Those in charge of the Cheakamus Community Forest (CCF) hope to make perhaps $20,000 in profit from the sale of logs from the initiative’s first year of operation, not the $1 million suggested by a recreation tenure holder who has been critical of the project, the Whistler-based forester who is working on the initiative said last week.

During a media tour of proposed CCF logging sites last Thursday (June 10), Peter Ackhurst and Heather Beresford, the Resort Municipality of Whistler’s environmental stewardship manager, also said CCF partners “would be running afoul of provincial law” if they did as Allan Crawford of Canadian Snowmobile Adventures (CSA) suggests and logged very little or not at all.

According to Beresford, the average of 20,000 cubic metres of annual allowable cut that CCF partners — the RMOW and Squamish and Lil’wat nations — are required to log each year was negotiated down from the approximately 33,000 to 36,000 that B.C. Ministry of Forests officials had suggested was sustainable in the 30,000-hectare area covered under the CCF tenure.

“If it was not under community forest control, a private company would have logged that much without input from the community,” Beresford said.

Said Ackhurst, “If you don’t harvest your allowable cut, they would put out a timber sale (licence) to a third party.”

Beresford said the Ministry of Forests operates on the philosophy that B.C.’s forests are a provincial asset that provides a wide range of benefits. “Employment (in the forest industry) is one of the benefits of owning and managing that asset,” she said.

Under the traditional system, B.C. Timber Sales would put out a timber sale licence to commercial operators, who would bid for the licence and then carry out the work with little or no requirement for public input, she said.

In the past, that has led to conflicts involving the government, environmentalists, communities and loggers. The community forest initiative, launched about six years ago, is an effort to curb the potential for conflict by putting decision-making over logging under local control.

There are currently about 40 community forest agreements in B.C., with about 10 more likely to be signed this year, Ackhurst said.

When the opportunity to secure a community forest agreement arose a few years ago, “We said, ‘Let’s see if we can get that tenure,’ rather than trying to influence a private operator to do it the way we’d like,” Beresford said.

“Having local control is really important because we can talk to our community for guidance.”

The main objective of the CCF is careful management of the landscape based on ecosystem-based management principals. For example, forest thinning such as the project just completed near the road leading to Kadenwood — where the primary objective was the reduction of fuels that might lead to destructive wildfires — is what’s planned near most built-up areas around town, Ackhurst said.

While it’s more painstaking work with only minimal financial return from the sale of the trees, all of the logs taken out during such thinning projects count toward the CCF’s annual cut.

“Optimistically, 25 per cent of our annual allowable cut will be in these types of areas,” Ackhurst said.

In other areas, such as one cut that’s proposed under the CCF’s Forest Stewardship Plan in the Cal-Cheak area and another that was completed last year across Highway 99 from Brandywine Falls Provincial Park, CCF officials and the contractor, Richmond Plywood, plan to follow a kinder, gentler set of logging practices than the traditional clear-cut model, Ackhurst said.

At Brandywine, the two showed off a five-hectare area that Ackhurst said is an example of “retention logging.” It featured the largest forest “opening” that’s proposed under the CCF — about five hectares,

While large swaths of forest had been logged, the larger remaining trees were spaced perhaps 40 metres apart. Alongside the logging road were a few large slash piles that Ackhurst said are slated to be burned, perhaps later this year.

Asked whether some of the remaining trees might blow over in the next big windstorm, Ackhurst said that some might, but that the idea was to leave enough shelter trees surrounding the forest opening to avoid large-scale blowdowns.

What’s more, traditional forestry might leave openings of 20 hectares or more, he said.

The idea behind the community forest is to put any profits back into the landscape. For example, this year they plan to gravel and grade the road leading up to the Cheakamus Lake entrance to Garibaldi Park, Ackhurst said.

Asked about Crawford’s estimate that the CCF would make $1 million per year in profit, Ackhurst said, “We’re just not focused that way at all. It’s zero profit or maybe $20,000, and all of the good works that we are talking about have to come out of that $20,000.”

He said the profit is to be split 60-40 with Richmond Plywood, with CCF getting 60 per cent.

Crawford, reached by phone on Friday (June 11), said that while he’s fine with tree thinning for fire hazard mitigation, and “selective” logging, he sees large, industrial-scale logging as anathema to what Whistler’s effort to promote sustainability it all about.

He was incredulous when told CCF officials hope to make $20,000 a year in profit.

“If they’re doing that for 20,000 a year, they’re complete idiots,” he said. Speaking about Richmond Plywood, he added, “I can assure you he’s making a profit; otherwise they wouldn’t be going through all this trouble and paperwork.”

Crawford said that when CSA officials cleared the sites they use on their tenure in the Callaghan Valley, they used most or all of those logs on site to build cabins and fences. They even use pieces as small as three inches in diameter as firewood. That’s what he describes as sustainable logging.

“We’re just so hooked on the idea of whacking it down and selling it for a couple of dollars to some other country. Let’s be smarter than that,” Crawford said.

He added, “This a big commercial operation, and it’s all about scale. The faster they go, the more money they make.

“There are squirrels’ nests in those trees. There are birds’ nests, there are bears. Do they check for that? No, it’s just big machinery going in there and ripping and tearing.”

Ackhurst and Beresford emphasized that that’s not their aim and that CCF officials are anxious to sit down with Crawford or anyone else to discuss how they can work together to the parties’ mutual benefit.

Said Beresford, “We’re doing this so that we can manage the forest for community values, way more so than how it’s been done in the past.”

The comment period on the CCF Forest Stewardship Plan has been extended until next Wednesday (June 22). Copies of the plan are available at the Whistler Public Library and at municipal hall, or for more information please visit www.whistler.ca and follow the links.