The comments here concerning how "logging" keeps "forests" somehow "healthy" are simplistic to the extreme and such nonsense is one aspect of the crisis in environmental management here in BC.
SOME types of timber harvesting, done properly, can and do allow for SOME species of wildlife to increase and others destroy habitat for other species. Perhaps, the best known example is the Mountain Caribou, extirpation in the Kootenay region of BC, one of the legendary hunting venues for big game since the late 19thC. While, the mature Engelmann Spruce-W.White Pine forests existed and relatively few apex predators, largely Wolves, were at minimal pop. levels, the Caribou, were healthy and at huntable pop. levels.
The clear-cutting, mechanized logging, destroyed their major food source, the "Cladonia" that requires these forest types to exist and that began the decline to the current situation, essentially extinction. Certainly, the logging road access contributed to this as the predators could more easily travel on the weather-firmed snow cover along these roads than the prey could/does.
I can describe other such devastating and unacceptable effects of logging in BC, especially the once-fabulous Kootenays, where the finest native trout and wild sheep hunting anywhere once existed, but, this example should suffice.
Can this be rectified and this paradise restored, well, IMHO, with 60+ years of bush experience there, NO, the damage is done and current game populations and fish stocks demonstrate this, IMHO.
I base this on my experiences in the BCFS, BCF&W, various conservation groups in the region and studies at the college there. My family lives there and will have for 125 years next spring and I discussed this with scores of oldtimers as a boy and young man, starting about age 12, 1958.
SOOOOO, we all NEED to reconsider our attitudes concerning logging and other resource harvesting and change our approach to such activities.
Last edited by SNAP; 11/19/17.
