Thread by @TorranceCoste

Some morning thoughts about #wildfires and forest management in #bcpoli:

About a month ago I started playing drop in soccer again.

My first night there, there were three guys I didn’t know, talking about setting wedges + other things I know to be associated with falling trees.

I asked them if they were arborists, or if they worked in the forest industry.

They said neither, they are forest fire fighters on the local crew. This was a couple days before the heat dome, and we talked about how busy they expected fire season to get in the coming weeks.

They haven’t been at soccer since, and, as there are mercifully fewer fires here on the Island, I assume that’s because they are redeployed to the interior, where hundreds of fires are raging.

#BCPoli #BCWildfires

At the end of the conversation, I did what I always do and thanked them for their efforts.

One of them said “well, someone’s gotta subsidize the logging industry, right?”

It was said lightly, but 100% seriously, and I’ve thought about it probably every day since.
#bcpoli

This idea that suppressing fires subsidizes the forest industry in BC and beyond isn’t new to me. It’s one of the more obvious examples of the state spending copious resources (in this case 100s of millions of dollars annually) to protect, among other things, corporate assets.

The rationale is that the extraction of those assets by corporations also has knock-on public benefits, in the form of jobs and royalties and taxes, and so it’s worth it to protect them.

But the fact that fires that destroy forests reduce the amount of resources available for corporations to exploit isn’t a piece we talk about much, nor is the fact that efforts to protect this potential profit has helped (along with climate change) stack the deck for worse fires.

This latter point is highlighted much more eloquently and informatively by @JZThinAir, in this recent op-ed:

vancouversun.com/opinion/jesse-… #bcpoli #BCWildfires #wildfires

By managing forests for timber and their associated benefits above all other values for a century (a core finding of the Old-growth Strategic Review panel and others), it’s now harder and more expensive to fight against the risk wildfires pose to that value and others.

And while yes, the forest industry provides benefits to the public, the prioritization of it above all other values is part of (again, combined with and compounded by climate change) what has made the #BCWildfire situation so challenging, expensive, and dangerous.
#bcpoli

And the work to operationalize that prioritization of that single value, the actual physical protection of those assets whose value is largely privatized, has been paid for by the public.

I don’t think this means we should never do it, but we should recognize that fighting wildfires in BC and elsewhere is a huge form of subsidy to the logging industry, and that that should be part of the conversation about #forests and #forestry here.

#bcpoli #BCWildfires

Some of the people who put their safety on the line actually fighting the fires are open and up front about this, and the rest of us should be as well.

#bcpoli #forests #forestry #BCWildfires