Editor:
This year’s apocalypse of fires, floods, droughts and storms should drive everyone to work together to prevent climate hell on Earth. That means rapidly reducing our use of fossil fuels and conserving Earth’s natural carbon-sequestering ecosystems and biodiversity like on Mt. Elphinstone.
I was disheartened to read in last week’s paper about the rift between the Sunshine Coast Community Forest (SCCF) and the environment group, Elphinstone Logging Focus (ELF).
I have known ELF’s spokesperson, Ross Muirhead, for decades. He worked with me at the Wilderness Committee while I was a leader there. He always focused on the problem, not the person. I can’t believe he would have spoken in a disrespectful way of anyone on the public tour of cutblock AN3A, although I would expect him to criticize logging practices that still fail to adequately protect our environment.
It’s tragic that B.C.’s professional foresters still clearcut, leaving behind only a few struggling trees, and allow logging on unstable landslide-prone slopes. Logging practices must change to eco-forestry and selective logging coupled with large protected areas to sequester carbon, preserve soils, groundwater and natural biodiversity. A few more culverts and better roads are not going to handle a deluge dump from an atmospheric river.
Stopping joint SCCF-ELF meetings is truly regressive when we must work together to avert biological and climate collapse. The BC Forest Service still does not reveal a lot of important data needed for the public to understand the impacts of logging. Regular meetings with concerned citizens are a reliable way to get public release of information like slope stability studies that can help provide the public pressure and political will to achieve needed changes. Throwing rocks at each other from “separate silos” will tragically fail to fix the mess we humans have created on Earth.
Paul George, OBC, Gibsons
