I’ve worn a sweater the last couple of mornings that I’ve stepped out the door of my house in Kimberley. The days are shortening, the morning air is crisp, and fall is around the corner following another long and tumultuous summer of wildfires in B.C. I’m looking forward to leaving those fires behind, and stepping into the winter to come.
Yet I remind myself that as the seasons shift, the logging companies are moving in. When the flames of summer wildfires recede this fall, forestry planners across the province will be heading out to survey the charred forests left standing — where there is wood to be salvaged, money can be made.
Many provinces, including British Columbia, incentivize post-wildfire salvage logging through reduced stumpage rates — the fee that businesses and individuals pay to harvest timber from Crown land. This places the burden of reforestation onto logging companies rather than the province, while at the same time increasing timber supply by getting burnt wood to mills, pellet and pulp operations quickly. After the 2023 wildfires, B.C. issued salvage cutting permits for 28,000 logging trucks worth of wood.
Earlier this year, the province announced measures to ‘streamline’ the salvage process and make it “more economic for businesses to salvage damaged wood”, including further reducing stumpage rates. The province’s statement said these measures would ‘support land recovery’, ‘regenerate the forests’ and ‘help restore areas for wildlife’. Earlier this week in a townhall in Nelson I listened to Premier Eby incorrectly assert that wildfire burned forests are intended to be logged because they are second growth.
Let’s be clear: while salvage logging might have short-term benefits for timber supply, the science indicates that large-scale industrial salvage logging actually impedes ecological recovery and makes our province less resilient in the face of climate change.
B.C.’s ecosystems evolved with, and continue to rely on, natural disturbances such as wildfire. After fire, ecosystems naturally rebuild and complex, post-fire environments emerge. These environments have more complexity than they did before — including snags (standing dead trees) and unique understory vegetation — and they can support more species as a result. Salvage logging removes this habitat complexity, and it cannot be replicated through replanting.
Two of the world’s preeminent forest ecologists, Jerry Franklin and David Lindenmayer, have referred to salvage logging as a tax on natural ecological recovery — it sets back ecosystems just as they’re beginning to recover. Heavy harvesting machines, like feller bunchers, can destroy the efforts of nitrogen-fixing plants like ceanothus, aspen shoots and fireweed, which are often amongst the first to sprout from charred soils. B.C.’s former chief forester Dianne Nicholls wrote that salvage logging, unless very carefully managed, negatively affects forest soil due to the “destruction of surface organic matter causing soil erosion and loss of soil nitrogen”.
The roads and heavy machinery used for salvage logging also increase the amount of sediment flowing into our streams and waterways. Too much sediment can bury or suffocate fish eggs, degrade water quality and make life very difficult for invertebrates, fish, and plant life in and around streams. Erosion and sedimentation rates naturally increase after wildfires, but salvage logging makes this problem far worse. One study from Alberta’s Southern Rockies found sediment production was nine times greater in burnt watersheds than unburnt watersheds, but 37 times greater in salvage-logged watersheds.
Salvage logging can also alter predator-prey dynamics. A study conducted in the Canadian Rockies highlighted that wolves often select post-wildfire logging stands close to roads to forage. This led to an increased predation risk to elk, causing elk and other ungulates to avoid post-wildfire salvaged areas despite these areas offering more food for them in the form of tender fresh shoots.
The province’s statement also emphasised the importance of salvage logging as a sustainable source of fibre. But sustainable for whom or what? It’s not sustainable for cavity nesters like black-backed woodpeckers, which quickly move into recently burnt areas to feed on the bounty of insects that begin to break down dead and decaying fire burnt trees. It’s not sustainable for our watersheds, which will see years of elevated sediment as a result of salvage logging. And it’s not sustainable for the ungulates that avoid salvage-logged areas due to increased predation risk.
The province and the Minister must consider the true impacts of salvage logging. Salvage logging isn’t about increasing forest regeneration — it’s about getting fibre to the mill, and planting fast-growing conifers as soon as possible to keep annual allowable cut rates high. We have to move beyond timber-centric thinking into a new era that prioritizes Indigenous values and cultural practices, ecosystem resilience, water, watershed health and wildlife.