By Plain Rhetoric

Climate change? I thought it was just a hoax

May 29, 2018 | 5:00 AM

Last summer was a devastating year for the Cariboo, with nearly 20 wildfires merging into one and creating a firestorm on the Cariboo Plateau that had never been experienced in anyone’s lifetime. In BC, a total of 1.2 million hectares burnt last summer but the majority of that destruction, nearly 1 million hectares, was concentrated in the Cariboo region.

According to the Ministry of Forests, nearly one quarter of Quesnel’s entire timber supply was destroyed in the summer of 2017. This on top of the previous devastation caused by the Mountain Pine beetle and before the oncoming Fir Beetle epidemic peaks and sweeps through the forest.

Quesnel’s Mayor, Bob Simpson summed it up by explaining that there isn’t a tree species that is not under stress as a result of increasing “maladaptation to the current climate.” A rather uncomfortable and self-conscious attempt to not use the words climate change in a region where many still refuse to accept or acknowledge the existence or impact of changes to our climate.

Yet changes there are and the outcomes are no longer an esoteric theory to be debated amongst academics and environmentalists living in major metropolitan centres.

BC’s Minister of Forests, Doug Donaldson, confirms that the region may not be able to support the allowable cut obligations to forest companies. From a decade of relatively inexpensive wood fibre, courtesy of the pine beetle, to losing one-quarter of the wood supply in one summer of wildfires, Minister Donaldson recognizes we have a major problem.

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We are running out of forest at an unprecedented rate which means we are also running out of jobs and investment our communities so desperately need. The summer of 2018 is already starting to look like a clone of last summer. Are we going to lose another 25 per cent of our economic life-blood?

If you, a family member or close friend haven’t already lost your forestry-related job then you are likely on the edge of unemployment in this sector and need to get over the absurdities of denial, finger pointing and name calling and start working on solutions. If you don’t do something and do it now, climate change will be taking away jobs in the woods. And I’m not talking about five or 10 years from now as it’s already underway and the rate is accelerating.

Imagine the consequences of another summer like last year, where an additional 25 per cent of the resource is destroyed. Just two summers and the combined destruction would equal 50 per cent of the region’s total forest.

In the Quesnel area, the fires were so intense that they even burned the dirt and destroyed the soil the forest once lived off. In many places, the soil can’t support anything right now, so even reforestation will be decades in the making.

Mayor Simpson and others are looking at solutions that include using value-added manufacturing as a means to get more dollars and therefore more jobs and investment out of less forest. They are also working on proposals to revamp our current forest practices and management with the goal of making changes that will lead to a more resilient forest.

So what are we doing to prepare for the inevitable here in Kamloops? Are we working on even a short-term plan for keeping our forestry sector alive and thriving? And deflecting the question by talking about mining, the pipeline or how business unfriendly Kamloops supposedly is, or how climate change is not real, is not the answer. You are simply stalling and by doing so, only speeding up the process of job losses in the woods or mills.

Leadership needs to replace our current practice of inaction and political platitudes. Those impacted need to stop complaining, blaming tree huggers or denying that anything is wrong. Everyone needs to accept there’s a new reality and start contributing to the solution.

There are answers and solutions but as I read the comment sections on articles and opinion pieces on the subject, I see so many instances of people wasting time by wanting to argue the cause, call people names or worse yet, not acknowledge the problem. How many layoffs do you accept because of forest fires, too harsh a winter, too hot a summer, spring flooding or bug killed trees before you accept that something is going on here that just isn’t normal?

Do nothing and the tombstone of our local economy and your job will likely read…”Climate change? I thought it was just a hoax.”