It’s happening. Big trees are falling in Foster Creek, and endangered mountain caribou are losing even more habitat and connectivity. Satellite images received by Wildsight conservation specialist Eddie Petryshen show logging underway in mapped at-risk old-growth forest.
You can still help protect what’s left. Add your name here to tell BC Timber Sales (BCTS) and key decision makers in the incoming government to stop logging BC’s most at-risk forests. Loggers will soon move onto cutting the ancient forest contained within block FOS002B.
Midway between Revelstoke and Valemount, where the Monashees meet the Kinbasket Reservoir, the world’s rarest Inland Temperate Rainforest stretches into the Foster Arm Protected Area. When our team walked these forests in July, we passed under cedars so large it took several people to encircle them. Many of these trees are several times older than Confederation.
BCTS, a provincial agency, auctioned off the old growth this summer, and it’s being cut as you read this.
The three cutblocks cover 120 hectares of old and ancient forest. They sit within one of the region’s largest remaining intact patches of low-elevation old growth, which is habitat for the Columbia North caribou herd: the southernmost viable herd of deep-snow caribou on Earth. Eight herds have already disappeared from the Columbia and Rocky Mountains in recent decades, largely because old-growth logging destroyed their habitat. Caribou are tightly woven into this ecosystem, and losing them would signal its collapse. People depend on these forests too, for carbon storage, protection from wildfire and climate change, tourism and industry.
This logging also means new and reactivated roads through high-value caribou habitat. Caribou abundance is predicted to drop 42 per cent for every 1 per cent increase in forestry roads.
A broken promise
The province’s own technical advisory panel recommended 100 of the 120 hectares for immediate deferral. That was part of BC’s commitment to pause logging in its most at-risk old growth. BCTS confirmed to Wildsight that the blocks were field verified as old-growth deferral polygons. After our inquiry, though, BCTS removed the deferrals from its database.
We’re calling on the new government to halt the logging and do what the NDP government didn’t: protect all remaining at-risk old growth. The best science consistently shows that BC’s inland temperate rainforest is imperilled and at a tipping point.
Say no — today
The minister of forests and BCTS can still save what’s left. Tell them to halt the Foster Creek cutblocks and permanently protect the Inland Temperate Rainforest, as their own government’s experts recommended.