BC Timber Sales (BCTS) is finalizing harvest plans for 120 hectares of ancient and old-growth inland rainforest in caribou habitat after their deferral status was simply deleted from the province’s database.
Right now, you can help protect Foster Creek by asking BC Timber Sales and key government decision makers to stop imminent logging plans in some of our province's most at risk forests in the Foster Arm.
About halfway between the communities of Revelstoke and Valemount lies Mica Creek, where the Monashee Mountains crash into the Kinbasket Reservoir. This is close to the northernmost point on the Columbia River before it was dammed, where the world’s rarest inland temperate rainforest stretches into the Foster Arm Protected Area. Today it’s a place so remote you can only reach it by boat, with trees many times older than Canadian confederation. When our team crossed the water and walked these forests this past July, we moved beneath Cedars so large, it took several people to encircle.
Under the management of the British Columbia provincial government, BC Timber Sales (BCTS) has now auctioned off much of the adjacent old-growth to logging companies, threatening to sever that habitat.
The three cutblocks, 120 hectares of old and ancient forest, are directly adjacent to the Foster Arm Protected Area. They sit within one of the largest intact patches of low-elevation old-growth that remains in the region. It’s habitat for the Columbia North caribou herd: the southernmost viable herd of Deep-snow Caribou left on Earth. Over the past few decades, we have watched eight herds disappear from the Columbia and Rocky Mountains, due in large part to habitat loss from old-growth logging. If these forests fall, the loss reaches far beyond the trees themselves. Caribou are highly integrated with the native ecosystem; if these animals vanish it will signal the beginning of ecological collapse. We depend on these forests for carbon storage, wildfire and climate protection, as well as tourism and industry. The forest’s health connects us all.
Logging this area would potentially reactivate up to 30 kilometres of overgrown road and push nearly five kilometres of new road through high-value Caribou habitat, and the science on what that means is clear: Caribou abundance is predicted to decline by 42 per cent for every 1 per cent increase in forestry roads in their habitat.
A broken promise
It shouldn’t be happening. One hundred of the 120 hectares slated to be logged were recommended for immediate deferral by the province's own technical advisory panel as part of BC's commitment to press pause on logging its most at-risk old growth. BCTS, a government agency inside the Ministry of Forests, confirmed to Wildsight that these blocks were field-verified as old-growth deferral polygons. But after our inquiry, the province removed the deferrals from its database. BCTS put the blocks up for auction in June and sold them in early July. Logging could begin at any time, but together we can still stop it.
Say no — today
The trees are still standing, and our provincial government can still protect the area.
Tell BCTS and decision makers to halt the Foster Creek cutblocks and permanently protect these forests and the globally unique old-growth of the Inland Temperate Rainforest, just as their own government's experts recommended.