Red Rush

When I first met Dave back in 2001, he had what he jokingly called a “Freedom 30 plan.” He was going to make a million dollars on bugwood by age thirty, sell all of his equipment, and live off the earnings. “I had to bump that up a bit,” he told me when I asked why he’s still working at thirty-three. “It’s Freedom 35 now.”

Near the end of the reconnaissance, Dave pointed to a clump of metre-high grass — the kind that usually grows in roadside ditches. “Now that the trees aren’t sucking up all the sunlight and water,” he said, “this understorey’s growing up like crazy.” Looking around, I was reminded of the rain-soaked forests along the BC coast, with their broad-leaved vegetation bursting up along the ground. I wanted to know if a whole new ecosystem would eventually grow up to fill the void left by the dead pine, but I stowed that question away for later, figuring Dave wasn’t the guy to ask.

“I don’t see any real pumpkins in here, but it’s not bad,” Dave said as we stepped back into the truck. “I’ll stick in a low bid and see what happens.”

On our way back to the farm, I told Dave I was planning to interview Bob Clark, who had recently retired from his post as BC’s “beetle boss.” Dave grimaced. “What does he know? He just sits around at a desk all day. He has no idea what’s going on out here.”

I was surprised at his reaction. Dave’s dad once worked alongside Clark at the Ministry of Forests and Range office in Vanderhoof. “Yeah, but he coordinated the whole provincial response to the beetle,” I said.

Dave snickered. “That worked out really well, didn’t it?”

to kill a pine beetle

“Cup a’ coffee? ” Bob Clark asked almost as soon as he opened his front door. Burly, bearded, and greying, Clark somewhat resembled Ernest Hemingway. He also appeared to live in Hemingway’s dream home. A massive antelope head met my gaze as I walked into the house. Downstairs in the den, a menagerie hung from the walls: bear, wolf, oryx, cougar, and more. In the basement was Clark’s office, a pine-lined room that also boasted probably the best wine collection in Vanderhoof.

Clark started with the BC Forest Service in 1972 and was placed in charge of the beetle battle in 2002. It wasn’t long before he concluded that the fight was already over. “I took a flyover of the affected area,” Clark said, shaking his head. “Afterward, I wandered around thinking, ‘I can’t win here.’”

The province’s strategy at the time focused on weeding out each and every patch of bug-infested trees, no matter how small. One method was called “snip ‘n’ skid” because it involved cutting a relatively small stand of trees, then dragging them great distances to logging roads using a towing machine called a skidder. “Over three years, the ministry did 15,000 snip ‘n’ skids,” said Clark. “It was probably a defence unparallelled in the history of man.”

Because snip ‘n’ skid harvesting concentrated on such small areas, it had the blessing of the province’s environmental groups. These groups didn’t find Clark’s next move nearly so palatable. In 2003, he abandoned the large-scale snip ‘n’ skid strategy and relocated more of the province’s cut to the fringes of the beetle kill, with the aim of carving out bigger clear-cuts directly in the path of the outbreak. The David Suzuki Foundation said in a press release at the time that this would make “a dire situation even worse,” but the environmental groups soon fell mute. “It might be the biggest issue in forestry right now,” Panos Grames, a spokesperson for the Suzuki Foundation, told me. “But our funders just aren’t interested in it.”

Seated behind his meticulously kept pine desk, Clark told me why he decided the cut had to increase: “In 1910, there was 300 million cubic metres of pine in BC. Run up to 2000 and we have 1.2 billion cubic metres, because of fire suppression.”

The BC Forest Service has long prioritized the battle against forest fires in order to protect the public and the province’s greatest economic asset. But fires are a natural part of the forest cycle, levelling older forests to make way for new ones. Pine beetles, which prefer older trees and their more plentiful phloem, are part of this cycle too. But with so many stands of old pine being protected from fire and logging, the beetle, Clark argued, had had a veritable buffet set out before it, spurring it to engulf the province’s forests. “In the seventies and eighties we should have harvested more,” he said. “We should have increased the cut.”

It’s long been known how the mountain pine beetle is killed: the thermometer must either drop to -40°C before November or stay at -20°C or lower for any two-week period over the winter. Historically, cold snaps always hit regularly enough to keep the beetle population down. But the last large-scale kill-off came on Halloween in 1985, when trick-or-treaters faced -37°C. Last November, with temperatures hovering between -35°C and -20°C for nearly a week, Vanderhoof watched to see whether the deep freeze would last long enough to massacre the beetle. It was not to be, however. The cold snap was too short, and it had come too late.

Since retiring from the Forest Service in February 2006, Clark had been working as a consultant, mostly with the Alberta government, which is extremely concerned about the beetle’s forays across the Rockies. “Alberta has a national obligation to fight this thing,” Clark said. “This is not a provincial problem alone. Tests tell us that the beetle could easily take Jack pine stands, and that means it could creep clear across Canada.”

Before leaving, I asked if there was anything more he could have done as beetle boss to stop the outbreak. “No,” Clark replied. “If we were there when the soft music played, when the first two bugs did their thing, we’d all be in a much different position. But that wasn’t about to happen. I don’t apologize for a thing.”

the long view

Thousands of years before Canfor, CN, the Stephen family, and even Vanderhoof himself, the Saik’uz people settled this region. Today, the Saik’uz First Nation consists of ten reserves, the most populous of which is Stony Creek Indian Reserve No. 1, a fifteen-minute drive south from Vanderhoof. I rolled in one afternoon on a vast, grassy plain dotted with a few dozen houses, a store, a band office, a school, and various other administration buildings. Affixed to the walls of the reserve’s wood- and vinyl-sided houses were eighteen-inch satellite dishes, up to five per dwelling.

According to regional myth, the forests in this region became a “sea of red” at one point during the nineteenth century. It’s not known if the legend refers to a beetle outbreak or to a massive wildfire that is thought to have swept through the area about 120 years ago. Traditionally, the Saik’uz have protected themselves from forest fires by staging controlled burns, which eliminated the fuel for wild-fires and regenerated hardy local species of green grass. “The government could’ve learned something from that,” said Stanley Thomas, a former chief and now a Saik’uz band councillor in his late forties. “They don’t know what to do now.”

As a kid, Thomas fished for trout, ling cod, and whitefish in Stony Creek, which moves through the centre of town at a pace leisurely enough to provide a habitat for mosquito larvae and green algae. “Can’t get nothing out of there anymore,” said Thomas. “A great starvation is coming again soon. That’s what the elders tell me. I think the land is dying.”

Thomas’s assessment echoed those of climate researchers in the region. When I spoke with Andrew Weaver, Canada Research Chair in Climate Modelling and Analysis at the University of Victoria and the editor of the Journal of Climate, he confirmed that an entirely new ecosystem could be headed Vanderhoof ‘s way. “I can say with a high degree of probability that we’ll see ecosystems shifting northward,” he said. “When you run climate models with vegetation incorporated within them, the boreal forest, the deciduous trees, the grasslands — they all head northward.” The beetle and the rising number of forest fires are both bellwethers of this shift.

There is something familiar in all of this for the Saik’uz. They have lost the natural resources that sustained them once before. The Dakelh people, who once controlled most of what is now the province’s Central Interior region, began settling the Stony Creek plateau — known in their language as Saik’uz, or “on the sand” — in the 1890s, lured by favourable fishing and hunting grounds. Within fifty years, the federal Department of Indian Affairs had outlawed the hereditary Saik’uz system of governance, carved their territory up for the Crown, and placed restrictions on trapping, hunting, fishing, and logging. Without the freedom to use their land, the Saik’uz fell into an economic decline from which they are only slowly recovering. Median income for Stony Creek residents fifteen and older hovers around $4,500 per year.

“We are seeing a few licences coming our way now,” said Thomas. “But what are they worth? A hundred percent of it is totally red. We only got five years, tops, and then there’s no more. Then we gotta wait eighty more years. It’s going to be a long time. Could be ghost towns all over by then, but not us. We’re still going to be here. We’ve got nowhere to go.”

after the boom

Vanderhoof ‘s economic upsurge appeared to be the sole upside of the ecological disaster. I dropped in on Len Fox, the town’s mayor, who was happy to list more signs of growth. “Right now, every plumber is busy, every electrician busy,” he said. “We had thirty-eight housing starts last year, which is quite good for a community our size. To the best of our knowledge, we have fifteen to twenty years on our current timber supply.”