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Dear Editor,
Re: Clayoquot Sound’s temperate forests among highest carbon storage areas in North America December 2, 2010, Westerly News.
I’m writing to comment regarding forest industry claims that in terms of climate change, wood is a carbon neutral and therefore desirable building material because lumber continues to store carbon.
The claim of carbon neutrality is untrue because forests store much more carbon than the lumber in their tree trunks. Carbon is also stored in tree branches and roots, understory vegetation and soil. And all logs are not turned into lumber — about half end up as short-lived products (bark, sawdust, scrap off-cuts and paper) that decay rapidly or are burned for fuel, thereby releasing carbon dioxide.
As for replanted forests, they are cut down again long before they can absorb the huge pulse of carbon dioxide emitted after logging old growth, with its stored carbon accumulated over centuries and millennia.
It’s far better to leave carbon stored in standing old growth forests, which also provide wildlife habitat, storehouses for biodiversity, and essential ecosystem services such as clean air and water.
Regarding the sensitive logging Iisaak claims to be doing, the larger context indicates otherwise.
Iisaak logs industrial volumes of old growth in Clayoquot’s globally rare temperate rainforest, about 75,000 cubic metres of wood per year (2,250 logging trucks full).
Clayoquot is the only large area of ancient forest left on Vancouver Island, an island where 75 per cent of the productive old growth forest has been clearcut.
Iisaak’s management plan reveals it plans to log old growth for another 170 years before it switches fully to logging second growth.
Next year, Iisaak is set to begin logging Flores Island where old growth forest, some of the most productive remaining in Clayoquot, is 96 per cent intact.
Iisaak’s 2004 management plan shows 86 cutblocks accessed by roads throughout Flores in the next 20 years.
Maryjka Mychajlowycz,
Friends of Clayoquot Sound
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