Editor’s note, Oct. 5: This story has been updated with information from a Sierra Club report that challenges the B.C. government’s accounting of the volume of old-growth logging in 2021.
Activists rallied last Thursday outside of Courtenay-Comox MLA Ronna-Rae Leonard’s office to protest the logging of old-growth forests in British Columbia.
The event was part of a province-wide United For Old Growth day of action, organized by the Wilderness Committee, Wildsight, Stand.earth, Sierra Club BC and Elders for Ancient Trees. Save our Forests Team Comox Valley (SOFT-CV) helped put on the Courtenay protest.
The protests demanded that the provincial government follow through on its 2020 Old Growth Strategic Review (OGSR). The OGSR put forward 14 recommendations for the protection of old growth forests, and called for a three-year implementation plan.
Arzeena Hamir, owner of Amara Farm in Courtenay and previous director for Area B of the Comox Valley Regional District, was at the protest. She shared that she was unsatisfied with the lack of action on old growth protection, and she hopes to send the message that the protesters have not forgotten the old growth recommendations from 2020.
“We’re still watching,” she said. “Their response to the lack of protection of old growth is really concerning.”
Hamir has noticed extreme weather events impacting her farm over the last few years. She said that she sees farming, food and the environment as all part of an interconnected system. Since they all impact each other, it has given her reason to become politically active in the community.
“It may sound like it’s weird that a farmer is interested in forest … but I see it as one huge connection,” she said.
In a November 2022 news release, the B.C. government stated the logging of old growth in B.C. has decreased by 43 per cent from 2015 to 2021.
In Nov 2021, the Old Growth Technical Advisory Panel identified four million hectares of old forests most at risk of biodiversity loss. Eighty per cent of those forests are not currently at risk, either because they are permanently protected, covered by recent old-growth deferrals or uneconomic to harvest, according to the release.
The release stated that the area of old-growth forests logged was 38,000 hectares in 2021, but a report by Sierra Club found that the number was actually 45,700 hectares — 18 per cent more than reported.
The Discourse reached out to the government to ask about the current state of old-growth logging in B.C., but did not receive an answer by the time of publication.
“I don’t think anybody is saying that we stop logging all together,” said Hamir. She said she simply wants forests managed in a better way.
“I think we need to create a reserve in forestry so that the area is no longer touched and it stays intact as an old-growth ecosystem.” That way, she said, more biodiversity and benefits of old-growth forests can be preserved.
