The ongoing lumber trade war has attracted spirited campaigns featuring opaque details and emotional arguments. The debate over forest management has too.
Last month, I attended “Forestry in Flux: Reimagining BC’s Forests,” a public speaker session put on by UBC Forestry. The session was the first of the Backman Dialogues, a three-part series about managing conflict and controversy in the forest industry.
The event was both informative and provocative. However, it was also unsettling. In telling the narrative of “economics versus the environment,” the conservation community makes it clear who the villain of the story is: people like me.
When the forest industry is portrayed not as a group of people, but rather a faceless Borg intent on destroying Mother Nature, it is much easier to ignore the human harms that accrue from deindustrialization. But this would be a mistake.
Context: Why Host an Event to “Reimagine BC’s Forests”?
To understand the current forestry debate in BC, it is useful to have some local context. The province has a pressing issue: over the past two decades, its timber supply has declined rapidly. Much of this has been due to the mountain pine beetle epidemic (1999-2015), which killed 58% of the province’s merchantable lodgepole pine. However, the reasons for the most recent (2020-) log shortages are more nuanced.
Beginning in 2019, the province brought in several new forestry and conservation policies. Some of them took land out of the harvest land base; others changed permitting requirements. The result was a sudden reduction in the number of areas that were permit-approved and ready-to-go for logging. The pace of logging slowed from about 50 million m3 per year thought the 2010s to about 30 million m3 per year in 2025, choking off BC sawmills’ log supplies.
With the forest industry now struggling to harvest even a fraction of it’s allowable annual cut (= its government-allocated harvest level on public land), many people are now asking “what amount of logging is actually sustainable in BC?” The forest industry has floated a target of 45 million m3, arguing that this could be achieved through addressing procedural bottlenecks, working more closely with First Nations, and expanding forest salvage and thinning operations. The conservation community, on the other hand, argues that the current log supply issues are due to over-logging in the past, and that cut levels should remain at 30 million m3 or lower. This targeted reduction in harvest would be accompanied by a restructuring of the industry, replacing the province’s large sawmilling sector with “small-scale, value-added” manufacturing.
How to Justify Hurting People
In the “human needs versus the environment” debate, classic approaches are to either argue for a side (i.e., “the environment is important”) or against the other side (i.e., human needs are not important.) As the actions being promoted by the conservation community would greatly reduce economic activity, the “human needs are actually not as important as you think they are” argument is coming to the forefront.
If one is going to argue for actions that would likely hurt people, it is important to have a palatable justification for doing so. Speakers at Forestry in Flux had several.
For example, we heard that the forest industry employees could adapt more easily to change than the environment could:
“We people and our economies are the nimble parts in here. Ecosystems are the ones that will struggle under climate change.”
Also, holding onto forest industry jobs is a misguided goal, as in the long-term, those jobs will be lost anyway:
“It is a myth that increasing logging leads to increasing jobs… Using ‘jobs’ as the rationale for decision-making makes us shy away from making bold choices, and it’s only true in the short term.”
And of all the arguments, the one that irked me the most was the not-so-subtle insinuation that it is okay to shut down logging, because the industry’s current predicament is its own fault for cutting down too many trees and then lying about it:
“We are here today because of a history of mismanagement and greed.”
“What my colleagues want us to believe is that there is something else going on than what I see. When I fly over the province, I see a landscape hacked apart by industrial logging.”
“Ravi Parmar [the BC Minister of Forests] saying, ‘Find me 45 million m3 [of wood to log]’ is like Donald Trump saying, ‘Find me 11,000 more votes in Georgia.’”
In other words (reading between the lines), industry and government are greedy knaves who deserve to be unemployed – and don’t deserve your empathy.
We Don’t Need Emotional Warfare to Effect Change
It’s a simple strategy, really: provoke your audience’s anger, suggest a bold solution, and then reassure them the solution won’t have adverse consequences. The goal is to convince decision-makers (and those who could lobby them) to eliminate the enemy.
The US Lumber Coalition does this when it accuses Canada of “harmful trade practices” and reassures US residents that rising lumber prices won’t actually hurt consumers. It’s an easy win: by writing a few letters and press releases, they are indirectly nudging their competitors out of the market.
The conservation community does this too. When speakers at Forestry in Flux blamed “greedy” forestry companies for the industry’s current predicament and reassured the audience that lower harvest levels won’t really hurt forestry workers, the message was clear: we should dismantle the forest industry as we know it. Let it die, then rebuild it from scratch with a new vision.
But is this really what BC’s conservation community wants? If the province’s forest industry were to collapse, there would be serious economic, social, and even environmental consequences. The industry does provide jobs. And trained forestry crews provide wildfire mitigation and ecological restoration treatments.
As the Forestry in Flux audience heard from the event’s other speakers, the forest industry is working hard to adapt and change. Further, as the industry builds trust with First Nations stakeholders, this change is accelerating. When ENGOs campaign on a platform of “the forest industry is lying to you,” this impedes, rather than helps, the change process.
I understand why ENGOs are pushing for change. However, please lay off the emotional warfare.
Forestry in Flux: Reimagining BC’s Forests
Sponsor
The Backman Family (Thank you!)
Moderator
Johanna Wagstaffe, On-Air Meteorologist and Seismologist with CBC
Speakers
- Adam Olsen, Negotiator for the Tsartlip First Nation and former Green MLA
- Lisa Matthaus, Provincial Lead of Organizing for Change (an ENGO)
- Molly Hudson, VP of Forestry and Sustainability of the Nch’ḵaỷ Development Corporation (the business arm of the Squamish First Nation)
- Dr. Dominik Roeser, Associate Dean of Research Forests and Community Outreach at UBC Forestry
Summary of the Dialogue
Johanna: What one myth about BC forests do you wish people understood?
- Dominik: The myth that BC is stuck in the past. Actually, we are innovating in both policy and practice.
- Molly: The myth that forestry is a sector rife with conflict. Actually, there is a lot of collaborative work in the sector, First Nations now control 20% of tenures, and we are doing land-based planning.
- Lisa: The myth that increasing logging leads to increasing jobs. “Jobs” is the rationale that guides the decision making. It makes us shy away from making bold choices, and it’s only true in the short term.
- Adam: The myth that there are still trees out there to log. What my colleagues want us to believe is that there is something else going on than what I see. When I fly over the province, I see a landscape hacked apart my industrial-scale logging.
Johanna: How can forest decision-making include more voices?
- Lisa: Have more community forests and tenure reform.
- Dominik: We need different forms of tenure. Plus, we need to get youth engaged. We need role models they can identify with – such as women (like Molly) and Indigenous people.
- Johanna: How can public engagement be rebuilt for trust?
- Adam: Government needs to get local communities involved.
- Molly: it is worthwhile to invest the time in building trust. Transparency helps; we need a common set of data.
- Dominik: With good data comes good decisions. In the absence of good information, people believe what they want to believe, and this can cause conflict.
Johanna: What strategies are needed to restore and conserve forests in an era of climate change, biodiversity loss, and wildfire severity?
- Lisa: We need to implement recommendation #2 of the Old Growth Strategic Review: declare biodiversity and ecosystem health to be the overarching priority for all sectors.
- Dominik: We need to diversify our forest practices, particularly in regards to wildfire mitigation.
Johanna: What supports are needed to implement forest management grounded in Indigenous principles?
- Adam: We should stop clearcutting. Our economy should depend less on forestry. Indigenous values are holism, relationships, interconnectivity, reciprocity, respect and resilience. Instead of having our current death mentality, we need to adopt an Indigenous mentality. This means we should be okay with not cutting at all. I don’t think the province is ready.
- Dominik: Can I respond? While we need to work on finding alternatives to clearcuts, right now they are an important tool in our toolkit, because they are the only thing we know how to do.
Johanna: What actions can industry and government take to show that multiple values are being integrated?
- Molly: I’ll interpret that as “how can we demonstrate balance”. We are doing this through landscape planning with a collaborative table of stakeholders, including First Nations. But this is a time- and resource-consuming process. I hope we can keep it going.
- Adam: The government knows how to announce it, but then grinds it to such a slow pace that it isn’t happening.
Johanna: Switching to a global stage, with so much uncertainty, how can the BC forest industry regain competitiveness and build long-term resilience and what type of leadership do we need from government?
- Adam: We need to stop trying to be globally competitive and instead reorient our communities to small-scale, value-added production. We need to give our forests and our landscapes a rest.
- Lisa: The forests are exhausted, we can’t find timber, and the US doesn’t want to buy our products. We should take this opportunity to do something different. Currently our industry is commodity oriented, with some other stuff on the periphery (i.e., value-added manufacturing). We need to put this at the center.
- Molly: Competitiveness does matter. Participating in the global forest economy benefits British Columbians and it can benefit forest management. We want to invest in our land base – where will this money come from? Exposure outside of BC brings wealth back into our province and allows us to do what we want to do. Global competitiveness and local resilience are two sides of the same coin.
- Dominik: We have been competitive at making 2×4 for the US. Now the US does not want it, so we need to rethink what competitiveness means. What should we be best at? Bioproducts? CLT? 2x4s will be part of the future strategy, but we need to expand on this.
Johanna: Final take-aways?
- Dominik: Bioproducts are an exciting opportunity. Commodity products like lumber and pulp are the bottom of the food chain, we need to create bigger profits on smaller volumes. We also need to better utilize our biomass residues.
- Molly: Go back to first principles. If we want to invest in the value-added end of the supply chain, we need to be certain that we have the fibre to feed through the supply chain so that we can attract the investment.
- Lisa: Find out what the land base can product sustainably first, and then figure out what to do with the wood. Prioritize ecosystem resilience. We people and our economies are the nimble parts in here. Ecosystems are the ones that will struggle under climate change
- Adam: Ravi Parmar [the BC Minister of Forests] saying, “Find me 45 million m3 [of wood to log]” is like Donald Trump saying, “Find me 11,000 more votes in Georgia.” It’s not out there! We need to tie people who live on the land base back into the decision-making and for the political class to stop thinking we have all the answers.
Reprinted with permission from Alice Palmer’s Substack.
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