On a rainy Friday this month, industry executives and government officials were sitting on the fourth floor of a Vancouver casino hotel. From the stage, a pitch for the future of forestry was on repeat: what if logging companies could be the heroes who saved British Columbia from wildfires?
Jamie Stephen, the managing director of the energy and resources consulting firm TorchLight Bioresources, put it another way. On one side, the timber sector says it should drive the solution; on the other, critics say it's dangerous to allow an industry that helped spawn the problem direct its solution through their version of “forest management.”
The disagreement hinges on what appears to be a simple question: does logging more reduce wildfires? Glacier Media asked seven experts in wildfires and forest ecology to help answer that question. “And even worse, where people have thinned in the name of ‘fuel reduction,’ they've taken the big trees and left small ones, removing old-growth values with no decrease in wildfire risk…” said Price.
Most of the forest ecologists interviewed for this story agreed that limiting wildfires would require a combination of leaving moist forests unharvested, leaving burned forests unsalvaged, and encouraging the re-growth of more fire-resistant deciduous trees. Bourbonnais said mechanical thinning may use some of the same equipment as logging but generally involves removing fibre that is not profitable, such as small trees and saplings.
“I hear the same words, but they don't mean the same thing,” she said. “They are talking about sanitizing the forest of its biodiversity values — i.e. its old trees, its dead trees. They are talking about creating an agricultural forest.” In one 2019 presentation to the Oregon House Committee On Natural Resources, Chris Edwards of the Oregon Forest Industries Council showed a slide of a timber-framed building next to a young child with an oxygen mask. A national campaign to show 'Canadian Forestry Can Save the World' In Canada, using wildfires to influence public opinion appears to only just be taking off. Holt, who attended the COFI conference, said it was the first time she heard B.C.
“Persuasion and opinion change are not something that happen overnight. Retention of information requires multi-platform saturation, memorable executions, and consistency of message to seed the underlying facts,” reads one slide. Glacier Media asked David Coletto what role Abacus Data had in shaping FPAC's Forestry for the Future campaign, and who came up with the idea for COFI to use wildfire as a way to turn the forest industry into the 'hero.'Familiar tactics from the same PR firms Melissa Aronczyk has spent years tracking the PR strategies corporations and politicians use to reshape the narrative around environmental problems.