Editor:
The community must speak out again.
It has been 14 years since the 44 month public portion of the Land Resource Management Plan (LRMP) process concluded.
A lot of people, including myself, dedicated an average of one whole day per month to identifying values and building consensus on how to manage all of our local resources. A lot of effort was made to have all the values included in the LRMP, from values like berry picking to big and obvious ones like forestry, mining, ranching and tourism.
One of the other biggies was visual quality objectives (VQO’s). It seemed important to have a green natural viewscape where logging block shapes were to be designed to minimize the their visual impact.
I believe this has not changed. What has changed is the green has turned gray, thanks to a little but very numerous pine bark beetle.
Judging from the recent Lakes District News poll, 83 per cent of the respondents are of the opinion that the VQO’s need to be adjusted to manage towards a greener natural view. I agree.
The benefits of this approach are numerous and include reduction of dispersed fuels for the protection of other users of the forest.
This brings me to a value that was not addressed in the last LRMP process. Biomass, a new buzz word for what in our area constitutes primarily timber harvesting residuals.
Unfortunately it is called waste and viewed as such.
The material I am primarily referring to is processed material that does not make standard quality saw log grade such as tree tops, low grade or small diameter tree trunks and round trim blocks left behind in the forest cut blocks as slash piles destined to be burned.
For several years our politicians have promised to create an incentive mechanism for industry to utilize this fiber to create jobs and reduce smoky pile burning.
So far nothing has happened. Instead businesses are forced to burn these piles or have to apply for extensions for hazard abatement on their harvest licenses which in the case on BCTS timber sales ties up significant amounts of money in the form of deposits.
The alternative is a ‘license to cut’ with a maximum cut of 2,000 m3 per license. Each individual is allowed a maximum of three. With tens of thousands of loads of cut piles of slash to be utilized we will need hundreds of these licences. So good luck for job creation, supporting existing operations let alone attracting new investment.
I believe the people of this community understand the issues and know what needs to happen, but are stifled by local and regional ministries that do not interpret or create policy in favor of the local community.
If the past is an indication of the future, it will be bright for residue piles this fall, gray for viewscapes and dim for the biomass industry. Let’s make the future bright for biomass, green for viewscapes and dim for slash piles.
In order to do so we must efficiently access forest biomass, the bureaucratic log jam must be removed and replaced by a more responsive administrative process.
Klaus Posselt, Burns Lake
