Terrace Review — Wednesday, May g,1991 C5

| Planning ina changing world

Ro

' ote Coad

Tree Farm Licence management is now a public job

. by Michael Kelly

cott Marleau spends con-
S siderable time in class-

rooms around the North-
west, telling children about his job
as head forester for Terrace’s
Skeena Sawmills. In recent years
he’s seen a striking change in the
kids’ attitudes,

"They’re asking me what method
we use for cutting, clear-cut or
select, how and when we replant
sites, what we’re doing to mini-
mize environmental disturbance...
they used to ask me whether I saw
any bears when | walked around in
the woods. It’s quite a change," he
Says.

The change in the classroom is
part of a vast overall change in the
public’s attitude toward forests.
That change has radically altered
the planning procedure Marleau
and others in his profession use to
determine the events that go on in
the publicly owned forests they
manage for timber.

“Integrated management is part
of everything,” he says. Years ago
a five-year Management and
Working Plan, the process that
Marleau is row labouring over,
was virtually an internal company
document available for public
examination for 30 days and sub-
ject to approval by the Ministry of
Forests. Now, the public is
involved from day one of the
process right through to the plan’s
final draft and review. "There is
pressure from the public and inter-
est groups to get involved, and
that’s they way it should be. It’s
public land and it belongs to all of
us."

The area of that public land
Marleau and his staff are dealing
with is enormous: over a million
hectares, twice the size of Prince
Edward Island. It’s Tree Farm
Licence #41, a long-term tenure
held jointly by West Fraser Tim-
ber, Skeena Sawmill’s parent com-
pany, and industrial partner Euro-
can Pulp and Paper. It
encompasses mountains, water-
sheds and marine inlets from the
Kitlope River - basin south of
Kemano to the south edge of
Lakelse Lake, surrounding the

-district municipality of Kitimat.

As Marleau begins explaining the
process for drafting a five-year
Management and Working Plan for
the licence, it becomes apparent
that the size of the land area does
not translate into a timber resource
of proportionate size.

"Twenty-five percent of that area
is productive forest land," Marleau
says. "And twenty-five percent of
that is what we consider operable
timber." Those calculations carve
the area the forester has to deal
with down to about 69,000 hec-
tares.

The process begins with "netting
down" the land base. In 1988
Skeena completed a mapping pro-
ject to pinpoint environmentally
sensitive areas for the south half of
the TFL —- the section south of
Kemano — and they are currently
in the process of doing the same
on the north half. Those areas are
deleted from the land base used for
timber harvesting, as are slide- and
avalanche-prone slope areas.

The remaining land area, after
the places inappropriate to cutting
are subtracted, is what the foresters

work with to set the annual altow-
able cut for the licence. That num-
ber for TFL #41 is 430,000 cubic
metres, five percent of which is
claimed by the Ministry of Forests
for the Small Business Enterprise
Program, a competitive bidding
scheme restricted to small logging
companies. Of the 408,000. cubic
metres lefi, Marleau figures, about
half will be pulp logs and about
half will be saw logs. All of it
goes through the Terrace mill —
the’ saw logs are milled into
dimension lumber, and the pulp
logs are put through the whole-log
chipper, with the chips then truck-
ed to Eurocan in Kitimat.

With that established, Marleau
can begin plans for timber harvest-
ing. The MWP, he explained, does
not go into the intricate detail of
each cut block or setting, but it
does indicate general plans for the
watersheds and valleys the com-
pany intends to log. "We use about
a 20-year time horizon," he says.

In addition to putting the plan
before the public, the forester also
has to work with numerous gov-
emment agencies: the Fish and
Wildlife Branch and other sections
of the Ministry of Environment,
the federal Department of Fisheries
and Oceans, and of course the
Ministry of Forests. When those
agencies are in agreement on the
general outline of ideas, then Mar-
leau can start putting together the

‘draft plan. At that point he gets

into detailed planning on matters
like vegetation management, land-
scape inventory and smoke man-
agement.

"There’s a lot of work in the
ficid. It’s a long, involved pro-

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cess... we even have to address
access management, deciding
which [logging] roads will stay
open permanently for the public
and how we're going to maintain
them."

The plan must also take into
account the possibility of a change
in the tenure’s land base. If, for
example, the Kitlope watershed is
set aside as a preserve — a propo-
sal being considered now by the
Ministry of Lands and Parks and
the Ministry of Forests — TFL
#41 would lose 12 percent of its
operable forest area. OF the
350,000 hectare watershed, Mar-
leau says, Skeena plans to log only
8,000 hectares, but the loss of the

timber on that area would be sig-
nificant for the company, he says.
"With a Tree Farm Licence,

there’s mo way to replace that
volume.”

Prescribed logging methods have
also changed over the years. Now,
for example, the "leave strips"

between cut blocks are left undis-
turbed tor 30 to 4U years instead
of 15 or 20. It’s more costly in
terms of road building and main-
tenance, but it looks better and it’s
better for the overall] health of the
forest.

The draft plan will be ready for
release to the public in mid-sum-
mer. Meetings will be held, and
adjustments will be made. Skeena
Sawmills representatives will have
io clarify their intentions under
public questioning. The foresters
themselves may learn a few things,
Marleau says from experience.
"It’s amazing the detail some
people have about the land."

Afier the public review and the
changes that come out of that
process, the final plan will be
submitted to the province’s Chief
Forester for approval. In its final -
form, the plan will govern oper-
ations on TFL #41 from Jan. 1,
1991 to Dec. 31, 1996.

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