Three hour talk yesterday with Rob Scagel, a brilliant forestry scientist in B.C. Apparently we have 15 million hectares of dead and dying timber lands in our province - a full one billion cubic meters – the cutting and replanting of which would pay for itself if we sold the wood for biomass (green) energy. India wants it. Are we taking that opportunity? No, the trees are rotting where they stand, turning into tinder, kindling waiting only for the match. And the beetles that killed the trees lie two inches thick on wilderness lakes, ready to advance on what’s left of the forest.
Why no mitigation? Why no action? The dead hand of conservation. No politician who wants to keep his job will touch B.C. forest policy – the political fallout would end his career. Who would turn out people on the streets? Representatives from America’s greatest foundations – who spent, in the last 10 years over $100,000,000 to subvert our natural resource policies. Which they have done with a series of state-of-the-art PR campaigns.
Read Vivian Kraus at http://fairquestions.typepad.com/fishfarmfuss/ for a forensic accounting of where just some of the money originated, who spent it and how. Trust me for just 15 seconds when I tell you that the science used to make this billion-dollar fortress, no-touch conservation decision is crap. Then ask: who suffers? I’ll tell you who suffers. The working poor. The rural poor. All of us who pay higher prices and lose the stumpage fees from the sale of the wood, which by the way, used to fund our health care. Who benefits? Ivy League foundation officers and their paid apparatchiks. And when our forest, our greatest resource, the resource that built this province into the gleaming triumph it is, the forest that rebuilt Europe after WW2, dies a firey death, they’ll turn away satisfied, go back to Nantucket and boil lobsters at a beach party, so they can preen in front of their friends and neighbours.
Thanks Heinz. Thanks Rockefeller. Thanks Hewlett Packard. Thanks Pew. Aren’t we poor ignorant colonials lucky to have you subverting our sovereignty? Spiral our economy into deflation. We’ll be so much happier as simple peasants. Who needs up-to-date cancer treatment but you, of course?
