Editor:
I read with interest the article in the March 28 edition titled ‘Province could relax the rules.’
Although I am not in agreement with several of the comments made I was particularly troubled by the following statement, “the province is looking at several forestry rules to free up unallocated timber”
For those who may not know, the rules being talked about are those put in place by society to protect values other than timber, things like caribou, moose, deer, goats, other wildlife, fisheries, watersheds, tourism and recreation and biodiversity within forest ecosystems.
The rules, to varying degrees, reserve some timber so that these other values are not degraded.
What this means is that this timber is in fact, allocated, just not to timber harvesting.
The suggestion put forward to relax these rules in order to harvest more will degrade many of these values.
I would however make an exception when it comes to visual quality.
I think a strong case could be made to relax conditions around visual quality provided only dead pine was removed and the relaxed conditions were only in place for as long as the dead pine is expected to be useful.
This would get these stands to green up more rapidly, reduce fire hazard and contribute something to current and future timber supply.
It is worth noting that the lakes land and resource management plan provides for visual objectives to be compromised as a reasoned response to catastrophic windthrow or beetle infestations.
Even with a relaxation of visual quality objectives a significant drop in timber supply is coming within the next 10 years.
If, however, decision makers choose to pretend that we have lots of unallocated timber in the lakes timber supply area, then my fear would be that we will seriously degrade the other values and our area may start to resemble Mordor.
Gunter Hoehne
