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greenstormForestry conference last week. I learned a bunch. Things I learned:
Blueberry River First Nation Decision: Indigenous rights in Canada tend to be advanced by the courts, with court decisions prodding the slow-lumbering beast of the government forward and public opinion hanging around, in front in some areas and behind in others. In our constitution "the existing aboriginal and treaty rights of the aboriginal peoples of Canada are hereby recognized and affirmed" and the concept of "aboriginal rights" is slowly being delineated. Very long story short, the Blueberry River decision is that the treaty didn't include an agreement that settlers would change the landscape enough to preclude the Indigenous folks' way of life. Cumulative effects from all the different activities (forestry, agriculture, oil and gas) are now significantly impacting Blueberry River First Nation's way of life, so the government is failing to uphold its end of the agreement. The government won't appeal. This decision is specifically applied to Treaty 8, which is a limited area, but it's likely also going to apply to underlying "aboriginal rights" of folks wo haven't made treaties and that has some significant ramifications. It doesn't let the government off on "we haven't measured it so we didn't know" or "we've consulted on each individual project so we don't have responsibility for the landscape as a whole" (which is the current way business operates). The test is basically, are the indigenous peoples able to continue their lifestyle? And obviously there are indigenous peoples in heavily populated areas down south who absolutely cannot continue their way of life because almost their entire area is paved over and the salmon they depended on are severely depleted, let alone wetlands etc. Almost certainly the decision will be applied to government land instead of private land, and to places where there's still room to salvage those lifestyles, but there's room for it to mean that Vancouver and the lower mainland needs to look very, very different.
There was a panel on conflict management that more-or-less said that foresters' first and highest job was to build relationships with folks in their area. I had some trouble swallowing all of this one -- it was mostly conflict-management folks and one forester, I think, and when folks brought up questions about people not believing good science the conflict management folks said basically, it doesn't matter what the science was. Honestly I found this an unsatisfying workshop, though the following day really operationalized a bit of it in ways that were useful to me.
That following day was a case-study of the Sea-to-Sky area. This is a place that sees huge high volumes of visitors all the time, international and otherwise, and they did a really good process with the (Squamish? Lil'wat?) Nation that led with values, worked out a vision statement, and then worked from there to implementation. The process built a tremendous amount of trust with everyone involved and is considered by both the Nation and the government to be a success; it was built on the values and needs of all parties; it used what I consider to be permaculture principles that use humans' natural tendencies, like building tourist areas in one place to draw folks away from other, more sensitive areas that can't take the tremendous traffic this area gets. The presentation was incredibly moving and it does seem like the way forward for me; it helped me feel hopeful after the previous day's conflict management panel where I felt basically like washing my hands of the whole business.
So here's the thing. Forestry is super extensive land management; we touch more of the land than anyone. There are plenty of other players. Land management absolutely needs to be done with consideration to the impact of all parties - legally, now, as well as morally. Deciding who gets to do what, and what will be done overall, therefore needs to be done either by all parties together or by a hierarchical body, or some combination of both I guess. This is all pretty simple stuff conceptually, though of course hard to put into practice.
All parties has been contentious for awhile, though. I want to say: the land is for folks who touch it, and who are touched by it. The remaining Nations are shaped by their land and they've sacrificed a great deal to maintain their connection to it; I have great faith that they put serious consideration into agreements about the land. Government trails behind social license but nonetheless is there as an entity and can be held to its agreements. Users of the land can be moved to learn about it because the land itself is powerful and people who access it tend to love it. But so much of our population is transient and disconnected nowadays; how do you sit down at a table and agree to values and goals with a set of people who have never seen the place, who are just passing through, who heard that there's a petition going around? How do you include people who don't have the wherewithal to focus themselves, who won't communicate unless something is happening they don't like? Forestry is coming to understand that the time to include people isn't after the planning has happened, because then you can only get a yes or no, but instead before planning has happened so it shapes the whole direction. Of course I think everyone has the responsibility to do this work but of course not everyone has the desire or bandwidth and I do accept that other people are busy handling economics or labour issues or whatever, or just surviving. So how do we do it, as a society?
I do think we'd probably feel better as individuals if we spent more of our time in this kind of engagement, in deliberately constructing how our society would work. Building things feels good, right? Hearing people out and feeling heard feels good. But how do we make a society like this?
Anyhow, that's not the kind of question that gets answered easily, but at least that one workshop had one good answer for one issue (visitor management) and one place. And it's part of the foundation of my actual job to do a tiny part of that, to measure and communicate about one thing that's happening out there to all folks involved. That's not nothing.
And of course there were panels and presentations on wildfire, which touches all aspects of Forestry. Wildfire is getting added to the legally-mandated considerations for foresters working on the landscape, where it will join Visual Quality, Wildlife, Biodiversity, Cultural Heritage, Fish/Riparian, Forage and associated plant communities, Recreation, Resource Features, Soils, Timber, and Water. There was talk about how fire suppression and lack of cultural burning has led to much higher densities of trees in many areas, which means the fires that do occur get Very Big instead of just passing through (I love the photos of a hundred years ago and now, showing how much ingress there's been, because I love data). There was talk about how climate change is going to change species composition. There was talk about how not to let dry forests flip into grasslands with climate change. There was talk (for the first time, I think) of how drought and not just temperature will factor into species change. There was a lot of talk of wildland urban interface areas, which are the forests close to populations, and how those should be managed, and case studies about how those had changed the trajectory of fires last year.
All-in-all it was nice to pop up to higher level stuff and hear talk about it again. It's the same things that are always on the table, but the conversation evolves every year and it's good to remember I'm part of this. The bits of my job where I clean data and spend two weeks putting together a contract make it easy to forget.
Community, I guess, important in everything.
Edited to add: this is an update to my thinking on forestry, which had been that it was the government's job to figure out how to find values/consensus/goals and my job to operationalize the goals; now I think it's kind of on all of us. The "government should take minimal effort from most citizens/vote in an informed way once a year and that's your only social responsibility" mindset doesn't seem to be supported by current events.
Blueberry River First Nation Decision: Indigenous rights in Canada tend to be advanced by the courts, with court decisions prodding the slow-lumbering beast of the government forward and public opinion hanging around, in front in some areas and behind in others. In our constitution "the existing aboriginal and treaty rights of the aboriginal peoples of Canada are hereby recognized and affirmed" and the concept of "aboriginal rights" is slowly being delineated. Very long story short, the Blueberry River decision is that the treaty didn't include an agreement that settlers would change the landscape enough to preclude the Indigenous folks' way of life. Cumulative effects from all the different activities (forestry, agriculture, oil and gas) are now significantly impacting Blueberry River First Nation's way of life, so the government is failing to uphold its end of the agreement. The government won't appeal. This decision is specifically applied to Treaty 8, which is a limited area, but it's likely also going to apply to underlying "aboriginal rights" of folks wo haven't made treaties and that has some significant ramifications. It doesn't let the government off on "we haven't measured it so we didn't know" or "we've consulted on each individual project so we don't have responsibility for the landscape as a whole" (which is the current way business operates). The test is basically, are the indigenous peoples able to continue their lifestyle? And obviously there are indigenous peoples in heavily populated areas down south who absolutely cannot continue their way of life because almost their entire area is paved over and the salmon they depended on are severely depleted, let alone wetlands etc. Almost certainly the decision will be applied to government land instead of private land, and to places where there's still room to salvage those lifestyles, but there's room for it to mean that Vancouver and the lower mainland needs to look very, very different.
There was a panel on conflict management that more-or-less said that foresters' first and highest job was to build relationships with folks in their area. I had some trouble swallowing all of this one -- it was mostly conflict-management folks and one forester, I think, and when folks brought up questions about people not believing good science the conflict management folks said basically, it doesn't matter what the science was. Honestly I found this an unsatisfying workshop, though the following day really operationalized a bit of it in ways that were useful to me.
That following day was a case-study of the Sea-to-Sky area. This is a place that sees huge high volumes of visitors all the time, international and otherwise, and they did a really good process with the (Squamish? Lil'wat?) Nation that led with values, worked out a vision statement, and then worked from there to implementation. The process built a tremendous amount of trust with everyone involved and is considered by both the Nation and the government to be a success; it was built on the values and needs of all parties; it used what I consider to be permaculture principles that use humans' natural tendencies, like building tourist areas in one place to draw folks away from other, more sensitive areas that can't take the tremendous traffic this area gets. The presentation was incredibly moving and it does seem like the way forward for me; it helped me feel hopeful after the previous day's conflict management panel where I felt basically like washing my hands of the whole business.
So here's the thing. Forestry is super extensive land management; we touch more of the land than anyone. There are plenty of other players. Land management absolutely needs to be done with consideration to the impact of all parties - legally, now, as well as morally. Deciding who gets to do what, and what will be done overall, therefore needs to be done either by all parties together or by a hierarchical body, or some combination of both I guess. This is all pretty simple stuff conceptually, though of course hard to put into practice.
All parties has been contentious for awhile, though. I want to say: the land is for folks who touch it, and who are touched by it. The remaining Nations are shaped by their land and they've sacrificed a great deal to maintain their connection to it; I have great faith that they put serious consideration into agreements about the land. Government trails behind social license but nonetheless is there as an entity and can be held to its agreements. Users of the land can be moved to learn about it because the land itself is powerful and people who access it tend to love it. But so much of our population is transient and disconnected nowadays; how do you sit down at a table and agree to values and goals with a set of people who have never seen the place, who are just passing through, who heard that there's a petition going around? How do you include people who don't have the wherewithal to focus themselves, who won't communicate unless something is happening they don't like? Forestry is coming to understand that the time to include people isn't after the planning has happened, because then you can only get a yes or no, but instead before planning has happened so it shapes the whole direction. Of course I think everyone has the responsibility to do this work but of course not everyone has the desire or bandwidth and I do accept that other people are busy handling economics or labour issues or whatever, or just surviving. So how do we do it, as a society?
I do think we'd probably feel better as individuals if we spent more of our time in this kind of engagement, in deliberately constructing how our society would work. Building things feels good, right? Hearing people out and feeling heard feels good. But how do we make a society like this?
Anyhow, that's not the kind of question that gets answered easily, but at least that one workshop had one good answer for one issue (visitor management) and one place. And it's part of the foundation of my actual job to do a tiny part of that, to measure and communicate about one thing that's happening out there to all folks involved. That's not nothing.
And of course there were panels and presentations on wildfire, which touches all aspects of Forestry. Wildfire is getting added to the legally-mandated considerations for foresters working on the landscape, where it will join Visual Quality, Wildlife, Biodiversity, Cultural Heritage, Fish/Riparian, Forage and associated plant communities, Recreation, Resource Features, Soils, Timber, and Water. There was talk about how fire suppression and lack of cultural burning has led to much higher densities of trees in many areas, which means the fires that do occur get Very Big instead of just passing through (I love the photos of a hundred years ago and now, showing how much ingress there's been, because I love data). There was talk about how climate change is going to change species composition. There was talk about how not to let dry forests flip into grasslands with climate change. There was talk (for the first time, I think) of how drought and not just temperature will factor into species change. There was a lot of talk of wildland urban interface areas, which are the forests close to populations, and how those should be managed, and case studies about how those had changed the trajectory of fires last year.
All-in-all it was nice to pop up to higher level stuff and hear talk about it again. It's the same things that are always on the table, but the conversation evolves every year and it's good to remember I'm part of this. The bits of my job where I clean data and spend two weeks putting together a contract make it easy to forget.
Community, I guess, important in everything.
Edited to add: this is an update to my thinking on forestry, which had been that it was the government's job to figure out how to find values/consensus/goals and my job to operationalize the goals; now I think it's kind of on all of us. The "government should take minimal effort from most citizens/vote in an informed way once a year and that's your only social responsibility" mindset doesn't seem to be supported by current events.
