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LETTER: Sometimes, it’s prudent to cut down trees

SAN Group of companies is establishing a lumber enterprise beside the paper mill on the waterfront..
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To the Editor,

Every few weeks it seems someone writes a letter to the editor decrying the cutting down of local trees. Usually these writings contain misinformation about forest practices in the Port Alberni area.

SAN Group of companies is establishing a lumber enterprise beside the paper mill on the waterfront. This entails land clearing and construction of a facility for operations. Comment was made about damage and removal of the trees adjacent to Stamp Avenue. Those maple trees in the corner are decaying, aged, with large heavy limbs hanging over the four-lane roadway. Heavy with leaves in season, the limbs are not stable in winds.

A cute story was told of someone removing leaf trees in town because of the yearly struggle to rake up the leaves. The writer offers to do the raking. Canada is a huge nation of trees, grassland and agriculture—all green and consuming vast quantities of carbon dioxide returning oxygen to the air. We represent 0.05 percent of the world’s population and contribute 1.8 per cent of pollution to air. We are not the problem. Canada does not harvest trees as never before.

Our forest industry has downsized and closed mills as well as harvesting operations. Somehow, companies re-established mills in foreign lands and are allowed to export our trees to those mills. Much of this is from our second growth timberlands. Calling them “babies” is rhetoric for city audiences.

I hope harvested land is being replanted. I hope foreign funded environmental groups stop killing our needed resource economy. The government needs to be realistic with its oversight of the BC forest resource. The green jobs mantra is from a few utopian dreamers.

Bruce E. Hornidge,

Port Alberni