This is not the forestry recovery that was hoped for. B.C.’s lumber production has long been considered a sector that would contribute positively and significantly to provincial economic growth in the post-recession period with U.S. economic growth and increased home building the key triggers for higher lumber export demand. Despite U.S. housing starts rebounding to…

The newly signed forestry agreement between the province of Quebec and the Grand Council of the Crees is a remarkable accomplishment. Six months of challenging negotiations, mediated by former Quebec premier Lucien Bouchard, have yielded a set of compromises that will put limits on logging in a 7,245-square-kilometre tract of land, completely protect an additional 9,134 square kilometres…

The forest industry, much like the forests we rely on, is in a perpetual state of transition.  Markets swing, customer demands shift, new research and experience informs, practices and technology evolve, climate patterns change, and people, politics and the law transform.  This myriad of factors means the industry is in a perpetual state of adaptation. …

A couple of red pines in northeastern New Brunswick are the oldest of their kind in Atlantic Canada, by far, according to a professor and the New Brunswick Museum. “These trees have lived 300 years,” said Ben Phillips, the conservation scientist at the UNESCO Fundy Biosphere Reserve and a professor at Mount Allison University. Stephen…

In yet another life (I have a checkered past) I worked in a sawmill situated on the margin of False Creek in downtown Vancouver. (Today, False Creek is a fashionable Vancouver address. But in 1948 the inlet called False Creek was a virtual cesspool; it was wonderful the stuff that rode up the jackladder clinging…

While Canada’s politicians fiddle about on the barbecue circuit this summer, the country burns. By Monday afternoon, 5,041 wildland fires had scorched 3.02 million hectares, equal to about half the area of Nova Scotia, and 902 of them were still burning. Air tanker companies are logging twice the normal total of flying hours. Ground crews…

80% of organisations remove Greenwash following the latest Two Sides Anti-Greenwash Campaign Two Sides have been actively challenging organisations which use greenwash to mislead consumers regarding the environmental benefits of alternative media. They have done this by requesting that organisations carefully consider their messages and the potentially misleading anti-print and paper statements that are being…