A proposed cutblock south of Castlegar has become a subject of contention and West Kootenay residents have a chance to weigh in.
BC Timber Sales (BCTS) Kootenay Business Area is planning to sell off three cutblocks in the Cai Creak area under timber sales license (TSL) TA2185.
Block 3 is the one Castlegar resident and professional biologist Matt Casselman is most concerned about.
Casselman moved to Castlegar in 2021, and wanted to know more about the forestry going on in the area, especially since the province’s Old Growth Technical Advisory Panel (TAP) had been in the news. Casselman was especially interested in finding local intact watersheds and areas that he would be able to explore on his own. He soon came across Cai Creek and BCTS’s plans to sell a TSL in the area.
“Cai Creek really stood out as an intact, bio-diverse, locally-important forest,” he says.
Casselman has been trying to raise awareness about BCTS’s plans and intact watersheds for the past three years, launching the Save Cai Creek website in December 2023 and collecting 450 signatures for a petition calling for the Legislative Assembly of BC to “immediately cease the advertising and planned sale of the TA2185-3 harvest plan by BC TImber Sales and defer all harvest within the Cai Creek watershed boundaries.”
With the Ministry of Forests currently accepting public comments regarding its forest operation map for the cutblock, Casselman is again encouraging West Kootenay residents to urge the province to reconsider logging in the area.
“Cai Creek should be protected. It is a biodiverse forest fill of old growth trees, and BC Timber Sale’s logging plans would irreversably disrupt this forest. I think it would be a big lost for our local ecology, the residents of Castlegar and all British Columbians.”
Comments are open until Wednesday, July 10 at 11:59 p.m.
The process now has increased importance for Cassselman as Bruce Ralston, BC Minister of Forests, has responded to his petition and his response indicates that the province has no intention of changing its plan.
Minister Ralston’s response
Katrine Conroy, MLA for Kootenay West, presented the petition in the legislature on Monday, May 13 and it was forwarded to the minister, who responded on Monday, June 17.
Conroy told Castlegar News that the minster responding at all is good, since he doesn’t respond to every petition.
In his response, Ralston writes that “although the Cai Creek watershed contains an Old Growth Managemenet Area (OGMA)” and areas identified by the TAP as ancient, remnant old growth or big-treed, the cutblock BCTS has proposed does not contain any OGMA or TAP old growth areas.
But Casselman points out that his petition said nothing about old growth, except that it happens to be included in the name of the TAP.
Casselman’s argument is that the Old Growth Tap identified the Cai Creek watershed as 70 to 80 per cent intact, and that for that reason, the area should be protected.
While Ralston says in his response that “sustainable forest management that supports ecosystem health and intact watersheds is a high priority for BC Timber Sales and the rest of the Ministry of Forests,” the only other part of the letter mentioning the word “watershed” are his acknowledgement that the cutblock is in the Cai Creek watershed (see quote above) and reassurance that “qualified professionals in forest hydrology, biology, and geoscience have conducted a preliminary watershed assessment” as well as several other assessments “in accordance with the approved Forest Stewarship Plan.”
The minister had not responded to a request for comment on this at press time.
Old Growth TAP and Intact watersheds
The recommendations from the Old Growth Tap came about as the result of a larger attempt by the provincial government to establish an old growth strategy.
In 2019, the provincial government appointed a two-person panel as part of an Old Growth Strategic Review process that involved engaging the public on old growth. On April 30, 2020, Garry Merkel – a professional forester, natural resource expert and member of the Tahltan Nation – and Al Gorley – also a professional forester and former chair of the Forest Practices Board – submitted their final report, A New Future for Old Forests: A Strategic Review of How British Columbia Manages for Old Forests within Its Anciet Ecosystems.
The report contained 14 recommendations. The sixth recommendation read, “Until a new strategy is implemented, defer development in old forests where ecosystems are at very high and near-term risk of irreversible biodiversity loss.” To that end, the OGTAP was asked to “provide recommendations and advice on priority areas for development of deferrals.”
The resulting report, Priority Defferals: An Ecological Approach included its own set of recommendations. One of them was to defer harvest in the most intact watersheds for each region and ecosystem.
The report also included a map showing BC’s intact watershed: “We mapped watersheds with more than 70%, 80% and 90% of the forested landbase intact (i.e., forest harvesting and roads make up less than 10%, 20% or 30% of a [sic] the forested landbase in the watershed).”
All of the Old Growth TAP’s maps are available as layers in iMap BC, which clearly shows that the area proposed for development falls within a 70 to 80 per cent intact watershed.
The bigger picture
As one expert sees it, the province’s decision to log in the Cai Creek watershed is ultimately part of a bigger picture problem.
Dr. Rachel Holt was a member of the Old Growth TAP and helped author the Priority Deferrals report. She is the principal at Veridian Ecological Consulting and lives in Nelson B.C.
She says that the province isn’t meeting the targets set for old growth protection set out in the Kootenay-Boundary Higher Level Plan Order, and that even if it was, they were set too low to begin with.
“The provincial government wrote its own report in 2018 that said of the old growth management areas out there, only 18 percent of them are actually old growth. So they have set aside these areas that are supposed to be old growth management areas, but in order to reduce the timber supply impact, they didn’t put the lines around old growth.”
The 2020 strategic review report recommended not only ensuring that existing targets were being met, but updating the existing targets.
“If we were meeting all the broader landscape-level targets then I might have less concern about that block,” says Holt, “but because in general we are not doing that, and in general the dry Interior Cedar Hemlock [zone], which is the zone that block is in, has very little old growth and little old growth structure remaining on the land base, then I'm concerned.”
Lieutenant Dan and other giants
The block in question also happens to be home to Lieutenant Dan, the largest ponderosa pine in B.C. – but the giant is in no danger of being logged.
BCTS has designated it as special tree and will reserve not only Lieutenant Dan, but some of the area around it.
But as Casselman will tell you, “Lieutenant Dan is not the only giant ponderosa pine in Cai Creek.”
Casselman measured several trees in the area and submitted them to the UBC Faculty of Forestry BC BigTree Website, where they made it onto the top 30 list.
Besides Lieutenant Dan, there are four ponderosa pines in the Cai Creek area that have made the list, taking the number 22, 25, 28 and 29 spots for their species. The area is also home to two western white pines that sit at numbers 8 and 9 on their list.
Casselman’ favourite of the ponderosa pines is a tree he calls Jenny, in keeping with the Forest Gump theme.
While Minister Ralston’s reassures Casselman that “the harvest plan and prescription that are being developed will reserve older large-diameter trees from cutting,” Casselman is concerned that Jenny seems to be in the way of a planned logging road.
The minister of forests’s letter did not specify the minimum diameter for trees that are to be kept, and he had not responded to a request for comment at press time.
Conroy, who is a former minister of forests and looked into the area after being approached by Casselman, says that all of the older trees within the cut block have actually been reserved from harvest.
“Because all of the trees purposed for harvest in that area, they grew after the fire in Cai Creek in 1934.”
But Holt points out that leaving the large-diameter trees will not preserve the ecology of the area.
“That particular block has a lot of old forest attributes in it, and the harvesting prescription says that they’re going to leave some of those big trees, unless they’re in the way of the road, but of course, it fails to deal really with the ecological… You can’t just log around a big tree and you don’t keep the forest, right?”