Ingmar Lee

So crystal clear to anyone who has worked much in clearcuts, -they're all massive incinerators in waiting. The residual post-logging slash fuel loading is enormous. Logging slash takes decades to rot to the point where it lies flat on the ground, prior to which it's like a fluffy, aerated layer spread over the ground, at times as much as 6 ft deep, especilly on the coast, where the slash layer can be monumental. Everything in the clearcut dries out rapidly towards summer and the wind flows and the sun beats down. The "edge forest" surrounding the clearcut also dessicates from wind and sun egress and the loss of adjacent canopy shade. Additionally, fringe blowndown trees at the cutblock edge lean into the surrounding forest, oftentimes uprooted and hung up and partially standing against he surrounding trees, where they die. Once a fire starts in a clearcut it expands quickly and begins to create an in-sucking wind vortex. Back in the 1980's when industrial "foresters" used to practice "broadcast burning," -to remove slash to facilitate "restocking," they were well aware of this fire in-sucking vortex phenomenon, and burns were conducted according to carefully calculated weather and humidity conditions. When the fires were set along a cut block perimeter by kerosene/gasoline "drip torching," either by hand or by helicopters laden with ping pong balls full of th fuel mix, if everything went right the fire would burn everything and get sucked towards the centre of the cutblock, -and then go out. Of course, many a time things didn't go right, and the fire would escape ito the surrounding forest. Once a clearcut initiatd fire, either deliberately or naturally set, escapes the cutblock into the surrounding dessicated edge forest, it quickly ladders up the branches and gets into the canopy, with all the green, oils-laden needles, and from there, it gallops voraciously across the landscape..

As a professional BC treeplanter and silviculture worker for 21 years, I've planted more than a million trees myself, and supervised the planting of ten million more. I've also spaced, pruned, brushed, weeded and vexared in the post-clearcut plantations. Anyone who has looked out the window of an airplane while flying across British Columbia sees a wilderness that looks like it's been hit by a shotgun blast, -a vast patchwork of industrial corporate clearcutting that extends to every horizon. Treeplanters crawl through every inch of those clearcuts and see directly for themselves the incredible devastations of industrial "forestry." And each year, following the snow as it recedes across the province, they start out on the coast in January, and end up in Fort Nelson by June, planting trees in clearcuts all the way. Nobody gets to see the actual state of BC's forests quite like treeplanters do. British Columbia's UBC-educated foresters to a man, -and an occasional woman- get out of school where they are taught how to scientifically prove that black is white, and then go straight to work for logging corporations. Their job, as far as I can tell, is to figure out which remaining stands of timber on the landscape are the most valuable, and then how to rip them out as fast and cheap as possible. And having ripped it out, to oversee the spread of industrially cloned seedlings across the clearcut before the brush closes over the ground. The faster the plantation grows, the sooner it's "taken off the books," and is then of no further responsibility to them. Plantation growth speeds are enhanced by broadcasting chemical fertilizers over the ground, or by spewing "growth retardants" like glyphosate and 2-4D to kill off the deciduous brush cover. British Columbia's UBC-educated "Registered Forest Professionals," (in my time they were known as "Registered Professional Foresters," -which apparently wasn't sophisticated-sounding enough) have overseen the systematic extermination of virtually every single stand of primaeval forest on Vancouver Island, -and without a peep of complaint. I will never forget the comment of an Interfor RPF who was responding to an incredulous treeplanter on the side of Kyuquot's Mount Paxton, (which had been cleared of every single tree right from the beach, to the summit and all the way down the other side) who had asked "Doesn't this seem rather excessive??!" The reply: "Not at all, -it looks more alpine that way." It took about 125 years to rip out the first half of Vancouver Island's once-magnificent primaeval forest. And it's taken about 25 years to rip out the rest, all with the scientifically precision "management" of these Forest Professionals. And furthermore, with the industry slashing its way through the post-primaeval subsequent-growth stands at a staggering rate, - the 150 year-old forest is all gone, and so on down the age profile, 100 yr-old stands, 80 yr-old, 60, 40, all gone, to where it is common to see logging trucks on Vancouver Island highways loaded with 30 year old "pecker poles." Even more tragically, I would hazard that most of the islands subsequent-growth logs are being exported in the round. For BC RFP's, "fibre-per-year-per-hectare" appears to be what their job is all about, and with this in mind, we are headed for the day when the "fibre" gets stripped off the land annually by lawn-mower. It is obvious to my scientifically-illiterate mind, that with the hot climate-change-addled sun beating down onto the dessicated clearcuts, that the volatility of these areas was significantly worse than in the cool stands of surrounding forest. And the un-impeded winds blowing over these clearcut areas, the surrounding "edge forest" also gets dried out. And when fire does start in the clearcuts, it quickly blows into the edge forest, ladders up through the branches and immediately becomes a raging crown fire, racing across the oil-rich foliage of the coniferous canopy. In this screed, I have referred to BC logging areas as "cleacuts." No doubt, some RFP factotums will take umbrage with this referrence. They will say that "we don't clearcut anymore." Instead, just as Big-Oil now prefers "Oil Sands" to historic terminology "Tar Sands," they will say they practice "Variable Retention" -whereby a single stem is left per hectare, or perhaps a clump of marginal timber in a road bight, -which can always be "salvage logged" later after it all blows down in the next windstorm. Recently, we've seen the BC Minister of Logging, Doug Donaldson, in the context of grinding up BC's forest "fibre" into bio-fuels, refer to BC's forests as "feedstock." I expect this is the ultimate goal of the BC "Forest Industrial Complex," -fibre-per-year-per-hectare for the production of biofuel. Certainly that venture will be Greenwashed to argue that it's non-fossil fuel-based "alternative energy" by the industrial corporate cabal and all its many lackeys..

It should be noted that the image provided with Briony Penn's excellent article is of neither an Aframax or Panamax tanker as discussed, but rather it is the "Sound Reliance," -an American ATB (Articulated Tug/Barge) tanker, which delivers oil products back and forth between the Kinder Morgan, Chevron and Suncor spigots, and Washington State Refineries. The "Sound Reliance" is amongst the very largest of the ATB tanker fleet which plies between Puget Sound and the Salish Sea. ATB Tankers have a gruesome track record of disasters along the BC Coast, including the wreck of the ATB "Nathan E Stewart" near Bella Bella and the very near wreck of the ATB "Jake Shearer." My predication is that the most likely, most imminent, most inevitable next tanker wreck along the BC Coast will be another one of these American ATB tankers. Here's a picture of the "Sound Reliance" in Burrard Inlet. Cheers, Ingmar