British Columbia Has an Old-GrowthProblem
- Andreas Kondos Sheppard
- Dec 12, 2025
- 2 min read
Opinion Piece by Andreas Kondos Sheppard
For how visible clear-cut logging is — the checkerboard scars across hillsides, the bald mountaintops, the flood-prone valleys once shaded by giants — the BC government seems deter- mined to obscure it.
And not with cloud cover, fog, or clever strategic logging.
No. The BC government obscures the truth — about the scale, the impact, and the contra- diction at the heart of its own forestry policy.
In one hand, the province promises to protect 30% of its land base by 2030. In the other, it’s pledged to double timber manufacturing output by 2030 — increasing fibre supply and cutting more trees to feed sawmills.
It doesn’t take an ecologist to spot the problem. BC can’t have both. If it attempts to, we’ll see a province of fragmented ”forest safe havens” surrounded by clear-cuts — conservation zones functioning like ecological zoos, walled in by industrial wastelands.
But is it really progress if we save a few remaining jewels, only to leave them encircled by stumps? Is that preservation? Or curation?
Let me be clear: I’m not saying BC should stop logging altogether. That would be absurd — and frankly, unrealistic. This province’s economy is inextricably linked to forestry. Some of the most ardent environmentalists I’ve ever met work in the forest industry.
But my point is this: we’re no longer dealing with a province of old forests. BC is dominated by second- and third-growth monocultures, especially of pine and spruce — forests that burn faster, host less life, and collapse under pressure. They were planted after earlier cuts, meant to fill quotas and grow fast. Now they fuel the firestorms of summer.
And still — those few remaining stands, the ones that came after the ice retreated, the ones that hold water like sponges, the ones that refuse to burn, the ones sacred to Indigenous Nations, are being logged. As of 2022, over 45,000 hectares of old-growth forest were still cut down — much of it in areas BC had previously promised to defer. And deferrals? They’re not binding — permits continue to be issued. British Columbia has an old-growth problem.
British Columbia has an old-growth problem.
Not one of abundance. One of compulsion. Like an addiction — a logging problem. A need to cut, even when it’s unsustainable. Even when it’s our own ecological suicide note. Like an alcoholic who can’t stop even as the body fails, we log and log and log — even as the floods worsen, the species vanish, the soil turns to dust.
These forests — the ones that have lived longer than colonization, that sheltered the first human presence in these valleys — are still at risk. And it has never been the government that saved them.
It was people. Protesters. Scientists. Knowledge keepers. Blockaders. Families.
It was action that saved them before.
It will need to be action that saves them again.
Because those trees cannot save themselves.
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