{"id":2372,"date":"2021-06-09T19:39:54","date_gmt":"2021-06-09T23:39:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.org\/weblog\/?p=2372"},"modified":"2021-06-09T19:41:43","modified_gmt":"2021-06-09T23:41:43","slug":"the-last-of-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/?p=2372","title":{"rendered":"The Last of It"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"the<\/a>

(image by Lorna Beecroft of Nanaimo, BC)<\/p><\/div>\n

The\u00a0above image of an ancient spruce being hauled up the Vancouver Island Highway\u00a0has gone viral and\u00a0I can say in my years of driving up and down that same highway,\u00a0I have seen\u00a0many such obscene sights.\u00a0\u00a0These last\u00a0old-growth\u00a0conifers, the remnants of a unique\u00a0temperate\u00a0rainforest\u00a0ecosystem, are being\u00a0logged into oblivion despite a massive outcry\u00a0led by environmentalists and First Nations communities.\u00a0Sadly, the battle\u00a0has been mostly lost outside a scant few officially protected zones so that British Columbia can continue using its ‘supernatural’ brand. As I write this, a huge and expensive police operation is underway\u00a0at\u00a0Fairy Creek<\/a>\u00a0,\u00a0with helicopters and special SWAT teams being deployed to dislodge the hundreds of protesters putting their bodies on the line\u00a0defending the last\u00a0unprotected\u00a0old-growth watershed on southern Vancouver Island. There have been dozens of arrests<\/a>, suppression of media and acts of police violence.<\/p>\n

So far, so typical. This spectacle has happened many times before, most notably during the massive Clayoquot protests<\/a> in the 1990’s.\u00a0Yet the zeal\u00a0with which this supposedly left-of-center provincial\u00a0government\u00a0has\u00a0propped up a clearly unsustainable\u00a0industry, hell-bent on liquidating the remainder of what everyone agrees is a disappearing resource*\u00a0isn’t just\u00a0about the commercial value of old-growth trees’ market value, though this is\u00a0an\u00a0undeniable factor, as their price, like that of other endangered commodities\u00a0like rhinoceros horn or elephant ivory\u00a0goes up in proportion to their scarcity. There\u00a0is something else\u00a0happening here though – a less obvious and more sinister\u00a0program by government and industry\u00a0to change the very way we think of what a forest actually is.<\/p>\n

*According to a recent study<\/a>:<\/p>\n

productive old forests are naturally rare in BC. Sites with the potential to grow very large trees cover less than 3% of the province. Old forests on these sites have dwindled considerably due to intense harvest so that only 2.7% of this 3% is currently old. These ecosystems are effectively the white rhino of old growth forests. They are almost extinguished and will not recover from logging.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Way back in\u00a0in 1992 I wrote\u00a0an article<\/a> for FUSE MAGAZINE entitled ‘The State of the Forest: The Canadian Landscape as Propaganda’<\/strong>\u00a0where I made case that\u00a0the ferocious push to eliminate\u00a0old growth forests, particularly those\u00a0accessible, lowland forests containing charismatic, cathedral-like groves, was a\u00a0deliberate\u00a0strategy\u00a0to\u00a0reverse the figure\/ground relationship between what is a ‘space of enclosure’\u00a0and\u00a0the\u00a0a priori<\/em>\u00a0ecological commons, i.e what\u00a0is capitalism and what is not capitalism.\u00a0I detailed how the language describing forests was being carefully\u00a0altered by corporations and their client governments\u00a0in order to strip away\u00a0any pre-capitalist connotations. In this new corporate forest-speak,\u00a0primary forests were coined\u00a0‘tree farm licenses’<\/em> or ‘fiber farms’.\u00a0<\/em>\u00a0 The word\u00a0‘farming’\u00a0serves as\u00a0stand-in\u00a0to legitimize the transformation of forests\u00a0\u00a0from unenclosed commons, stewarded but not owned in the settler-colonist sense of the word by\u00a0original inhabitants (either\u00a0as traditional territory or under some kind of usufruct<\/a>), to fully enclosed property\u00a0under what Marx\u00a0termed ‘primitive accumulation’.\u00a0 There is nothing remotely resembling ‘farming’ about felling primary, old-growth forests, an extractive process more akin to mining or\u00a0the\u00a0industrial slaughter the great whales, but the metaphor persists and is actively promoted. Just a few days ago, a logger, Ron Tucker, interviewed<\/a> during a counter-protest denouncing the Fairy Creek blockade said it yet again:<\/p>\n

“We live in the best area in the world for timber and trees and this is what we do. We’re farmers and we farm trees.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Ron Tucker, logger<\/em><\/p>\n

Perhaps he even believes this but it is hard to square that notion with the BC government’s own assertion<\/a> that logging the province’s old growth, forests which no farmer ever\u00a0planted,\u00a0remains\u00a0key to the future of\u00a0the industry and\u00a0that 27% of the annual harvest is still dependent on\u00a0old growth forest.<\/p>\n

In my article, I detailed other forest industry neologisms such as clear-cutting with camping allowed afterwards\u00a0defined as \u00a0‘mixed use’<\/em>, ‘shared use’<\/em> or ‘the working forest’<\/em>, the latter being a particularly galling, faux proletarian obfuscation\u00a0of corporate extractivism. The forest isn’t exactly working and the jobs created in British Columbia’s industry turn\u00a0out to be\u00a0one of the\u00a0lowest <\/a>\u00a0jobsper\u00a0volume of wood harvested\u00a0with\u00a0much of\u00a0what is felled\u00a0shipped overseas as raw logs,<\/a> eliminating opportunities for stable employment in secondary manufacturing and milling. Government subsidies\u00a0<\/a>\u00a0to the industry remain massive even without factoring in the\u00a0substantial policing costs\u00a0incurred when an outraged population pushes back and starts putting bodies on the line to defend\u00a0the last\u00a0shreds\u00a0ancient forest as\u00a0has been happening at Fairy Creek.\u00a0 Police\u00a0helicopters\u00a0with specially trained commando units deployed\u00a0to\u00a0arrest tree sitters and blockaders along with the round-the-clock heavy presence of ground forces doesn’t come cheap and\u00a0the costs could in\u00a0 fact far exceed the commercial value of any timber extracted. But this is about more than simple economics.<\/p>\n

Charismatic, ancient trees\u00a0pervade our collective unconscious.\u00a0Their archetypical images crop up in many religions as ‘world-trees’ or\u00a0trees of life<\/a>,\u00a0connecting heaven and earth.\u00a0 The Norse had their Yggdrasil,<\/a> the local Kwakwa<\/u>ka<\/u>\u2019wakw people and other First Nations of the Pacific Northwest coast, worshipped red cedar (Thuja plicata)<\/em> since time immemorial, carefully\u00a0prying individual planks from old-growth trees without killing them, leaving them\u00a0standing to heal. Images of old-growth\u00a0even pervade such popular\u00a0genres as\u00a0video\u00a0gaming<\/a> and streaming television. Think of the Weirwood tree<\/a> in the godswood\u00a0of Winterfell or pretty much all of James Cameron’s Avatar.<\/a>\u00a0 Ancient groves symbolize something very deep and\u00a0meaningful, connecting us to a\u00a0time before property.<\/p>\n

Which is why there is such a push to have\u00a0ancient\u00a0trees eliminated\u00a0except in a few sanctioned\u00a0parks where\u00a0they can be commodified as\u00a0tourist attractions.\u00a0Instead of\u00a0being allowed to perform their function as\u00a0the\u00a0ecological scaffolding\u00a0that holds\u00a0together\u00a0an interdependent, living\u00a0landscape, maintaining the stability of the regional hydrology, fish habitat and climate, any old-growth\u00a0trees\u00a0allowed to survive\u00a0get reduced to props in a wilderness theme park. The not-so-subtle message is that all forests are transactional\u00a0spaces valued only for the readily extractable commodities contained within. Even parks exist primarily to provide marketable experiences to extract\u00a0dollars from tourists. The battle for Fairy Creek is as much ontological as it is ecological. We are living in a world run by people who\u00a0hate the symbolism of ancient trees\u00a0existing just for their own sake.\u00a0Soon we\u00a0will even lose the\u00a0language\u00a0as to why they should have been left standing in the first place.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

‘It exists!’ he cried.<\/em><\/p>\n

‘No,’ said O’Brien.<\/em><\/p>\n

He stepped across the room. There was a memory hole in the opposite wall. O’Brien lifted the grating. Unseen, the frail slip of paper was whirling away on the current of warm air; it was vanishing in a flash of flame. O’Brien turned away from the wall.<\/em><\/p>\n

‘Ashes,’ he said. ‘Not even identifiable ashes. Dust. It does not exist. It never existed.’<\/em><\/p>\n

‘But it did exist! It does exist! It exists in memory. I remember it. You remember it.’<\/em><\/p>\n

‘I do not remember it,’ said O’Brien.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

George Orwell – 1984.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The\u00a0above image of an ancient spruce being hauled up the Vancouver Island Highway\u00a0has gone viral and\u00a0I can say in my years of driving up and down that same highway,\u00a0I have seen\u00a0many such obscene sights.\u00a0\u00a0These last\u00a0old-growth\u00a0conifers, the remnants of a unique\u00a0temperate\u00a0rainforest\u00a0ecosystem, are being\u00a0logged into oblivion despite a massive outcry\u00a0led by environmentalists and First Nations communities.\u00a0Sadly, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2372","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2372"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2372\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2421,"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2372\/revisions\/2421"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}