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Let gravity guide forest management

Candace Batycki’s article on the timber grab by the forest corporations should be a wake up call for the people of the Kootenays.

Candace Batycki’s article on the timber grab by the forest corporations should be a wake up call for the people of the Kootenays. Will the people every wake up to the crazy reality that is the plight of our forests today?

All my life, there has been a dance of the timber quotas from small family holding timber quotas, where there was a sawmill or several in every town, and a pile of sawdust at the end of almost every road. Our forests were an integral part of every community. Today, a few corporations own it all, and rare is the citizen who makes his living from the forests.

The provincial governments of whatever political persuasion have never managed our forest properly. They viewed this grand and glorious resource that surrounds us as a cash cow. Royalties, stumpage, and alienation of forest lands to private hands seems to have been their only goal. They know nothing, and I wonder how many of those politicians we sent to Victoria could tell the difference between a hemlock and a Douglas fir.

Democracy is failing us and the forest. It is time to bring democracy home. It is time to inject reason and natural law into democracy.  Let us start by introducing Watershed Democracy into our lives, where God’s law of gravity will determine how we manage our forests by watershed and species.

Scrap the entire timber quota and tree farm license system, and bring the forests back into our lives. Victoria has failed us, and local control based on watershed is the only sensible route to take. Let God’s law, natural law, let gravity be our guide.

Wake up citizens, for the corporations are doing to us what we did to the native peoples.

Dick Murphy

Nelson