How BC’s Mountain Pine Beetle epidemic is setting the tone for things to comeThe Interior of BC isn’t green these days, it’s a sea of red, a carpet of dead and dying trees.
A tiny bug, the size of a grain of rice, is changing the face of our forests—and the economy of the Interior along with it. The Mountain Pine Beetle (MPB), Dendroctonus ponderosae if you want to get Latin about it, is by no means a stranger to the woods of western North America.
Fossil records of the beetles found in bogs go as far back as 30,000 years ago. Nonetheless, they’ve emerged from the swamps of time to become what is being termed the largest insect epidemic in North American history.
Sadly, good ol’ humankind is partly to blame. Our greenhouse gases, also credited with melting the polar icecaps and other nasty effects, are helping change the planet’s climate, leading to global warming. Because of global warming, beetle mortality rates have plummeted; more of their eggs are surviving beneath the bark of trees during milder winter seasons.
Also to blame is our long history of fire suppression and our tendency to over-encourage the growth of pine forests—the province’s most commercially harvested tree species. Safe from fire, there is now more mature pine in BC than ever before, which translates into more fodder and nesting sites for the pine beetles, which need lodgepole pine to continue their life cycle. This is why populations have surged to such massive numbers, far out of reach of any serious human intervention.
The ravages of the epidemic have so far been limited within the borders of our fair province, renowned for its evergreen woods the world over. By 2004, the beetles had tainted seven million hectares of those forests, all in a time-span of about ten years.
The economic consequences of their penchant for pine are rather dire: the provincial government estimates that the mountain pine beetle infestation will have critical economic implications for 30 communities around the province, which will in turn determine how 25,000 families will go about earning their wages in the future. As the pine forests slowly die off in the next ten to 15 years, one wonders as to what will happen to the people who depend on them.
It is here that an interesting pattern begins to emerge. Faced with a natural disaster that will take a decade to really make itself felt, the people in BC have been given the same amount of time to
prepare themselves. It’s a little like warning farmers in Saskatchewan about an impending drought, and then giving them ten years advance notice. A natural disaster in slow motion, the MPB epidemic raises the following two questions: what are we doing to prevent a social and economic depression, and will it be enough?
Quesnel: tomorrow’s ghost-town?
Nate Bello is principal of an alternate school, family man and mayor of Quesnel, BC, arguably one of the hardest-hit towns in the province. He’s known for being straight-shooting and tenacious, which helps explain why he’s won the last four consecutive mayoral elections. He credits his political success to his door-to-door campaign strategy: he generally hits 80 per cent of the homes, in a city with a population of 10,000 people, on foot. Bello is currently gearing up for yet another election, and says the mountain pine beetle epidemic will easily be the biggest challenge for whoever wins the post.
“We’re the worst hit,” he says simply. “Quesnel is the worst hit community, because we are so dependent on the forest industry.”
Here’s why: despite its tiny population, Quesnel has six sawmills, two pulp mills and one medium-density fiberboard (MDF) plant. The sawmills alone provide 1,800 direct jobs, and Bello estimates 7,200 people would be directly affected if the mills went belly up. The gravity of his city’s situation is clear: “We’re noted as the most concentrated area for wood processing in North America,” he says grimly.
Outside his city’s plight, Bello visualises the problem in terms of the bigger picture. He knows the scenario Quesnel is facing is just one of many playing out in other cities and towns, such as Burns Lake, Vanderhoof, Williams Lake and 100 Mile House.
Lodgepole pine constitutes about 70 per cent of the forest around Quesnel. It’s also the dominant species in the rest of these communities, which, taken together, form what is called the province’s ‘pine belt.’ Practically all of it is classified as dead or dying. To say people are concerned is an understatement.
Ironically, Quesnel and other cities are enjoying something of a boom at the moment, made possible by a decision issued by the BC’s Chief Forestor, who is allowing the mills across the Cariboo-Chilcotin and Omineca regions to cut a much higher number of trees than normally permitted under the Ministry of Forest’s Annual Allowable Cut (AAC). While the pre-epidemic AAC for the Quesnel district stood at 2.2 million cubic metres of wood, these days it sits at over five million. To cope with the huge swell of wood coming into their log-yards, many sawmills have hired extra shifts and added state-of-the-art upgrades to their operations. Both the government and the logging industry are hoping to harvest as many of the dying trees as they can.
They only have a short window of opportunity to do so. After a tree is first successfully attacked and penetrated by beetles, the mills have around five years to process lumber from the tree. If they don’t get to the tree during this time, it’s game over for cutting anything useful from the logs, which become too dry and cracked to be of any good.
Like numerous other communities dotting the Interior, Quesnel is going full steam in an attempt to salvage as many trees as possible.
“Right now things are humming along,” explains Bello, adding that as a result real estate is up in his city as well. “It’s a pretty positive climate right now.”
But the prosperity is far from permanent. In fact, it’s more like a last-ditch bonanza before Quesnel falls on hard economic times. In the next five to ten years, the AAC will have to drop to less than half of the old level in order to ensure a sustainable harvest of trees for future generations. After all, the province’s woodlands don’t grow as fast as they are being cut; in order to compensate for the increased harvest going on right now, activity in the future will have to be severely curtailed. In Quesnel, for example, it is forecasted that in ten years the mills will only be allowed to handle about one million cubic metres per year. The consequence of such a sharp drop in a city like Quesnel spells sure economic disaster.
Alarmed by what he sees as a threat to the future of Quesnel and the Interior of the province in general, Bello has been an instrumental political figure, clamouring for the attention of officials at both the federal and provincial levels. He secured the sympathy of the Campbell government during a symposium on the problem in November 2003, by stressing the unprecedented threat of the MPB on rural communities, as well as the need for concerted leadership and action to address the issue. Those efforts, added to the efforts of other community leaders, were rewarded with a $100 million grant from the federal government, along with an additional $101 million from the provincial government.
The money is to be used in a number of different ways, ranging from silviculture restoration and fuel management to research and economic development/diversification. A great deal of the money will be used by business and community leaders in order to plan what to do next.
Grateful, Bello nonetheless sees the federal and provincial aid as a drop in the bucket compared to what the Interior will need if it’s going to make it through the crippling years ahead.
“ We’re looking for over a billion dollars to come in [to the province] to support us as we restructure our economy” he says. “It’s crucial.”