Please remove the Carmi recreation trails near Penticton from the BCTS sales inventory.
Our forests are crown assets and should be managed for the people of B.C. by skilled foresters, biologists and economists, not a sales team who don’t care if they give the trees away for a net financial loss to the communities and our province.
I’m assuming you don’t get out in the field much, but I can assure you that the people of Penticton, and those who use the Carmi trails, spend plenty of time in our local forests. We can see what’s going on, we live with what’s going on. We experience the forest fires, thick smoke, high winds and blow down in the ridiculously tiny leave strips, blocks of 15-20 year old trees dying to drought, floods, roads, roads and more roads. We know what modern logging shows look like with mechanized logging, stumpage fees, foreign owned non local mills, dams and water rights, water use and land sales affecting the use of the lands, ranching, motorized sports, random gun play. We see and live in all of these changes.
At the risk of sounding like a country bumpkin, you folks in the city in your offices, who recreate somewhere other than our publicly owned forests, are completely removed from and unaware of how your policies are affecting those of us living, working and playing away from the larger population centres. You seem to feel we are easily fooled by your stories. We aren’t and guess who looks like they are being fooled by BCTS? I’ll give you a hint, its not us.
Your policies reflect desperation, short-sightedness and poverty thinking. Are we so poor in B.C. that we have to log small recreation areas valued for so much more than timber? Values that create healthy, intelligent and sustainable communities. Communities that are needed to pay your pension. Is this the legacy you want to leave?
Please leave our recreation trails alone, we do not want them logged. If our timber supply is so tight that we have to take trees from places like this then the industry needs to change itself, it can’t keep taking more, there is no more to give.
Please wake up from your delusions and see what’s going on before it’s too late.
Michelle Parry
Penticton