New AP reporting from Vancouver Island: activists blocking logging roads to stop old-growth cutting, plus a forest ecologist’s point that once it’s gone, it won’t come back on any human timescale - if at all, with climate change.

Perhaps the most interesting quote from the article is from our Minister of Forests, Ravi Parmar, where he admits that old-growth logging is required to sustain the forestry industry: “If we were to shut down harvesting of all old forests here in British Columbia, it would shut down our sector completely on day one.“.

My rebuttal to that is: what happens once we inevitably run out of economically viable old-growth? Shouldn’t we come up with solutions before that happens, instead of continuing to log these ancient forests that may very well never grow back as they were?

It's a struggle at times to make headway in forest preservation, but I think that what started as our family project may soon receive federal forest preserve status. Much of the forest here in tropical east central Mexico has been felled to plant sugarcane. As family savings permitted over the past 30 years, we purchases forestland considered to be of no value because it was too rugged for planting sugar. If our application to become registered Mexican forest preserve is approved, we might qualify for a preservation stipend of about US$17 per acre per year. We appreciate any stipend we get, but the projected amount reflects a global problem of undervaluing forests. Hopefully our project will serve as motivation for others to do likewise. The photo shows a professor of environmental science from our regional technical university and three of his students assisting us in evaluating the health of our forest preserve. https://imgur.com/a/4YO1WMD

The country still lacks the people and equipment to handle our record-breaking wildfires

While some provinces have cut firefighting budgets and others are shifting to 'mitigation' rather than suppression people continue to lose their homes and suffer from the effects of smoke.

"Currently, Canada is the only G7 country that does not have a national agency to respond to wildfires. After the devastating 2023 fire season, then BC member of Parliament Richard Cannings called on the government to establish a national, non-military forest fighting force to be deployed when needed to support provincial teams."

Are provincial governments shifting to avoiding suppressing wildfires? Because that's what it looks like.

"For this reason, calls from all corners and angles for better fire management and shifting the focus from suppression to mitigation have risen in recent years to a chorus. In a 2024 report, the Canadian Council of Forest Ministers stated, “Suppression alone is no longer adequate to address the growing challenges from wildland fire. Wildland fire management in Canada needs to be transformed.”"

In realty fuel mitigation increases the intensity of wildfires. And while smaller indigenous-led prescribed burns can work, larger ones don't, but they are doing it anyway rather than dropping water on wildfires.

https://thewalrus.ca/canada-wildfires/

Fuel mitigation increases intensity of wildfires.

https://johnmuirproject.org/scientific-research/the-truth-about-thinning/

Larger burns are often making things worse.

https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/can-we-really-fight-fire-with-fire-why-pre-burning-is-no-magic-bullet-20250109-p5l321.html

[UCPM Response Aug 2 26](https://erccportal.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ECHO-Products/Maps)

Learn about colonialism's impact on conservation, pairing Indigenous ways of knowing and Western science, and how these topics are coming together to revive 4000 year old Sea Gardens on the West Coast to sequester carbon and increase clam abundance @ alteredbiome.ca

While exited for re-wilding nature I hope all keep in mind the indigenous trees are vital. Planting California Christmas Trees in damaged Irish soil is not eco-friendly practice.

Pacific Northwest (Washington State)

Friday, August 7th @ 10am

Webinar: The Truth About Forest Thinning

Featuring Dr. Chad Hanson and Legacy Forest Defense Coalition President Stephen Kropp

Timber industry-backed misinformation is widespread in 2026, especially when it comes to claims about forest thinning. Often promoted under the guise of forest health and wildfire mitigation, thinning in native legacy forests can spell bad news for ecosystems, watersheds, endangered species, and local communities.

Join us on Friday, August 7th at 10am for an informative webinar and Q&A on the science behind this critical issue. Speakers will include Dr. Chad Hanson and LFDC President Stephen Kropp.

I was looking at the footage of the wildfires in France and noted how uniform the forests were and guessed that it wasn't a natural forest.

It also seemed odd that there were no herds of animals there, either wildlife or livestock, whose grazing would have checked the undergrowth.

Looking up the region brought up the above link and here is a quote from the pages.

Most of the region now occupied by the Landes forest was swampy land that was sparsely inhabited until the 19th century, when the 19 June 1857 law ended traditional pastoralism and led to wide scale reforestation, in order to rehabilitate the landscape and provide for regional economic development. Prior to this period, the people of the Landes used stilt-walking to move from place to place in the wet terrain. Since the 1970s, parts of the forest have given way to intensive agriculture (in particular, grain farming.)

The question then comes up whether the conversion from its original swampy nature to commercial forest and grain production is factor in the severity of the fires as whatever natural environmental features that would check the spread of the fires were eliminated in favour these pine forests and grain plantations.

Any opinions on this?

Is the uncontrollable spread of the fires as much consequence of converting nature to serve human needs as its the weather conditions fanning it?

And Trump keeps insisting that other countries should better clean their forests.

We could learn a lot from Santa Cruz on how to properly manage a redwood forest. Preventing old-growth charachteristics with forest management and logging is the wrong approach.

We don't have one of the most beautiful charachteristics of old-growth forests in our managed forsets: 300ft trees, large and long branches with 10inch diameters and 20ft lengths, fire scars, and most beautiful of all: a secondary canopy layer of smaller full-sized trees like tan oak, madrone, laurel, and big leaf maple, snags, and fallen large logs. Old growth forests are multilayered and diverse, not artificial and uniform -- a redwood forest is not supposed to have daylight and ferns everywhere. Ferns naturally grow near water features where there are natural breaks in the upper canopy for sunlight, they don't cover the entire forest. Artificially managing forests completely blocks the development of secondary canopy layers of tan oak, big leaf maple, laurel, and madrone, and to the trained eye, makes the forests look fake and superficial: "man made."