Study - By 2030, 68% Of BC's Mature Pines Gone, 20% Of Total Timberlands Denuded By Pine Beetle

[hatrack]

EDIT

This catastrophe is happening so slowly that for many of us the only tangible evidence of it are the two architectural centrepieces of the 2010 Winter Olympics. Yet the blue-stained beams of the Richmond oval and the showcase walls in Vancouver's convention centre are among the few bright spots. Over the years, there have been lots of stories chronicling the beetles' massive destruction, changes to allowable annual cuts, mill closure and layoffs. The most recent reported that in the next 20 years, an estimated 28,700 forestry-related jobs will be lost, 68 per cent of the mature pine stock dead, 20 per cent of the total timber harvest land base denuded.

Fast-track harvesting of blue-stained beetle-infested wood has fuelled mills and brought workers back. With as much as 75 per cent of B.C.'s lodgepole pine needing to be cut before 2024 when the beetle-inflicted damage will make it useless, innovative new products are being made from the dry, cracking timber.

The end of the pine-beetle epidemic was heralded last September by Pat Bell even as he admitted that he's likely the first B.C. forest minister in the province's 130-year history to worry about running out of trees.

In retrospect, Bell may have been optimistic. More recent reports have suggested that damage in the Okanagan, Cranbrook and Boundary regions is not expected to peak until 2014. The problem is that there's nothing we can do. We are not defeating the beetles. They are simply running out of food and moving on.

EDIT

http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/Pine%20beetles%20march%20across%20catastrophe%20slow%20motion/3417092/story.html

[Bigmack]

1. We drove thru No. B.C.

a few years ago, retrieving a motor home from Skagway for a friend who'd had a stroke, and we drove thru MILES and MILES of dead-dying pine forests. At times, the forests would be brown as far as the eye could see, and that was THEN. It's an environmental disaster, probably caused - exacerbated by global climate change - the winters are no longer cold enuf to kill off large numbers of the beetles. The fire dangers alone have to be horrendous. "Catastrophe" is absolutely the right word for all this. Ms Bigmack