Media Clipping — February 8, 2002, Clipper News

Sierra Club calls for independent review of Bowater logging

By Mark Roberts

MUNICIPALITY - Sierra Club International will become involved in the Bowater Mersey Paper Company clearcut dispute in the Municipality of Chester if the company doesn't change its policies, promised Sierra Club of Canada executive director Elizabeth May at a February 4 press conference in Chester.

May said Bowater is an international company, alluding threateningly to the company's customer base. She added the organization is throwing its considerable resources behind what was once a local campaign to stop clearcutting in the Kaiser brook area north of Chester off Highway 14.

Bowater has stopped logging in the area but will begin again in June.

The press conference was hosted by Chester municipality residents Brad Armstrong and Martin (Rudy) Haase, the principal organizers of what was once a small protest. The media focused event included a speech by Ron Colman, the head of Halifax-based GPI Atlantic, an organization that uses scientific and economic data to promote including the cost of environmental degradation in the economy or price of goods.

Vastly simplified, this increasingly popular, but not yet mainstream, approach would see current taxes replaced with environmental taxes on products that create a future cost, like pollution or resource depletion.

The free market would respond through competition to reduce prices by using environmentally friendly business practices.

May said a scientific advisory panel should be convened to independently assess the region. Both Bowater and the Sierra Club would appoint members to the panel.

Bowater has asked the provincial government to review company harvesting operations in the area. May said government is too pro-business to provide an independent assessment. "Don't set the bar so low." Armstrong agreed, saying the provincial government approved an aquaculture farm in Northwest Cove against the wishes of nearly every resident in the Aspotogan Peninsula community.

The Sierra Club previously used protests and the organization's ability to reach customers on a global basis to force Corner Brook Pulp and Paper in Newfoundland to stop clearcutting the province's "Boreal forest." A scientific panel resulted.

May said the Acadian forest ecosystem will soon be gone forever.

The logging industry, she said, is practising "species conversion" in creating pulpwood forests out of clearcuts. "That's been the goal of industry in this province for a long time and unfortunately it's taking the heart out of our forest." She added the region in question is essential to the East River watershed.

She said Bowater's reference to their ISO 14001 international environmental standard is misleading, in that it is systematic and as much based on productivity as the environment.

The Sierra Club wants the 3,000 acres protected, or, at the least, selectively cut.

Armstrong agreed. "We do not have a pocket wilderness in Lunenburg County. This would be a good opportunity to establish one."

He criticized the government's new logging regulations by saying companies can apply to cut down "legacy trees" in buffer strips around waterways and that old growth forests still aren't protected.

"These are the last remnants of old growth forest in Nova Scotia. Once they are gone, they're gone forever." He promised the protests would start again if their demands aren't met.

Colman said GPI Atlantic studies use provincial government data from the Department of Natural Resources' last six forest inventories, starting in 1958, when 25 per cent of the province's forests were covered by trees more than 80 years old and nine per cent were more than 100 years old.

Today, he said, 0.9 per cent are 80 to 90 years old and 0.15 per cent are more than 100 years old. May, Armstrong and others said there are many examples of 100 year old trees in the Kaiser area and, in fact, some trees over two centuries old have been found. Video footage from the area was shown at the press conference.

Colman said he, too, is alarmed over the effects of clearcutting on the province's animal and plant population, Nova Scotia's biodiversity. He spent a lot of time, however, putting his interpretation of the effects of clearcutting in the same terms industry and traditional economists use. He said he wants to do this to demonstrate why Nova Scotians have the right to tell Bowater what to do on their own land.

The forest is losing value, he said. Older trees, for example, he said, create higher value timber. "Our forests could be fetching much higher prices." He said the clearcut rate has doubled in the past 20 years and the area clearcut has doubled in the past 10.

Recreation, tourism - "Brook trout is a shade dependent species." - and the cost of degrading watershed areas are also economic factors, he said.

Eventually, he said, the world will do something about global warming. He expects "carbon sinks" will be considered in the pollution equation and that old growth forests store great amounts of carbon.

This could mean, he said, Canada won't be affected as much economically as many countries if the rest of the country's forested carbon sinks remain standing.

Selective harvesting, he added, is "ecologically appropriate," and provides long term, year-round employment instead of two or three machine-based jobs every 60 years.

"There will be zero employment in that area for the next 60 years. Clearcutting is not a sustainable method of harvesting."

Copyright © 2002, Clipper News