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Clearcutting, Fish Habitat, and Forest Regulation in British Columbia, 1900-45

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Clearcutting, Fish Habitat, and Forest Regulation in British Columbia, 1900-45 “Streams Being Ruined from a Salmon Producing Standpoint”: Clearcutting, Fish Habitat, and Forest Regulation in British Columbia, 1900-45 Richard Rajala he relationship of forests to healthy fish populations has drawn a good deal of scientific and regulatory attention over recent decades in British Columbia. Indeed, according to one Trecent report, almost five hundred rivers, streams, and lakes have “suffered major losses” in fish habitat as a consequence of industrial forestry. Habitat degradation more generally has played a part in the ex- tinction of at least 140 salmon runs. Environmental organizations point the finger of blame at weak enforcement of the federal Fisheries Act and equally poor performance by provincial environmental regulators under a referral process that provides for joint assessment of practices that threaten salmon stocks. The province’s 1995 Forest Practices Code, drafted to protect riparian zones, had by many accounts failed as a regulatory instrument even before a 2002 Liberal government deregu- lation initiative, thanks to the reluctance of industry and the Ministry 1 of Forests to accept restrictions on clearcutting practices. The answer, declared the Sierra Legal Defence Fund sldf( ) in 1997, lay in denying loggers access to streamside timber. Only by preserving the riparian zones intact could the streams be afforded protection against bank erosion, sedimentation, higher water temperatures, and debris torrents. “The health of riparian areas is vital to the health of the forest ecosystem as a whole,” asserted the sldf. More recently, a 2002 Raincoast Conservation Society analysis of central and north coast wild salmon 1 John Werring, High and Dry: An Investigation of Salmon Habitat Destruction in British Columbia (Vancouver: David Suzuki Foundation, 2007), 1; Brian Harvey and Misty MacDuffie, Ghost Runs: The Future of Wild Salmon on the North and Central Coasts of British Columbia (Victoria: Raincoast Conservation Society, 2002), 14. bc studies, no. 76, Winter /3 93 94 bc studies runs found that 74 percent were depressed. In addition to calling for changes in fishing regulations and greater caution in aquaculture policy, the report urged an end to clearcutting in drainages that support wild runs. Despite the Department of Fisheries and Oceans’ 1986 “no net loss” salmon habitat protection policy, degradation continues due to poorly defined government policies, insufficient funding and staff, and recent deregulation. A real commitment to ecosystem-based management is required, write Jeffrey Young and John Werring, one that involves “the 2 establishment and enforcement of conservation objectives.” Early twentieth century fisheries managers and fishers would have agreed with some or all of these observations, albeit in somewhat different language. This article seeks to analyze the forestry-fisheries conflict from1900 to 1945, documenting relations between fisheries officials and forest managers, the sources of habitat degradation, and the obstacles to regulatory action. It should, perhaps, come as no surprise to environmental historians that little progress was made in overcoming the structural obstacles to stream protection in this era. Foresters and fisheries managers had their hands full dealing with the allocation and conservation of the resources in their respective fields. Further complicating matters, forests came largely under provincial control, while Ottawa had primary responsibility for salmon. In an era of almost continuous federal-provincial acrimony over natural resource jurisdiction and revenues, the Dominion trod carefully in its relations with British Columbia and its dominant industry in the area of habitat protection. Fisheries managers and fishers were far from silent, however. The record, indeed, is one of frequent complaint about the destructive consequences of streamside logging, a critical perspective that came to take in the broader implications of clearcutting for watershed dynamics. Yet, mindful of the province’s jurisdiction over forests, Ottawa pressed for Victoria to control the timber industry rather than to test the po- tential power of the federal Fisheries Act. Even the 1932 incorporation of a specific prohibition against the deposit of logging waste in streams did not produce a vigorous regulatory stance. One explanation is that unfettered forest exploitation meant more to British Columbia than undisturbed streams did to the Dominion. That would become clear on the rare occasions when federal managers took 2 Sierra Legal Defence Fund, Stream Protection under the Code: The Destruction Continues (Vancouver: sldf, 1997), 1-3; Harvey and MacDuffee, Ghost Runs, 10, 16; Jeffrey Young and John Werring, The Will to Protect: Preserving BC’s Wild Salmon Habitat (Vancouver: David Suzuki Foundation, 2006), 17. “Streams Being Ruined” 95 an aggressive approach to enforcement, in the case of the Stellako River log drives in the 1960s and the clearcutting controversy at Riley Creek on Haida Gwaii late the following decade. In both cases Ottawa retreated when challenged, seeking honourable compromise when the province refused to yield. Like a sediment-choked stream, the constitutional waters were murky, with doubt prevailing over just how far federal jurisdiction over salmon conservation could be pushed in regulating logging. Not until hearing British Columbia’s logging-inspired cases in the 1970s did Supreme Court decisions provide some clarity. The slow pace of scientific inquiry into the ecological dynamics of fish population renewal also comes into play. As one American researcher put it in 1954: “We can say siltation is bad, removal of shade good or bad, water level fluctuation is bad, and make other general statements, but this is not sufficient. We are going to be asked … how much can be tolerated without serious loss to the resource.” Answers to these questions remain elusive today but the problems are old ones, cited frequently as causes of declining fish populations and incorporated in demands for forest practice reform in the years prior to the Second World War. Under- standing why proposals for reforms went unheeded, in the final analysis, demands attention to a political economy that treated both resources as commodities but that ranked the returns of timber above those of fish. “Some resources,” Graeme Wynn notes, “were prized more than others” in the exchange-value calculus of industrial capitalism. Moreover, a profit-sharing arrangement bound the province and timber capital to each other in a relationship that left plenty of room for squabbling over the size of the shares but that left them united against any challenge to profitable forest exploitation. Fishers and managers of commercial salmon stocks had a voice but virtually no input in the affairs of the logging industry, and recreational fishers had even less. Timber, by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, drove the BC economy. Fisheries managers, federal and provincial, were in a subordinate rela- tionship to foresters, their political bosses, and to the industry to which 3 they catered. Professionals in both fields identified with what Samuel P. Hays sees as the central tenet of conservation: “rational planning to promote ef- ficient development and use of all natural resources.” But what would it mean for conservation when one arena of resource exploitation damaged 3 Howard A. Tanner, “Place of Fish and Game in Multiple Use of Watersheds,” Transactions of the American Fisheries Society 87 (1954): 386-91; Graeme Wynn, “‘Shall We Linger along Ambitionless’: Environmental Perspectives on British Columbia,” BC Studies 142/43 (2004): 11. 96 bc studies the productivity of another? Resolving that problem demanded an altered conception of efficiency, one that would tolerate some sacrifice of hard-won profits in the logging sector to the needs of fish and those who captured them. The most logical but extreme solution, involving protection for streamside timber, would mean relinquishing access to the most highly valued stretches of that resource. The philosophy of multiple-use, which came into circulation during the 1930s, offered a conceptual path to balance, but among BC foresters only Ernest Manning seemed to think seriously along these lines before the Second World War. During this period, foresters, as a rule, managed forests in a way that contemplated few constraints on practices to conserve that resource. Demands for a more holistic notion of conservation to embrace the needs of another resource that fell largely under Dominion authority met rigidities in outlook and economic reality that were too 4 strong to overcome. This was not a conflict between dedicated conservationists and ruthless exploiters. The salmon canners and the federal fisheries -of ficials who catered to their needs were adept at using the language of conservation to control access to the resource, a tendency most clearly demonstrated in their attack on First Nations salmon weirs. Commercial fishers had their own allocation motives, campaigning to deny licences to the Japanese, fighting with sport fishers over rights to salmon, and waging an internal war over catch-share that pitted the troll, gillnet, and seine sectors against each other. But it would be a mistake of equal magnitude to dismiss all expressions of conservationist sentiment as a mask for material concerns. Among rural resource users, argues Richard Judd, a “conservation consciousness” provides strong cultural sanctions against wasteful and destructive practices.
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