Are BC’s Forests Running Out of Trees?

On a mild day last October, lawyers and executives reconvened, after a quick boxed lunch, beneath the ’80s-era light fixtures of the U.S. International Trade Commission’s Washington, D.C., hearing room. They were ready to settle a long-standing beef.

For decades, the United States had charged an import fee on what it saw as an endless stream of cheap and plentiful wood from Canada. For just as long, Canada and its provinces complained that fee was unfair.

A senior vice-president with one of B.C.’s biggest logging companies, West Fraser Timber Co., was there to argue that the industry was screwed either way.

“There's a new normal that's emerged,” said James Gorman, referring to raging wildfire seasons. “For us, it's quite a terrifying one.”

These worsening fires, Gorman explained — in addition to pest infestations and a glut of too-young-to-harvest forests — mean that Canada, and B.C. in particular, is running low on trees to log.

Listening to the afternoon’s testimony, the panel of commissioners seemed confused.

Canada and B.C. pride themselves on sustainable forest management, and they’d sent the panel glossy promotional materials saying as much. The sustainability claim revolves around the “allowable annual cut,” a forestry rule that, in theory, keeps logging within nature’s limits. Last year, for example, B.C. allowed companies to log enough to fill 25 million swimming pools with wood. And yet, Gorman’s company was among those fleeing the province “due to the lack of available fibre.”

Something, it seemed, had gone very wrong.

After almost two million years of on-again, off-again glaciation, B.C.’s forests found lasting roots around 50,000 years ago. For the latter half of that period, Indigenous Peoples lived in and tended to the forests, such that, when settlers began arriving, they were among the most abundant and biodiversity-rich places on the planet.

But then a century ago, B.C.’s colonial government began a bold experiment on its forests. It began to convert its ancient, unlogged forests into tree plantations and dole out a yearly logging allowance to companies so that its new tree crop would never run out. The system, known as the “sustained yield,” was designed to provide the steady stream of trees required for empire-building.

But the experiment has gone awry. “We’re running out of trees,” Prince George-Mackenzie MLA Mike Morris said in an interview with The Tyee.

In 2015, as parliamentary secretary to the minister of forests, lands and natural resource operations, Morris completed a provincewide investigation into B.C.’s natural resources.

“The amount of tree harvesting that has taken place right across the province is far greater than I could ever have imagined,” he said.

During the daylong hearing last fall, the commissioners temporarily joined a growing effort to unravel the mystery of B.C.’s missing forests. What kinds of forests, they asked, are left? It was a question that Gorman and the roomful of experts and lawyers struggled to answer.

Out on the cutblock

A June downpour has just subsided, and a thin haze of mist hovers on the pavement as Michelle Connolly drives her silver Tacoma on the outskirts of Prince George. Four pink balloons tied with gold ribbon greet us at the edge of town. “Want to go to a birthday?” Connolly asks me, joking, before the pavement gives way to rough gravel.

Connolly checks the black iPad on the middle console. On it, the Tacoma becomes a blue, satellite-linked dot moving through a maze of logging roads. When the surface we’re on eventually turns smooth, it’s a sign to Connolly that she’s on the right track. “It’s newish,” she says. “We might find some active logging.”

Since their beginnings around a kitchen table in 2017, Connolly’s grassroots group, Conservation North, has been searching for the region’s last unlogged forests. Their job has grown more difficult over the years.

Three years ago, using public data from the provincial and federal governments, Conservation North created the first graphic illustration of the forest industry’s footprint in B.C. The map, titled “Seeing Red,” shows a province painted red with cutblocks. Flecks of green, unlogged forests peak around the edges.

“People were shocked,” Connolly says.

B.C. doesn’t specifically keep track of how many unlogged forests remain. But according to Dave Daust, a forester and a member of B.C.’s Old Growth Technical Advisory Panel, unlogged forests are growing exceedingly rare in some areas of the province.

According to the province’s definition, old growth loses its status as soon as a natural disturbance, like a pest outbreak or a wildfire, runs through it. But those ecosystems are still filled with similar soil and biodiversity benefits to old growth. Some species, like varieties of woodpeckers and insects, even thrive in those naturally disturbed areas.

Old growth and naturally disturbed places, sometimes called “primary” forests, are united by a critical distinction: they haven’t been impacted by industrial development, including logging.

“If we don't value primary forest, even if it’s been naturally disturbed recently, we're losing a bunch of our biodiversity,” Daust says.

Daust’s analysis of two heavily logged ecosystems in B.C. shows primary forests in short supply.

Of the areas still available for logging in the Quesnel timber supply area, for example, Daust’s research based on B.C.’s data sets indicates that 33 per cent of the moist, cold spruce-pine forests remain unlogged. Of that, only 12 per cent is productive enough to support the biggest trees.

Zeroing in on another example, in the North Island timber supply area, Daust says, 32 per cent of the very wet, maritime cedar-hemlock forests remain unlogged. Of that, only 13 per cent can support the biggest, most valuable trees.

Both the Quesnel and the North Island ecosystems have faced natural disasters like fires that mean most of the remaining unlogged forests are still too young to log. That means industry is vying for the last few percentages of unlogged, mature forests. Daust notes that other ecosystem types in those areas had more primary forests remaining.

Cam Brown, a forester and resource analyst for the consulting firm Forsite, says that by his estimate, around half or less of the timber harvesting areas across the province, including low- and high-productivity ecosystems, remain unlogged, but that some areas more targeted by logging have less.

When it comes to the more widely known category of old growth, Daust’s research with the province’s Old Growth Technical Advisory Panel paints an even more dire picture: many big-treed ecosystems have dropped below 10 per cent of what was there before, and some have less than one per cent.

That puts those primary forests in danger of ecosystem collapse, according to conservation science, which indicates that biodiversity is at “high risk” when less than 30 per cent of an ecosystem remains.

“Most of our ecosystems are at high risk,” says Karen Price, an ecologist and member of the province’s technical advisory panel with Daust. “We’re in a really bad state.”

A 2021 study predicted that ecosystem collapse in B.C.’s interior rainforest is imminent in the next nine to 18 years. The province’s own research shows almost 2,000 other species are at risk of disappearing.

In part, that’s because planted forests can be dead zones for biodiversity.

While planted forests vary, their major chords are the same: They’ve been clear cut and then plugged with baby trees — usually a few of the evergreen trees deemed most lucrative to grow. Their forest floor is void of living and decaying plants unlogged forests feature in scores. Research has found moose populations in the Prince George region are starving from a lack of nutrients that grow in unlogged, primary forests.

“There's nothing there for wildlife to eat. There's nothing there for humans to eat,” said Darlene Vegh, a Gitanyow Elder and expert in forest ecology.

“There's nothing there.”

From the passenger seat of Connolly’s Tacoma, my eyes acclimate to a conveyor belt of uniform, bright green trees passing by the window.

Besides the road’s noise factor, Connolly is watching for a change in colour — unlogged forests tend to announce themselves with a deep, bullfrog shade of green.

Summer’s long daylight is receding when we find it — the dark green facade and the jagged crown of a forest that’s never been industrially logged. Inside, it’s curiously bright and spacious; big patches between old trees are filled with young shrubs. Delicate fronds of lichen — a favourite, protein-rich snack for threatened caribou populations — cling to the trees.

“These places have a different feeling,” says Connolly. “You can see all the layers of life and their diversity.”

On the outskirts of the forest, a thin metal plate punched into a pine tree signals its uncertain future. It belongs to BC Timber Sales, the province’s logging arm.

A forest industry in crisis

B.C.’s forest industry is relying on this dwindling supply of unlogged forests.

“Most harvest right now is coming from previously unlogged forest,” says Brown.

There are a few reasons for this. First, much of B.C.’s planted forests are too young to log. In an email to The Tyee, the Ministry of Forests noted that “the vast majority of reforested areas, over 80 per cent, are less than four decades old and not suitable for harvesting yet.”

A recent analysis done by University of Northern British Columbia adjunct professor Jeff Werner found that 40 per cent of the trees in an area south of Prince George are 13 years old or younger. Forests in that region are considered “mature” at around 80 years old.

Primary forests’ trees boast superior wood quality over planted forests. In part, that’s because their wood often boasts tightly spaced rings from years of accumulated growth. Those rings translate to high-quality timber in log markets.

And planted forests tend to have lots of small-diameter trees. Countries like Germany and Sweden, which also base their forest industries on planted forests, require companies to tend to their logged stands, thinning them out over decades so that bigger trees can grow. In B.C., companies are freed from their responsibilities over their logged blocks after about a decade. This results in “a whole bunch of smaller trees that you probably have to wait longer to harvest,” Brown says.

B.C. companies do some second-growth logging on the coast, where Brown estimates about 20 per cent of the annual cut comes from already logged forests. That’s because coastal logging started earlier in B.C.’s colonial history; some of the second growth in these forests is around a century old.

In the province’s vast interior, where most of its logging happens, second-growth harvest is almost non-existent.

As replanted forests regrow, however, “more harvesting will take place in reforested areas,” the Ministry of Forests told The Tyee in its email.

For now, though, that leaves roughly 80 per cent of the coastal cut and almost 100 per cent of the interior cut focused exclusively on unlogged, natural forests.

Recent natural disasters like wildfires and bark beetle infestations have only made the situation worse. Wildfires in B.C. have burned a combined area the size of Taiwan over the last six years. The pine beetle killed off half the province’s pine trees over the last decade. Because B.C.’s forests have more pine trees than any other species, that die-off had a major impact. Not all pine trees died in the attacks, but the survivors were often cut anyway thanks to a policy push that raised the allowable annual cut to expedite logging in the affected areas.

These disasters hastened the inevitable consequences of overharvesting, says Gary Bull, a professor in the department of forest resources management at the University of British Columbia. Bull attended the U.S. trade commission’s hearing in Washington, D.C., as an expert witness.

“We would have got here eventually, but the mountain pine beetle fire discussion has now probably brought us forward about 20 years.”

So why do B.C.’s logging allowances still suggest companies have a lot of trees left to log? The allowable annual cut was 57 million cubic metres in 2023, but companies logged 42 per cent less than that.

In part, it’s because the calculations involved in the sustainable yield system ignore the value difference between planted, young forests and old ones that tend to have big trees and higher-quality wood, says Brown. They assume both kinds of forests are equally desirable to the logging industry.

Brown sees that as one of sustained yield’s major blind spots. “We’re really good in B.C. at focusing on volume,” he says. “We kind of suck at focusing on value.”

In an emailed statement, the Ministry of Forests said that its chief forester uses a tool called a “partition” to spread out logging levels to different species and ages of trees when determining the allowable annual cut. But those partitions are not always legally enforced. In the Mackenzie timber supply area, companies faced no consequences logging more than 2.5 times more timber than a partition allowed.

B.C.’s forest inventory is also notoriously full of holes. It relies on a complex patchwork of models to make an educated guess about its forests. But the models are often wrong. A recent timber analysis on the North Island, for example, found that B.C. had overestimated the amount of wood in its young forests by an amount that was “not quantifiable at this time.” In the absence of better information, the chief forester used the incorrect data anyway.

In an email, B.C.’s Ministry of Forests said the review had “considered” information around modelling uncertainties but that this information “showed very little impact to short-term harvest levels.”

B.C.’s most recent inventory review panel found that the amount of money the province spends on inventorying its forests is less than a 10th of what other North American jurisdictions with similarly complex forest industries spend.

“In B.C. forestry we have this black box,” says Erik Piikkila, a forest ecologist and former adviser in B.C.’s forest inventory branch. “We lift the lid sometimes and we look at it and go ‘Oh my God, what a mess’ and then slam the lid down.”

Starting in 2018, logging rates across the province began to nosedive, plummeting below B.C.’s predictions for what the industry could “sustainably” cut down. At least 15 mills closed their doors across the province, and the forestry sector lost 3,750 jobs last year alone.

B.C. has started to reduce companies’ logging allowances to adjust to the new reality, but it’s slow going — they get revisited roughly every 10 years. Meanwhile, those allowances, intended to act as a limit on logging, have begun to look more like an empty promise.

‘Improved policies’ — but more trees felled

This dramatic crash is exactly what B.C.’s sustained yield system was supposed to avoid.

According to its original designers, unlogged and old-growth forests were meant to disappear. They envisioned the forests like a crop of corn or wheat — the oldest trees would be cut first, allowing time for the younger ones to grow. A now ubiquitous term, “sustainability” was first coined to promote the project of turning forests into tree farms.

“The people and industries of the British Columbia Coast may rely upon a new forest crop quickly following the old,” the forestry company MacMillan Bloedel told its employees on Christmas cards sent out in the 1960s. The company’s owner, H.R. MacMillan, was the province’s first chief forester in the 1910s and set the groundwork for the sustained yield system to come.

By the 1990s, B.C.’s project to convert old growth had fallen out of vogue. The province introduced a new iteration of sustained yield that promised to curb the industry’s worst environmental ills. New regulations required companies to leave more trees around waterways and replant more native tree species. B.C. also added a slate of provincial parks and “special management areas” — such as old-growth management areas and areas to protect types of wildlife — to save critical ecosystems from logging.

But B.C.’s new parks often included places companies didn’t want to log anyway, and its management areas were notoriously adjustable — companies used loopholes to move them around when they got in the way of logging valuable trees, or to log within them.

Meanwhile, B.C. kept logging, cutting more trees in these 30 years of supposed improved management than it had in the preceding century. The industry reached its zenith in 2005, when companies logged enough to rebuild the CN Tower with wood every four hours.

For Connolly’s group, Conservation North, the solution, today, is clear: unlogged forests need to be taken off the table for good.

“It’s so far gone now,” says Connolly. “There’s no more time to be farting around with doing better logging, no matter how great it is, in the little patches.”

The sustained yield approach, Connolly says, will need to be turned on its head, meaning forestry harvests in forests that have already been logged instead of the unlogged forests that remain.

“There’s this idea that you’re wasting a forest if you cut it when it’s not big enough yet,” she says. In that vein of thinking, old growth is naturally the first to go, followed by the older second growth. But that long game bulldozes biodiversity, says Connolly. “From an ecological standpoint, obviously that's a massive disaster.”

Dual vision

Every year, the gap between B.C.’s logging allowances and what companies are actually able to harvest out on the cutblocks gets wider. Meanwhile, B.C.’s biggest logging companies ramped up their steady flight from the province, relocating their operations to the southern United States and Europe. Companies like Canfor, Interfor, Teal-Jones and West Fraser now have opened up mills throughout the pine forests of the southern United States. Trees grow faster there, and because most of the land is privately owned, companies aren’t required to pay logging fees to the government as they are in B.C.

“The money is walking with its feet to the southeast United States,” Gary Bull, the UBC forest resources professor, told the U.S. International Trade Commission during his testimony last fall. “It's not staying in Canada.”

James Gorman of West Fraser Timber, sitting nearby at a table flanked by lawyers, didn’t disagree. Over the last two decades, West Fraser has gone from having two-thirds of its business in B.C. to just under a quarter.

“I suspect there aren't many forest products companies in the United States that have invested as much as we have over the past several years in the United States,” Gorman said.

Despite the evidence presented to them about the state of B.C.’s forests, the commissioners seemed unconvinced. They noted that the province’s then chief forester, Diane Nicholls — who has since left the role to work for a multinational wood pellet firm — had recently commented that the province’s allowable cut levels in a few northern regions remained appropriate despite record-breaking wildfires.

“That’s pretty big, right?” commissioner Jason Kearns asked the room. “To have the chief forester in British Columbia say that she would be just disagreeing with you until at least 2022?”

A month later, the commission rejected Canada and B.C.’s bid to remove the import fee.

But that mild October day, as the meeting wound to a close, confusion around the state of B.C.’s forests hung like a haze over the room.

“I have a trip planned to British Columbia,” said Kearns as Gorman concluded his statements. “Kind of a bucket-list ski trip 30 miles south of Revelstoke. I look forward to seeing your forest then.”

“You'll be in caribou country,” Gorman said, likely unaware that southern mountain caribou residing there are on the verge of extinction. One herd is now a single female with no chance of having calves.

“If you see one,” said Gorman, “be careful.”