Behind the green curtain: despite the rhetoric, British Columbia's recent forestry reforms will not protect biodiversity, and herein lies a cautionary tale for advocates of incremental change: 1

• Published in: Alternatives journal (Waterloo) 1997-10, Vol.23 (4), p.16
• Main Author: M'Gonigle, R Michael
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Biodiversity; Environment; Environmental protection; Environmentalists; Forest management; Forest products; Forestry; Forests; International; Land use; Legislation; Logging; Old growth; Ordination; Organizations; Parks; Parks & recreation areas; Provincial parks; Sustainable development; Wildlife; Wildlife habitats
• ISSN: 1205-7398

There have been gains, particularly in the formal protection of many long - contentious wilderness areas. Overall, however, the programme has failed. And, in one important respect, the reforms have actually left the environmental movement to protect biodiversity worse off than before. Because the environmental movement accepted incremental reforms within the dominant paradigm of continued industrial forestry, rather than insisting on structural reforms to the whole model of production and regulation, the movement is now tangled within a model of forestry that is clearly unecological, and is disempowered as a force for piercing the curtain of green rhetoric. The problem here is obvious. The overall legislative package seeks to protect biodiversity but within the "sustained yield" paradigm that still assigns priority to maintaining timber production. Indeed, the official policy is the "liquidation" of old growth forests, and their "conversion" to managed, even - aged plantations of "normal forests". Imposed constraints are a constant irritant to a fibre - hungry forest industry that is able to exert significant political and economic pressures on government. Thus, when new parks are designated, the level of the allowable annual cut (AAC) is often not reduced to account for the resulting timber withdrawals in the parks but, at cabinet's insistence, is kept high to reflect the Crown's "socio - economic objectives."(f.19) Furthermore, a provision in the Code's Biodiversity Guidebook explicitly allows the biodiversity requirements to be relaxed where there will be a significant impact on the AAC.(f.20) The continuing crisis of biodiversity cannot be resolved within the existing models of economic development and bureaucratic regulation. Today, our over - built economic and political institutions are overwhelmingly dependent on linear systems of extraction, production, and disposal that have long been underwritten by the twin subsidies of environmental erosion and social inequity. Whether it is the large fisheries corporations plundering Canada's east and west coasts (and decimating the communities there), or the forestry multinationals clear - cutting all the forests in between, the lesson of the BC reform project is clear: biodiversity and corporation do not mix, and bureaucratic intervention has not protected biodiversity.