One constant in the 20 years that officials have been dealing with the mountain pine beetle is how unerringly pessimistic and alarming they've been in their predictions.
There aren't many people who can be accused of optimism since the insects burst out of Tweedsmuir Provincial Park in the northwest and started killing every pine tree in sight.
Consider former forests minister Dave Zirnhelt's appraisal more than 15 years ago. "You can't spend enough money; you can't log enough to fix the problem," he said. "It exceeds the capacity of anybody -- industry, government, communities -- to respond.... You can't get ahead of the beetles when winter doesn't knock them back.... There is no way to stop the bugs."
Despite a lot of talk about beetle "action plans" since then, that grim assessment seems to be holding. The crisis Zirnhelt was talking about abated somewhat on its own. But the beetles returned with a vengeance a few years later and really started running amok around 1999. Any actions taken by governments since then have been attempts to mitigate the effects of the disaster, rather than bring it to an end.
The latest full assessment from the Ministry of Forests, released last week, continues the tradition of pessimism.
It's a carefully worded scientific appraisal of a natural disaster, cautious and matter of fact. But just the straightforward outline of the facts is enough to give you chills.
There are now 13 million hectares of grey and red dead pine, up from four million four years ago. That's an area three times the size of Vancouver Island. The chart showing the volume of timber killed (the equivalent of more than 500 million telephone poles) over the past few years goes up at a 45-degree angle.
And it's projected to keep going up at that rate for another five years. It's the equivalent of 15 years of harvesting in the Interior.
An estimated 40 per cent of the pine forest in B.C. is now dead. The latest projection is that 78 per cent of that forest will be dead before the beetle kill levels out.
It's a number that's difficult to fully comprehend. It represents almost one-quarter of the entire provincial timber base, all species included.
What do you do with that massive amount of wood? Log like crazy is the answer for the moment. The most valuable use of the wood is as saw logs, but the dead trees only have a shelf life of a few years before their quality starts declining. So the annual cut has been hiked dramatically over the past few years to get as much value as possible out of the dead forest.
But now an economic crunch is getting in the way of that effort. The high Canadian dollar, the U.S. housing slump and the softwood lumber deal limit the markets for that timber glut.
So now the only benefit of the beetle epidemic -- a short-term boom -- is fading.
The fallback position is to devise a new market for that wood. The government is putting a lot of faith in the bioenergy sphere, hoping the timber can be processed and burned to create electrical energy. That's a pretty ignominious retreat from the idea of the "highest and best use" of the wood.
There are a lot of sophisticated new bioenergy technologies being considered. But still, after listening to talk about value-added manufacturing for years, logging trees to burn them is like going back to the Stone Age.
And even that concept has problems. Whatever investment capital the industry had went into sawmills. The Interior forest industry would have to completely retool to get into the bioenergy field, which takes major capital.
There are also some remarkable projections about what the forest will look like a generation from now. The allowable cut will drop to almost half what it is now, of course.
And the remaining timber will be of a completely different calibre. Almost half of the pine forest will be less than 50 years of age. That could spell a prolonged gap between the amount B.C. might want to harvest and the amount actually mature enough to be of any commercial value.
There are millions of federal and provincial dollars flowing into the Interior to help figure a way out of this mess. They're planting seedlings, they're figuring out new uses, they're calculating different salvage opportunities.
But the main thing they are doing is concentrating on diversification. Agriculture, mining, community projects, retraining efforts all have one thing in common. They're planning for an Interior economy that will not-so-gradually start to look a lot different than it does now over the next few years.The Times Colonist
