucopia of amusing but useless household gadgets sold to the masses in huge meeting houses. Their focus began to dissolve into the particulars of local survival. Economies of scale in the traditional sense were stood on their inflated heads as groups of citizens simply rebelled by creating transition communities, thus ignoring the ministrations of large government, the bailout demands of large banks, and the popular taste for endless consumption. Soon after, the province known as British Columbia broke up into self governing regions, cities dissolved into neighbourhoods, mega corporations disarticulated into small and medium enterprises, entertainments became self organized and globally consumptive reach reverted to the proudly local.
All of this re-localized energy became intensely networked through the internet, employing the ever-present sub-cutaneous communicator implants that had replaced the strange vogue for tattoos. At first these resembled I-pod touch instruments, but due to increasing human obesity, many had enough suitably extended skin surface to implant full screen I-pads instead.
People became adept at bypassing the attempts at control by the lumbering giant species of commerce, central intelligence and national governance.
Attempts at universal video surveillance were thwarted by 14 year old boys with laser flash responders that fried the Google street cameras. Attempts to taser the unruly into submission were thwarted by citizens with I-phone cameras, facebook accounts, youtube access and incessant twittering. Attempts to supplement airport full body screening machines with Body Orifice Security Screening Chairs, adapted from prison use, were thwarted by the senior citizen majority who retaliated by wearing signal jamming Depends, reminiscent of the wire mesh in radial tires. Attempts to privatize the crown forest estate were thwarted by Mayors of communities who remained intimately attached to the democratic base of their society. The paradigm of “control by the few large” fell victim to the “dissonance of the many small”.
A Tale of Three Human Cities
Perhaps I can make this more immediate for you by speaking of the future of some British Columbia communities. As the decade of the 20 teen’s unfolded, towns and cities across the province began to re-invent the social contract between government, industry and municipalities. This was a time of great invention on earth when it could have been a time of contraction and despair, or worse, extraterrestrial colonization of my beloved Pandora as people fled the declining planet earth rather than reconstructing its native ecosystems.
Consider the Autonomous City of Prince George in 2020
Prince George became autonomous in the early spring of 2014 when it became apparent that the US housing market was never going to recover in the form of massive suburban subdivisions of individual frame homes. China had reverse-engineered BC’s timber frame housing designs and was now making roof trusses and interior walls out of extruded nano-carbon fibre infused cellulose derived from fast growing grass and bamboo plantations. As traditional construction products were in such precipitous decline, the city stopped talking about growth in volume of the old lumber and pulp corporate giants and began to look for alternatives.
Meanwhile, human researchers at the University of Northern British Columbia, working quietly behind the scenes, with a grant from the Harrison Ford Foundation, developed a bioreactor that could produce a combination of industrial feedstock biochemicals, electrical energy and distributable heat from biomass. What was unusual about their technology is that it was scalable, the smallest units capable of being mounted in a smart car and the largest capable of dealing with the organic waste of an entire city. Instead of forest biomass being used for lumber and pulp to be shipped in bulk at low value added prices, the city transformed their forest industry into a source of distributed grid electricity at both the household and city levels, exporting clean and green power collectively to the lower mainland and further to the desperate California energy cooperatives.
District heat from networked plants is now the main source of winter heating and all transport vehicles run on syngas-electric hybrid engines.
The city’s wholly-owned subsidiary, Silvachem, now exports biochemicals to medium sized conversion and manufacturing plants in the Kamloops industrial zone, where most of the province’s artificial textiles and domestic use plastics are formed. Kamloops had developed that specialty as they diversified away from the sports tourism that had collapsed with the rise of gasoline prices and the prohibitions facing American travellers. It was still believed in Homeland Security circles that their sports fields were actually well-disguised camps in which the 9/11 terrorists had trained. Kamloops’ chief competitor in this new regime is the United Communities of the Trench, which also draw biomass materials from Alberta, desperate for new markets since the collapse of the carbon capture tunnels and the CO2 asphyxiation of Edmonton.
Forest biomass used to be considered a waste product from the bulk solid wood industry, so the biomass usage that evolved early was to turn mill waste into fuel pellets for the carbon offset industry in Europe. But, without a very large source of already transported and assembled material at industrial scale mills, a more readily available supply had to be created. Biomass farms sprouted up, each with their own responsively scaled bioreactors, where a range of grasses, shrubs, hybrid trees, ponds of genetically engineered algae and bacterially mediated solid waste supplied the necessary feedstocks. The value added price of these new material and energy products vastly outweighed the primitive use of primary forest resources for lumber, pulp or pellets.
In 2014 the city had negotiated a land grant from the province that gave it effective control of the region from Vanderhoof to Mackenzie. Instead of being the whining supplicant for tax transfers from the province to the city, Prince George now was flush with tax earnings from its internal economy and was able to entertain the whining supplications from Vancouver for tax transfers, not always, it appears, received with unbridled sympathy.
The Duchy of Duncan
Vancouver Island, as always, proved to be both quixotic and inventive, if not downright pentapolar. Over its restricted geography and short colonial history it has been severally a coal mine, a salmon mine, a timber mine, a governance factory and a seniors warehouse. It has ranged from a little bit of old England, to a little bit of remaining old growth forest, to a little bit of un-subdivided agricultural land.
What began its fundamental transformation was the recognition in 2015 that the food transfers from Mexico and California were literally drying up, that the food reserve amounted to a mere three day supply – half of which was pet food, that most of the valuable private forest land had been converted to post-tax-revolt real estate and that the average age of the workforce was 73. With a human resource that was largely incapable of the rigours of forestry, mining and fishing something had to be done. Fortunately, senior humans have a fascination with gardening and a new agriculture began to take shape.
Like the devolution to the smaller scale that had happened in the biomass industry in Prince George, food production on Vancouver Island became a market and quality controlled, cooperatively networked grid of small-scale greenhouses, community market gardens, rooftop vegetable fields with occasional goats in residence, two-cow dairies, half-acre vineyards and four-chicken back yards. The sheer volume of the collective output of these micro-farms created a surplus of produce that dwarfed the heavily polluted Fraser Valley and commanded premium prices in the Granville Island Market, even though virtually all the produce was genetically engineered. The Island could also have supplied northern Washington if it were not for the border closures enforced after the infamous exploding false teeth incident on the Victoria to Seattle Ferry.
The forestry enterprises of the island are now, in 2020, exclusively represented by tax-paying woodlots producing musical instrument wood, decorative paneling, big-leaf maple sugar, wooden cutlery, horticultural supplies, medicines, wild berries and Roosevelt Elk jerky. The old pattern of high grading cedar from natural forests has evaporated as the cedar died back from summer drought. Residual hemlock forests, once left to rot, are primarily used for justifying Air Canada carbon credits and securing watersheds from the landslides caused annually by the catastrophic El Nino fueled November storms. Plantations of second growth Douglas fir, once established for a renewed structural timber supply, are now parks and ecological reserves also earning carbon credits that government is using to pay their civil servants in lieu of salary. No human would think of harvesting at a grand scale for mere wood.
The Duchy of Duncan was always a bit special, inhabited as it was and still is by characters that inspired the novels of Jack Hodgins. Among them, a group of staunch royalists had come up with the idea of a land grant similar to the one in Prince George, but with a twist. It was to be called the Duchy of Duncan as a ploy to gather distinction within an island of increasingly strident and unique communities all vying for a new tourist-attracting persona not based on murals.
What was even more special was that the royalists were also equally reverent about the region’s First Nation heritage, so the symbol of the Duchy was a hybrid totem pole, with British Royal symbols interspersed with native mythological ones. Governance is being conducted by a Romanesque forum in which governing “Dukes” are elected for four-year terms and drawn from traditional native leaders and Mayors of Cowichan Valley municipalities. A carved wooden replica of the Magna Carta is mounted conspicuously on city hall to caution any Duke from aspiring to the status of King, lest the round table of Dukes find it necessary to become Barons.
Then, there is the Principality of Kaslo
(Neytiri’s Note: Na’vi historians originally selected New Denver for this look at the future, but had to default to Kaslo as the human inhabitants of New Denver, adamant in refusing to establish a cell phone network, were completely disabled with Alzheimers disease which could have been prevented by the radiation of a few calls a month to Nelson.)
No place in British Columbia quite lends itself better to the new dispensation, however, as does the Principality of Kaslo. Not only is it replete with an amazing number of suitably qualified prince and princesses along with a highly inventive citizenry, but also its mountainous isolation is reminiscent of the alpine locations of the storied castles of earth’s old Europe. In effect, it has presence.
As the last functioning sawmill in the northern reaches of Kootenay Lake faded into history in 2010, the timber supply was shrinking from a combination of climate change, Mountain Caribou habitat reservations, park expansions, creation of the Resort Municipality of Jumbo and complaints to the Forest Practices Board. It was a time of necessary change that began with the incorporation of a community forest. At first, the debate in polite Kaslo society, and it was exceedingly polite, was about how much timber should be cut, how it should be cut, what would be visible, what would impact local streams or viewpoints, how it would influence interface fires, who should manage it and how would benefits be distributed, if any actually arose.
But, inevitably the customers for traditional timber products were shrinking in number and the community forest, organized by government as a timber producing tenure, was starting to decay. Even as this was occurring, the community forest leadership convinced government to expand their forest holding to include the area from Meadow Creek to Trout Lake and the upper Duncan and as far south as Queen’s Bay. There were howls of protest from the scattering of remaining volume based tenure holders in the West Kootenays, but the principality prevailed. The Kaslo community forest now had holdings with a much larger array of potential assets. Water, scenery, diverse forest species, viewscapes, waterfront real estate, hot springs, caves and park access servicing opportunities, all synergistically linked with one another.
Under persistent lobbying the terms of reference for community forests abandoned the idea of being a “timber tenure with cut controls” and transformed into a land tenure with freedom to exploit any and all non-destructive uses as the community management could invent.
What ensued was spectacular. Kaslo has become an entrepreneurial showcase, with resort development, cooperative wood supply yards, a Karst Science centre, an artisanal musical instrument factory linked to the annual Jazz Festival, a park access unit for seniors employing solar electric ATV’s, a fully functional mine railway and a plant marketing “Eternal Spring”, a potable water presented in locally-blown glass bottles. Theatres, museums, high end hotels, local specialty foods and an aura of the “edge of well preserved wilderness” have made the Principality as storied as its European ancestors. They have been so successful that the local labour market had to be supplemented from an extended family bused in daily from nearby Bountiful.
Whither the WSCA?
Amid all this change the obsolete Western Silviculture Contractors were set adrift. As a group they had been responding to the industrial scale planting of serial pine monocrops by large timber corporations anxious to rid themselves of their reforestation obligations. The decline persisted, as one by one, the nurseries that produced millions of seedlings closed down their greenhouses and planting yards. Seed collectors vanished and seed orchards suffered from neglect. Controversy ensued about the wisdom of allowing crucial infrastructure to dissolve that would be needed for rehabilitating the large areas denuded by pests and pathogens accelerated by a warming climate. But, humans had arranged their affairs so that they only planted what their corporate licensees harvested, so the mechanisms of rehabilitation of public land starved when the big companies starved and the volumes of pest-killed commercial trees exceeded their shrinking markets for salvaged timber.
What happened next was the stuff of Pandoran legend. Led by a young firebrand, Joan of Arkansas, a movement began in the United States, which called itself “Mothers of Earth”. It recruited only young human women and their announced mission was to de-carbonize America by planting trees and shrubs, sort of like latter day “Johanna Appleseeds”.
They planted apples and pines, sugar maples and filberts, locust and fir, Oregon grape and juniper. They were creating a multifaceted forest cover and a native food supply at the same time. They conducted micro-burns to create a mosaic of habitat in fire dependent forest types. They allied themselves with woodlot owners and community forests, private and public holders of land that would bear afforestation and whose owners would agree to indenture their male children to a lifetime of tending the results.
They negotiated “Save America” carbon credit bonds with government during President Michelle Obama’s second term of office, prevailing over the private sector cap and trade system that had been taken over completely by the Chinese National Bank who had purchased the failing Goldman Sachs with their abundant US Dollar Reserves.
The movement quickly spread to Canada, particularly British Columbia. Princess Karen of Kaslo replaced the avatar of the octogenarian John Betts as the leader of the tree planters of the province. Western Silviculture was transformed into the “Daughters of the Silviculture Revolution” recruiting extensively among the children of the now aged and arthritic industrial tree planters. They went their American sisters one better, however, as they created local chapters in every community, specifically charged with supporting woodlots and community forests to diversify their planting regimes, including on occasion even the land grants of medium sized cities of the coast and interior. They refused, however, to plant for large industrial corporations, leaving that fading task to their brothers that had left school early under overwhelming academic competition from girls.
They rehabilitated forest species nurseries, but on a local scale, with seedstock derived from local sources in small amounts. They grew stock to order as part of landscape design teams that were producing carbon credits, specified products in agroforestry, specialized woods for contracted end users, energy feedstocks for bioreactors, forest pharmaceuticals and wildcrafted foods. They fiercely defended the security of the carbon sink old growth forests, keeping them from being harvested for raw log export.
If human families wanted to explore a forested landscape on vacation, they would seek out a “Daughter” who knew every nuance and byway of the wild forests that lay bountifully, with rapidly recovering biodiversity, beyond the intensively managed areas of small-scale commerce. We Pandorans were emotionally touched, even encouraged, by this development.
By 2020, British Columbia had finally made its most crucial land use transition. Forestry, silviculture, land rehabilitation, protected areas, and community economic restructuring was run exclusively by human women.”
What’s Next Pussycat?
Neytiri Looks at Earth in 2020
The movie AVATAR provides us an age-old story about indigenous populations living in harmony with nature being displaced by the avarice of more powerful colonial invaders looking to strip assets at the expense of the environment and the culture. This simple tale, told elegantly from a visual perspective, would seem overwrought in the modern world if we were not doing those terrible things any more. In fact we are continuing the onslaught daily as we displace Borneo natives to site dams and coal mines in Sarawak, displace subsistence rice farmers to create massive biofuel plantations in Sierra Leone, create a naval base on World Heritage Jeju Island in South Korea to the dismay of its residents or place mine tailings in BC Lakes over the objections of our own First Nations.
So, in trying to address the herculean task of forecasting “what’s next” for silviculture, and being constrained to deliver my remarks as an “after dinner” speaker, surely the meanest of speaking engagements, I sought extraterrestrial help. It seemed only appropriate to ask Neytiri, the Na’vi Princess from Pandora to help me with a forecast for earth as she in turn would have the assistance of the “Mother Tree” the source of wisdom for all living things. My only problem was that I did not speak the Na’vi language. As it happens, however, I was able to enlist the actress Zoe Saldana, who played Neytiri in the Avatar film. In conversation, Zoe remarked... “I will say that my "Avatar" character, Neytiri, has been the most challenging of my entire career - physically, mentally, and spiritually. It's the first time I played a non-human, I had to learn a different language, and it was hard to part with her at the end”
What follows, in her own voice, (in Zoe’s parallel translation from the Na’vi and to be conveyed in turn by me to the assembled silviculture contractors) is Neytiri’s reflection on the forest and foresters of earth.
Neytiri Speaks
“The future, although tantalizingly opaque to your human eyes, is eminently transparent to a Pandoran Na’vi - and here it is – as seen through our secret and sacred source, the bi-directional time-warping history generator we call “The Mother Tree”, the impartial guardian of all life on our moon Pandora.
Forestry, as earthlings had known it in their heyday of liquidating the sacred forests of their planet, has already passed. There are, of course, a few dinosaurs that have yet to make their trip to the tar pits of history, but that is their problem, not that of the resurging human guardians. The small and swift-footed mammals we saw scurrying unnoticed about the feet of the mighty, had a different problem. They had to rapidly re-tool the human enterprise to keep up with a swiftly changing ecological reality on their home planet. They were successful in that enterprise because they had to be and because it was just too much fun- and they do love to play! Besides, we certainly didn’t want them here on Pandora.
Picture your future, earthlings!
In 2010 human fascination with things global began to collapse. People were turned off especially by the enormous public debt incurred to provide diverting international entertainments and a cornucopia of amusing but useless household gadgets sold to the masses in huge meeting houses. Their focus began to dissolve into the particulars of local survival. Economies of scale in the traditional sense were stood on their inflated heads as groups of citizens simply rebelled by creating transition communities, thus ignoring the ministrations of large government, the bailout demands of large banks, and the popular taste for endless consumption. Soon after, the province known as British Columbia broke up into self governing regions, cities dissolved into neighbourhoods, mega corporations disarticulated into small and medium enterprises, entertainments became self organized and globally consumptive reach reverted to the proudly local.
All of this re-localized energy became intensely networked through the internet, employing the ever-present sub-cutaneous communicator implants that had replaced the strange vogue for tattoos. At first these resembled I-pod touch instruments, but due to increasing human obesity, many had enough suitably extended skin surface to implant full screen I-pads instead.
People became adept at bypassing the attempts at control by the lumbering giant species of commerce, central intelligence and national governance.
Attempts at universal video surveillance were thwarted by 14 year old boys with laser flash responders that fried the Google street cameras. Attempts to taser the unruly into submission were thwarted by citizens with I-phone cameras, facebook accounts, youtube access and incessant twittering. Attempts to supplement airport full body screening machines with Body Orifice Security Screening Chairs, adapted from prison use, were thwarted by the senior citizen majority who retaliated by wearing signal jamming Depends, reminiscent of the wire mesh in radial tires. Attempts to privatize the crown forest estate were thwarted by Mayors of communities who remained intimately attached to the democratic base of their society. The paradigm of “control by the few large” fell victim to the “dissonance of the many small”.
A Tale of Three Human Cities
Perhaps I can make this more immediate for you by speaking of the future of some British Columbia communities. As the decade of the 20 teen’s unfolded, towns and cities across the province began to re-invent the social contract between government, industry and municipalities. This was a time of great invention on earth when it could have been a time of contraction and despair, or worse, extraterrestrial colonization of my beloved Pandora as people fled the declining planet earth rather than reconstructing its native ecosystems.
Consider the Autonomous City of Prince George in 2020
Prince George became autonomous in the early spring of 2014 when it became apparent that the US housing market was never going to recover in the form of massive suburban subdivisions of individual frame homes. China had reverse-engineered BC’s timber frame housing designs and was now making roof trusses and interior walls out of extruded nano-carbon fibre infused cellulose derived from fast growing grass and bamboo plantations. As traditional construction products were in such precipitous decline, the city stopped talking about growth in volume of the old lumber and pulp corporate giants and began to look for alternatives.
Meanwhile, human researchers at the University of Northern British Columbia, working quietly behind the scenes, with a grant from the Harrison Ford Foundation, developed a bioreactor that could produce a combination of industrial feedstock biochemicals, electrical energy and distributable heat from biomass. What was unusual about their technology is that it was scalable, the smallest units capable of being mounted in a smart car and the largest capable of dealing with the organic waste of an entire city. Instead of forest biomass being used for lumber and pulp to be shipped in bulk at low value added prices, the city transformed their forest industry into a source of distributed grid electricity at both the household and city levels, exporting clean and green power collectively to the lower mainland and further to the desperate California energy cooperatives.
District heat from networked plants is now the main source of winter heating and all transport vehicles run on syngas-electric hybrid engines.
The city’s wholly-owned subsidiary, Silvachem, now exports biochemicals to medium sized conversion and manufacturing plants in the Kamloops industrial zone, where most of the province’s artificial textiles and domestic use plastics are formed. Kamloops had developed that specialty as they diversified away from the sports tourism that had collapsed with the rise of gasoline prices and the prohibitions facing American travellers. It was still believed in Homeland Security circles that their sports fields were actually well-disguised camps in which the 9/11 terrorists had trained. Kamloops’ chief competitor in this new regime is the United Communities of the Trench, which also draw biomass materials from Alberta, desperate for new markets since the collapse of the carbon capture tunnels and the CO2 asphyxiation of Edmonton.
Forest biomass used to be considered a waste product from the bulk solid wood industry, so the biomass usage that evolved early was to turn mill waste into fuel pellets for the carbon offset industry in Europe. But, without a very large source of already transported and assembled material at industrial scale mills, a more readily available supply had to be created. Biomass farms sprouted up, each with their own responsively scaled bioreactors, where a range of grasses, shrubs, hybrid trees, ponds of genetically engineered algae and bacterially mediated solid waste supplied the necessary feedstocks. The value added price of these new material and energy products vastly outweighed the primitive use of primary forest resources for lumber, pulp or pellets.
In 2014 the city had negotiated a land grant from the province that gave it effective control of the region from Vanderhoof to Mackenzie. Instead of being the whining supplicant for tax transfers from the province to the city, Prince George now was flush with tax earnings from its internal economy and was able to entertain the whining supplications from Vancouver for tax transfers, not always, it appears, received with unbridled sympathy.
The Duchy of Duncan
Vancouver Island, as always, proved to be both quixotic and inventive, if not downright pentapolar. Over its restricted geography and short colonial history it has been severally a coal mine, a salmon mine, a timber mine, a governance factory and a seniors warehouse. It has ranged from a little bit of old England, to a little bit of remaining old growth forest, to a little bit of un-subdivided agricultural land.
What began its fundamental transformation was the recognition in 2015 that the food transfers from Mexico and California were literally drying up, that the food reserve amounted to a mere three day supply – half of which was pet food, that most of the valuable private forest land had been converted to post-tax-revolt real estate and that the average age of the workforce was 73. With a human resource that was largely incapable of the rigours of forestry, mining and fishing something had to be done. Fortunately, senior humans have a fascination with gardening and a new agriculture began to take shape.
Like the devolution to the smaller scale that had happened in the biomass industry in Prince George, food production on Vancouver Island became a market and quality controlled, cooperatively networked grid of small-scale greenhouses, community market gardens, rooftop vegetable fields with occasional goats in residence, two-cow dairies, half-acre vineyards and four-chicken back yards. The sheer volume of the collective output of these micro-farms created a surplus of produce that dwarfed the heavily polluted Fraser Valley and commanded premium prices in the Granville Island Market, even though virtually all the produce was genetically engineered. The Island could also have supplied northern Washington if it were not for the border closures enforced after the infamous exploding false teeth incident on the Victoria to Seattle Ferry.
The forestry enterprises of the island are now, in 2020, exclusively represented by tax-paying woodlots producing musical instrument wood, decorative paneling, big-leaf maple sugar, wooden cutlery, horticultural supplies, medicines, wild berries and Roosevelt Elk jerky. The old pattern of high grading cedar from natural forests has evaporated as the cedar died back from summer drought. Residual hemlock forests, once left to rot, are primarily used for justifying Air Canada carbon credits and securing watersheds from the landslides caused annually by the catastrophic El Nino fueled November storms. Plantations of second growth Douglas fir, once established for a renewed structural timber supply, are now parks and ecological reserves also earning carbon credits that government is using to pay their civil servants in lieu of salary. No human would think of harvesting at a grand scale for mere wood.
The Duchy of Duncan was always a bit special, inhabited as it was and still is by characters that inspired the novels of Jack Hodgins. Among them, a group of staunch royalists had come up with the idea of a land grant similar to the one in Prince George, but with a twist. It was to be called the Duchy of Duncan as a ploy to gather distinction within an island of increasingly strident and unique communities all vying for a new tourist-attracting persona not based on murals.
What was even more special was that the royalists were also equally reverent about the region’s First Nation heritage, so the symbol of the Duchy was a hybrid totem pole, with British Royal symbols interspersed with native mythological ones. Governance is being conducted by a Romanesque forum in which governing “Dukes” are elected for four-year terms and drawn from traditional native leaders and Mayors of Cowichan Valley municipalities. A carved wooden replica of the Magna Carta is mounted conspicuously on city hall to caution any Duke from aspiring to the status of King, lest the round table of Dukes find it necessary to become Barons.
Then, there is the Principality of Kaslo
(Neytiri’s Note: Na’vi historians originally selected New Denver for this look at the future, but had to default to Kaslo as the human inhabitants of New Denver, adamant in refusing to establish a cell phone network, were completely disabled with Alzheimers disease which could have been prevented by the radiation of a few calls a month to Nelson.)
No place in British Columbia quite lends itself better to the new dispensation, however, as does the Principality of Kaslo. Not only is it replete with an amazing number of suitably qualified prince and princesses along with a highly inventive citizenry, but also its mountainous isolation is reminiscent of the alpine locations of the storied castles of earth’s old Europe. In effect, it has presence.
As the last functioning sawmill in the northern reaches of Kootenay Lake faded into history in 2010, the timber supply was shrinking from a combination of climate change, Mountain Caribou habitat reservations, park expansions, creation of the Resort Municipality of Jumbo and complaints to the Forest Practices Board. It was a time of necessary change that began with the incorporation of a community forest. At first, the debate in polite Kaslo society, and it was exceedingly polite, was about how much timber should be cut, how it should be cut, what would be visible, what would impact local streams or viewpoints, how it would influence interface fires, who should manage it and how would benefits be distributed, if any actually arose.
But, inevitably the customers for traditional timber products were shrinking in number and the community forest, organized by government as a timber producing tenure, was starting to decay. Even as this was occurring, the community forest leadership convinced government to expand their forest holding to include the area from Meadow Creek to Trout Lake and the upper Duncan and as far south as Queen’s Bay. There were howls of protest from the scattering of remaining volume based tenure holders in the West Kootenays, but the principality prevailed. The Kaslo community forest now had holdings with a much larger array of potential assets. Water, scenery, diverse forest species, viewscapes, waterfront real estate, hot springs, caves and park access servicing opportunities, all synergistically linked with one another.
Under persistent lobbying the terms of reference for community forests abandoned the idea of being a “timber tenure with cut controls” and transformed into a land tenure with freedom to exploit any and all non-destructive uses as the community management could invent.
What ensued was spectacular. Kaslo has become an entrepreneurial showcase, with resort development, cooperative wood supply yards, a Karst Science centre, an artisanal musical instrument factory linked to the annual Jazz Festival, a park access unit for seniors employing solar electric ATV’s, a fully functional mine railway and a plant marketing “Eternal Spring”, a potable water presented in locally-blown glass bottles. Theatres, museums, high end hotels, local specialty foods and an aura of the “edge of well preserved wilderness” have made the Principality as storied as its European ancestors. They have been so successful that the local labour market had to be supplemented from an extended family bused in daily from nearby Bountiful.
Whither the WSCA?
Amid all this change the obsolete Western Silviculture Contractors were set adrift. As a group they had been responding to the industrial scale planting of serial pine monocrops by large timber corporations anxious to rid themselves of their reforestation obligations. The decline persisted, as one by one, the nurseries that produced millions of seedlings closed down their greenhouses and planting yards. Seed collectors vanished and seed orchards suffered from neglect. Controversy ensued about the wisdom of allowing crucial infrastructure to dissolve that would be needed for rehabilitating the large areas denuded by pests and pathogens accelerated by a warming climate. But, humans had arranged their affairs so that they only planted what their corporate licensees harvested, so the mechanisms of rehabilitation of public land starved when the big companies starved and the volumes of pest-killed commercial trees exceeded their shrinking markets for salvaged timber.
What happened next was the stuff of Pandoran legend. Led by a young firebrand, Joan of Arkansas, a movement began in the United States, which called itself “Mothers of Earth”. It recruited only young human women and their announced mission was to de-carbonize America by planting trees and shrubs, sort of like latter day “Johanna Appleseeds”.
They planted apples and pines, sugar maples and filberts, locust and fir, Oregon grape and juniper. They were creating a multifaceted forest cover and a native food supply at the same time. They conducted micro-burns to create a mosaic of habitat in fire dependent forest types. They allied themselves with woodlot owners and community forests, private and public holders of land that would bear afforestation and whose owners would agree to indenture their male children to a lifetime of tending the results.
They negotiated “Save America” carbon credit bonds with government during President Michelle Obama’s second term of office, prevailing over the private sector cap and trade system that had been taken over completely by the Chinese National Bank who had purchased the failing Goldman Sachs with their abundant US Dollar Reserves.
The movement quickly spread to Canada, particularly British Columbia. Princess Karen of Kaslo replaced the avatar of the octogenarian John Betts as the leader of the tree planters of the province. Western Silviculture was transformed into the “Daughters of the Silviculture Revolution” recruiting extensively among the children of the now aged and arthritic industrial tree planters. They went their American sisters one better, however, as they created local chapters in every community, specifically charged with supporting woodlots and community forests to diversify their planting regimes, including on occasion even the land grants of medium sized cities of the coast and interior. They refused, however, to plant for large industrial corporations, leaving that fading task to their brothers that had left school early under overwhelming academic competition from girls.
They rehabilitated forest species nurseries, but on a local scale, with seedstock derived from local sources in small amounts. They grew stock to order as part of landscape design teams that were producing carbon credits, specified products in agroforestry, specialized woods for contracted end users, energy feedstocks for bioreactors, forest pharmaceuticals and wildcrafted foods. They fiercely defended the security of the carbon sink old growth forests, keeping them from being harvested for raw log export.
If human families wanted to explore a forested landscape on vacation, they would seek out a “Daughter” who knew every nuance and byway of the wild forests that lay bountifully, with rapidly recovering biodiversity, beyond the intensively managed areas of small-scale commerce. We Pandorans were emotionally touched, even encouraged, by this development.
By 2020, British Columbia had finally made its most crucial land use transition. Forestry, silviculture, land rehabilitation, protected areas, and community economic restructuring was run exclusively by human women.”