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This week:

Between a rock

and a hard place

Part Two

‘Werby Squish headed
H towards his pickup truck

. with resolve. The steady —
drizzle no longer bothered him.

His mind was racing. Survey the
big picture, he mused. It’s not
the answer. But it’s where the
answer will be found.

Squish crawled into his pickup,
turned the key in the ignition
and drove out of the parking lot.
The morning shift was beginning
to atrive at the sawmill, he
observed. Faceless men draped
with yellow rain gear and topped
with white hard hats, men who
also knew an answer had to be
found but never talked about it
on the job.

They quietly worked their spot
on the production line and never
questioned what happened out-
side their area of concern. That
wasn’t their job. Their job was
to mindlessly but efficiently
push the right button at the right
time as dictated by the bottom
line. Mindless efficiency .as
predicted in Orwell's 1984.

They’re part of the big picture,
he thought as he turned left onto
Highway 16. They’re part of the
big picture but don’t really know
where they fit in. It’s kind of an
unwitting plot of the board.
Divide and conquer. Don’t let
one man understand what the
next does, for if he does, he

might sce how he can do his job
better and that might mean he
will make changes. Make a
decision of his own. And making
decisions, is the divine right of
the board,

Was he getting cynical in his
old age? Squish wondered. When
he was younger he had believed
in the forest industry. He had
trusted the people who directed
it from distant and magical
places like Toronto and New
York. After all, it was their
livelihood, too.

But things had changed over
the years. It was now 1993, most
of the good trees were gone, and
nothing more than the most
basic things required by law had
been done to replace them. In
some cases, companies had lied.

Even minimal requirements had

not been met. They simply
swooped in, cut everything in
sight, and left as quietly as they
came, leaving for others the job
of cleaning up their mess.

_ Sawmills were closing. Pulp
mills were closing. Hundreds of
people had fost their jobs and
had no prospects for the future.
"No problem," management
maintained. "World markets are

down... Things will get better." |

But there was a big problem.
More than a declining world
market, increasing costs and the
declining quality of the Cana-
dian product was the real culprit.
It was a problem that seemed to

Forestry
Insights

Terrace Review —~ Wednesday, November 20, 1991 7

by Tod Strachan, in consultation with Rod Arnold and Doug Davies

defy any real solution. The bot-
tom line had devoured itself;
much like a swarm of locusts
claims everything in sight, then
starves.

Squish feared overseas cus-
tomers would never come back.
Why should they? They could
buy clear lumber from a revital-
ized Russia for the same price as
the knot-filled, bowed waste we
were producing here.

The windshield wipers flapped
to a beat of their own. Squish
drifted back to reality. He was
beginning to feel his earlier
depression return.

"Why am I kidding myself," he
said as he pounded the steering
wheel with the heel of his right
hand. "There is no solution.”

He had to fight the battle,
though. Squirrel had made him

realize that. She was depending
on him. So were those workers,
though they might not be aware,
who sat pushing assembly line
‘buttons while they wondered in
silence how many pushes were
left.

’ Squish slowed and turned left
onto a logging road. "This area
was reforested by Jovial Logging
Inc. in 1991," a sign proudly

announced. A half mile later, a
locked gate.

"Why do we keep this thing
locked?" Squish wondered aloud.
"To protect all those seedlings?
Or to hide the truth?"

Squish drove through and
locked the gate behind him. He
tried to decide why he driven to

this particular site and found no

reason at all. He had simply
climbed into his truck, shifted it
into gear, and driven off. There
had been no conscious plan.
Other than seeking the truth.
Defining the big picture and
deciding how the future might be
altered for the better.

A fork in the road. Squish
turned left again. "Funny," he
mused. “If I keep turning left,
I'll eventually wind up going in
a circle. And that’s how my day
began."

.A bridge. Clutch Creek. The.
gateway to Gearbox Lake. A
good salmon-rearing area... once.
There had been a few disasters
here, Squish knew. But that had
been a couple of years ago and
Nature was on the mend.

A remarkable lady, he
reflected. A true friend indeed,
No matter how much you hurt

her, she always seems to return.
One day, though, if we don’t
change our ways, she might not.
Keep doing as we are and event-
ually we’re going to inflict the
fatal wound. ~

It will be a disastrous day.
Squish tried to imagine the
scene. The world will be abuzz.
"Mother Nature is dead. Mother
Nature is dead. We've killed
her." And in ignorance, everyone
will wonder how it happened.
True, there were some who had
tried to warn us, but they were
activists. Not worthy of our
attention.

A hint of a right turn. "Final-
ly,” Squish laughed. "Maybe I
can get out of the circle running
routine after all.” A small sign
to his left announced, “Bik. 1,
C.P. 001". He remembered it
well. He had warmed Milton
Jovial of the folly of phase
contracting but Milton liked the
bottom line and wanted to try it.

‘Squish’ coasted to a stop,
turned off the ignition and se1
the handbrake. "Somewhere," he
said to himself. "Somewhere out
here is the answer. All I need to
do is open my eyes and it will
be mine."

Licence holder seeks integrated management of Kitlope

To the Editor; .

In your Oct. 30, 1991 edition you
had an article regarding the
Kitimat-Stikine Regional Board’s
position on the Kitlope Valley
controversy, As licensee for the

area we would like to address

some of the comments made
toward land use and particularly
Tree Farming.

We maintain that tree farming
can co-exist with the other re-
sources including recreational,
ecological, cultural and wildlife

Pifer =n" Continued from page 6

over to the Liberals, Otherwise,
are you not basically looking at a
second term for the NDP, with lit-
tle option to do anything about it?

GW: Well, I think that largely
will depend on how we conduct
ourselves over the next few years.
There are some Socreds who have
met with various (Liberal) candi-
dates, and they don’t want us; but
frankly, we're not too keen on
them,

But there are also a significant
number of others who previously
supported Social Credit, who are
very interested in seeing a pro-

values. These are the same inte-
grated. values that the Regional
Board supports, and we applaud
their position.

In the article there was reference
to Kitamaat Village Council’s
views on various issues, namely
the economic benefactors, a
establishing a monocultural forest,
destroying the environment and
destroying habitat for fish and
and destroying habitat for fish and
grizzly bears. That is not our view
nor our intention on how we man-

gressive free-enterprise alterna-
tive, and they now recognize that
our independence from the federal
party gives them the freedom to be
able to support us, and to work
with us to build that progressive
party, They are not being discour-
aged from getting active, provided
that they buy into the agenda that
we have for the province. We are
not dogmatic or rigid.

The NDP got roughly 40 percent
of the vote, which means that 60
percent out there want something
else, and that's a good block to
work with.

age these resources.

The Kitlope is one of many pro-
posed land preservation areas
within our licence and if they all
are implemented we will lose 22
percent of our annual allowable
cut. The Kitlope represents over
50 percent of this potential loss. If
all of these proposed land reserves
were approved, the B.C. economy
would lose over $17 million
annually. The Kitlope represents a
loss of $10 million or approxi-
mately 209 jobs. The article stated
that “98 percent of benefits from
logging go to people outside the
region,” All citizens of the North-
west are benefiting from the tree
farming whether they reside east,
north, west or south of Terrace.
The Kitlope contains sufficient
timber to sustain a harvesting
operation for over 45 years, not 20
years as stated in your article. We
have a legal obligalion to ensure
that all forest land remains pro-

ductive, therefore sustainable
forestry that recognizes and

respects other resources is our
management objective.

The article states that the Kitlope
and the rest of the Tree Farm will
become 4 monoculture forest. This

is incorrect. (Previously harvested
areas now have more species
diversity than the old growth
forest that they replaced.) All
forest land is managed for natural
diversity. During the pre-harvest
prescription stage of approval the
replacement species are identified
and stocking schedules committed.
At the same time fish and wildlife
(grizzly bears, goats, etc.) habitat
is identified and a management
plan is prescribed. Grizzly bears
can and do co-habitate with
forestry operations, but they
cannot survive the pressure of
hunting and poaching.

Our northwest portion of B.C.
contains many established re-
serves for various uses such as
ecological, recreation, wildlife,
landscapes and various classifica-
tion of parks. There are thousands
of hectares all over the northwest
which are wilderness and not part
of the working forest. Does an
area have to be classificd as park
or wilderness to provide the
benefits and uses of a park? To
our knowledge there has not been
any economic analysis or utiliza-
tion study conducted on existing
rescrves, therefore we welcome

land use decisions which reflect
all interest groups’ requirements.
All decisions must reflect issues
that have been identified, justified,
substantiated and debated by the
citizens of British Columbia.

We hope this process will be

implemented for the Kitlope when

the provincial moratorium on

harvesting within that valley
expires in 1992.

V.N. Maskulak

Woods Manager,

Skeena Sawmills

Terrace, B.C.

Editor's note: We would like to
remind readers that the remarks
and points of view to which Mr.
Maskulak refers are attributed in
the Oct, 30 news story to directors
of the Kitimat-Stikine Regionai
District board and to Kitamaa:
Band chief councillor Gerale
Amos. The story reports views
expressed by those individuals, no:
by the staff and management o:
the Terrace Review.

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