Vancouover Island's diminishing Tree Harvests

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - In the second of two broadcasts about more sustainable forestry practices, one of the founders of the Cortes Community Fortes Co-operative talks about the industry’s diminishing harvests in terms that every gardener understands. 

“Back in the 1970s it used to be called tree farming, to give the public the idea that you're actually going to be creating crops off of that landscape each year,” said Ellingsen. 

Every farmer knows that they need to replace the nutrients that they are taking out of the soil, or “pretty soon it will not grow a crop successfully any longer.” 

However the foresters, engineers and everybody else involved in deciding what is a sustainable cut in the provincial forest are not allowing for the reduction of nutrients in the land base with each succeeding harvest. 

“They just work on an assumption that has been toted for years. We can cut down the forest and then as long as we replant at least one tree for each one we cut - or maybe two or three considering that they will not all get to an age where we allow ourselves to cut them again - we're still going to be sustainable. Each crop is going to be replaced with new trees, but the thing is not being replaced is the nutrients that it takes to grow those trees. It's being gradually drawn down,” explained Ellingsen. 

He said it takes about three years for the soil in his garden to become exhausted. After that, he needs to either add nutrients in or leave the garden fallow so it can regenerate itself.

“In forestry terms, we're dealing over a lot longer timeframe, but the dynamic is still the same. Every time you have a new crop of trees on a landscape and harvest it, you're taking about half of the nutrients that it took to grow that tree out of that landscape and disappears down to the booming ground and off to the ship or wherever it's going or the saw mill, or wherever it's going,” said Ellingsen.“Over probably three or four rotations, you're going to be exhausting, that landscape of the ability and the nutrients required to regenerate, succeeding crops of trees.” 

He said Eastern Vancouver Island is now into its  third or fourth tree harvest. The forests between Victoria and Sayward were initially logged in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. Most of the giant trees were cut down by the 1950’s and 60’s. Isolated pockets remain, like Cathedral Grove on the way to Port Alberni.

“When I was a young fellow, the assumed harvesting cycle was around 80 to 120. Now the ministry of forest thinks that the sustainable rate of harvest should be around 60 to possibly 80 years or 50 to possibly eight years. So it's creeping down all the time.”