|
Shrooming in Vancouver Island’s Stumpfields
by Ingmar Lee
 Every autumn I head out towards Jordan River to pick wild mushrooms. Years ago, having comprehended the scale of the industrial decimation of fish worldwide, I quit one of my favourite pastimes and channelled my predatory proclivities into the hunt for mushrooms instead.
The delight of discovering a luscious patch of mushrooms easily compares with the thrill of catching fish. But these days it’s getting more and more difficult to find a forest where wild mushrooms grow.
A few years ago, I used to go searching for matsutake, also
known as pine mushrooms, which only grow in primeval forests. Perhaps
because of its purported aphrodisiacal qualities, the matsutake is much
sought after by Japanese, who will pay up to $150 for three prime
specimens.
These mushrooms are picked during the day, trucked to
Vancouver at night, and then flown straight to Japan the next morning.
The matsutake business is a completely underground multi-million
dollar industry in British Columbia, and in the past, the picking was
often so profitable that people would employ helicopters to get the
crop out. But everything in the BC woods defers to the logging industry
and now, on Vancouver Island, the primeval forests where matsutakes
grow have been virtually exterminated.
These days, I’ve
taken to going after chanterelles instead, which occur en masse in
second-growth forests. But here on south island, even these immature
forests have now been levelled again by voracious logging corporations
such as TimberWest, Western Forest Products (WFP) and the untrackable
flipping corporate spawn of the American logging giant, Weyerhaeuser,
which cut and ran from the island several years ago.
These giant
corporations, which are guided by the long-term “forestry” vision of
quarterly dividends to unit-holders have logged out virtually all of
Vancouver Island’s second-growth timber profile right down to 30
year-old “pecker-poles” which can barely produce a 2X4. All over
southern Vancouver Island, the logging industry has gated off most of
the roads leading out to the woods, so the public will not easily see
the ecological massacre that goes on back there.
The other
day, when I arrived at my reliable old chanterelle patch -after
climbing over the gate- I was disgusted, although not surprised, to see
WFP’s latest example of sustainable, “World Class” logging. Instead of
our once public forest, I was met with a 100 hectare steaming
stumpfield, which featured a solitary clump of 5 teetering trees left
behind in the middle of the clearcut.
This was an example of the
farcical greenwashing scam of “variable retention” logging. By leaving
five pathetic trees which will all blow over in the next wind, Western
expects to maintain the PR chimera that it logs in a sustainable,
ethical manner. From the air, the outright scandal of variable
retention can be seen at a glance, with single solitary trees left
every hundred metres, or with timber left standing in a road bight so
that when it blows down, it can be easily removed by obtaining the
easily available ‘salvage permit,’ or with the very worst, worthless
timber in the cutblock left behind for ``structural representation.``
As far as the eye can see, massive clearcuts stretch out from horizon
to horizon.
Having totally exhausted the timber resource,
these massive forest-destroying corporations, with a little help from
their government lackey, can now provide their unit-holders with far
more enormous returns by getting out of forestry altogether and selling
off the stumpfields.
 Jordan River is just the most current scam in BC’s
sordid history of “log-and-flog” deforestation. Thanks to Logging
Minister Rich Coleman, WFP was able to sleaze 70,000 acres out of their
Vancouver Island tree farm licence. Having logged it flat, they are now
selling it all off for real estate. Same deal with Victoria’s current
development monstrosity at Bear Mountain, which was public forest land
until the arrival of Gordon Campbell’s Neo-con regime. Although
environmental requirements for the logging of BC’s public forests are
laughable, there are absolutely no restrictions on the damage which can
be done on private land. Once these lands are taken out of the TFL, the
logging companies can mercilessly gut the forests without any
regulatory hindrance, and then subdivide and sell off the land to
developers.
The Ministry of Logging has such little interest
in Non-Timber Forest Products that this potentially massive resource is
ignored in the provincial GIS database. People who harvest wild produce
are finding it increasingly difficult to sell as the government
tightens regulations around the food chain. Certainly none of the
corporate food stores such as Thrifty’s, Safeway or Save-On Foods will
have anything to do with wild produce, and by the look of it, prefer to
stock their shelves with industrially-grown “Money’s” mushroom-type
products. Smaller grocers like Peppers, The Market on Yates and
Lifestyles are selling chanterelles and other wild mushrooms for as
much as $17.95 a pound. A few years ago, many of Victoria’s gourmet
restaurants were eager to buy chanterelles from pickers, but these
days, many chefs, such as at Swans (owned by UVic) didn’t even know
what a chanterelle was when I showed up with 20 pounds of fresh-picked
mushrooms the other day.
The Campbell regime has been an
utter catastrophe for Vancouver Island’s forests, and with the WFP
Jordan River sell-off and the awful Bear Mountain development
precedents, our botanical splendours are being ripped off and ruined,
never to return. It’s a monumental tragedy that our second growth
forests, which once offered the opportunity to practice ethical,
sustainable logging (there is no such thing as ethical logging in the
Earth’s final primeval forests) as well as the harvesting of a variety
of non-timber resources, are being squandered now, mostly for the
American raw-log market, and then being flipped for subdivision
development. How did this happen? Well, when the Gordon Campbell regime
came to power, 7 of their top-ten election financiers were logging
companies which contributed about $1.5 million to his campaign. It’s
shameful how cheaply these corporations bought themselves a BC
government.
 |
Writings 
Subscribe to this comment's feed
