WESTERN REPORT: Time to Act Decisively on MPB
by John Betts

It is widely assumed that because of the size of BC’s mountain pine beetle (MPB) epidemic there is an equally massive reforestation response. There isn’t. It is also widely assumed that there is a massive salvage effort to harvest the dead pine. There isn’t. As for government investments, the provincial purse still only funds forestry at lower than pre-MPB epidemic levels. And the often-mentioned federal dollars have largely been diverted to small market airport improvements and infrastructure; things the beetles are not likely to notice. Of the hundreds of millions of dollars of government MPB funding promised, very little of it seems intended to restore the actual landscape.

Since the millennium, 12 million ha, an area representing one fifth of the province’s forested land, has come under assault from the beetle. That sum doesn’t include at least another one million ha suffering from other pests and blight. This has all occurred in the last decade as annual planting has steadily averaged around 250 million seedlings. If trees planted is a bellwether of the province’s strategic response to the MPB, the evidence is we are not responding through a major ramping up of reforestation. This would seem to be supported by forecasts based on sowing requests that by 2009 the province will plant 70 million fewer trees than today; a 20% drop to the lowest planting levels in two decades.

The log harvest profile for the past decade suggests the strategy of uplifts has not succeeded in effectively directing the cut towards the heavily hit stands. Although exact figures on the pine salvage component are hard to find, it looks like restoring the MPB-attacked woods by harvesting is not happening because we are not extensively cutting the dead trees in the first place. Worse, the regeneration program is subject to the market for lumber, which answers to other imperatives far removed from forest health and the long-term considerations of British Columbians.

The government has committed to planting 20 million seedlings annually through Forests For Tomorrow, but at the end of 20 years this will only address approximately 440,000 ha. No one is proposing planting the whole plague, but this is a remarkably modest response compared to the size and scale of the attack.
It seems the current policy is to wait for two things: natural regeneration and a new bio-energy industry. Neither of these are inevitable. And even if they do occur, they will have to compete with some other biological effects gaining force across the landscape, the most principal one being fire. Leaving millions of hectares of contiguous MPB-attacked stands to go through the fuel succession process over the next few decades is likely to be catastrophic as our fire seasons lengthen with climate change.

The millions of hectares of beetle attack represent an array of values at risk unaddressed by our response to date. Hydrology, aboriginal rights, future lumber supply, wildlife habitat, public safety, parks, green house gas mitigation, existing plantations, and infrastructure protection all need to be considered as part of our lawful obligation to maintain abundance and diversity on the land. The current forest conditions won’t lead to that unless we intervene soon and begin to strategically steward nature on a course we can live with. To not do this is to place a massive lien against the future of the province.