What are your names?
TL: I’m Tea Leaf
OL: And I’m Oak Leaf

And what’s the organization you’re from?
OL: Ya we’re part of the core organizing team for Old Growth Vancouver.
TL: That started in March. We met at at the BC Forests March, a group of us, and we got each other’s social media contacts and we created a group chat and it started very organically. We started talking to each other and wondering what we could do for Fairy Creek and then we had weekly online meetings and eventually we started brainstorming and spontaneously doing events and tons of people would show up and speakers would show up.
OL: It’s gotten way more support than we ever would have imagined.
TL: We thought we were going to do things on a really low-key level but as soon as we started reaching out to people, it was like everyone wants to do something but not everyone can come out here.

So what was the last event that you had?
OL: I think it was our best event, it was a meeting at Stanley Park and we had a couple of Indigenous speakers and then we did a nature walk and a community building event.
TL: One of the other organizers went through the forest with a microphone and talked about the different old growth trees there and why they were important. We also saw a bard owl when we were there and then talked about them for a bit and people just kind of walked and talked with each other and arranged car pools to come here. Eventually we got to the end of the walk and Uncle Stacey sang a song and so did Cedar George (*from Tsleil Waututh) and they both did a bunch of talks. It was really cool because no-one really knew each other but everyone was like friends and family afterwards.
OL: It wasn’t this whole awkward thing where the event’s over and kind of teetering off; people stayed and got to know each other and since the pandemic started I haven’t even witnessed any community at all like that.
TL: Ya I’ve been doing activism for 3 years now and mostly I started off with animal rights and then environmental stuff and climate change and now old growth stuff. So it’s evolved over time. I’ve known so many activists and been to so many different activism events but usually civilians or people who watch the event are scared or they want to be as far away from that as possible. But these events, these community building ones, people walk past and they're like oh this seems interesting, and then they just come and join us and then our group just kept expanding and expanding all throughout the event.

When did you first come out here in person?
TL: We came out here once to Eden Camp and Eden Grove just for a day and it was absolutely amazing. We’ve always loved nature, we’ve always been in parks and went hiking but we’ve never been in such an undisturbed piece of nature before. And then seeing it in contrast to the clear-cuts right beside it was a big awakening and it made us want to come back here as soon as we can and do what we can to help out here.
OL: And do our part.

If you were going to try and convince somebody to support, what are some of the main things that you would say to them to help educate them about why it’s important to protect old growth and why you’re giving your time and energy to come here?
OL: I would maybe get the know the person first and see where their range of thinking comes. There are a million reasons why we should save these old growth trees from it being unceded territories and obviously the land should belong to the Indigenous people rather than just being clear-cut and exploited for profit. And the whole environmental and scientific standpoint - the second growth forest, it doesn’t come back from being clear cut.
TL: The biodiversity doesn't come back.
OL: Ya, I just went to forestry school. I just graduated. I just really wanted to see for myself because the BC forestry industry is so like so gung about about like 'we’re really good at our environmental practices, out of all of Canada, we’re the most sustainable and we only harvest less than 0.1 % of trees in a year'.. or something. And they have this whole map and all of these stats and its just compartmentalized nature because they don’t have the understanding of the intrinsic value of the ecosystem and how it all works together. They see it as simply a stand of trees and they clear-cut these stands of trees and they plant trees; they plant a few trees for every one they cut down. I’m also a certified silviculturist and the protocols just don’t come anywhere to what they need to be as far as the considerations for the environment. For instance, if they actually cared about the environment they would be doing selective cutting rather than clear-cutting.
A really good example of an environmental approach to logging is Wildwood. It’s this guy who used to be a forester and he has his own plot of land and he tends to it all himself and he takes into effect the canopy exposure to light, the ecosystem’s needs, and he only takes what he needs and that’s a hugely important part. With the forestry industry and the government, they just cut as much as they can for the most profit and it’s leaned on old growth logging for way to long. The fact that a lot of loggers rely on a source of income from old growth logging is just really sad because it’s a non-renewable resource. And a lot of wildlife species rely on these old growth forests and that’s what makes it really important and they just have a huge disregard for the ecosystem as a whole.

You said that old growth is a non-renewable resource. I think an argument some people make is like “trees grow back”..
OL: Ohhhh, when loggers say that the forest is just trees it irks me. When they just boil it down to trees. Because the way they plant them is they just find a suitable spot and they plop a little baby tree in there that’s about a year old. And you don’t actually know if they’re healthy until they're about 40 years old and a lot of them aren't used to growing into clear-cuts because unless they’re part of that first Seral stage of where it’s just beginning to grow and the other trees are used to different micro climates - like they prefer shade or prefer certain types of environments which don’t really exist in clear cuts. And they all grow at the same height so then it creates a one story canopy rather than a multi-level canopy where a well established old growth forest is multi-leveled canopy that lets more light in. If you’ve ever walked into a second growth forest and it’s so dark in there, there’s barely any plants on the ground. I’m like oh, I can just tell exactly how they logged this and just the terrible forestry management of it. In silviculture, they have about 20 years to get a forest back to what is called ‘free to grow’ standards and that’s basically to the government’s standards of free growing i.e. this tree is healthy, it will grow to a mature height etc. Depending on the type of forest they have to have a certain amount of trees in an area or in a plot that are healthy in order to have a free to grow survey and then they’re like okay we might come back here but law doesn’t really require them to after it’s labeled free to grow. They're doing even shorter and shorter rotations in crops now because they just see them as TFL – Tree Farm Lots – and that it’s a rotating crop. It’s really sad how they see that. And when I was in class I could tell that I was the only one who was a little bit troubled with the practices, because everyone was thinking that they made forestry sustainable when they updated all the laws in 1994, with FERVA. The thing is it looks really good on paper in numbers, but when you begin to question what these numbers are based off of, they’re based off of profits; and no real science behind how ecosystems work and an ecosystem's needs because in nature you’re not going to just cut down all this land, have it exposed to all weather conditions, totally mess up the soil because you’re using machinery on the site and it can push down the soil. There’s this whole other thing about the carbon sequestering. When you cut down the trees all of that is gone but when a tree falls down naturally it still holds the carbon and there’s a lot of carbon in the soil too. So when it’s compact it dissipates and the overall soil quality isn’t great after it’s been clear-cut.

There was some research published saying that old growth wasn’t storing carbon and that it was actually bad for the climate somehow and that second growth is better for carbon storage and this was used as an argument to justify cutting down old growth?
OL: I hear that so much. So basically the bigger the tree, the more carbon it can hold. And that makes sense. They call it ‘recharging’ a forest when you cut it down. It’s a fresh way to have this young productive forest because it’s going to absorb all of this carbon. And it does absorb a lot of carbon at first but then it kind of teeters off. Like these old growth forests, they’ve been there for hundreds and hundreds, sometimes even more than a thousand years and that’s a lot of accumulated carbon and they do still suck up carbon; they’re still huge carbon sinks. I know that loggers love to use information that’s convenient to their agenda of logging. You’d be surprised how much education it doesn’t take for you to become a registered forester
TL: Like 4 months
OL: If I went to school for under another year I could be a registered professional forester, without the experience.
My schooling was a lot of field-based, on the ground learning from every single sector of forestry, so it was a little bit of everything and then I went into my own research through the government of British Columbia and all the protocols. And I got to see some TFL paperwork that was processed for certain cut blocks and actually went to those cut blocks and just interpreted all of the data and just went down this whole rabbit hole of research. It’s so far from sustainable. But sustainable is such a subjective word because it means something different to everybody. You ask a logger and they’re like the forest will come back because we only harvest a certain percent each year so we’re never going to run out of trees. However, when you weaken and ecosystem, when you clear-cut an ecosystem and even integrate climate, which adds an indefinite layer to how ecosystems are going to survive in the future. They actually started planting trees from Oregon up here on the southern coast of British Columbia just because they're anticipating the warming of the climate. That really shocked me.

It’s like they're acknowledging the issue and trying to mitigate it without addressing the roots cause? They’re trying to put a band-aid over it, it sounds like.
OL: That’s totally it, it’s like when you clear-cut a forest, that forest becomes unhealthy. When you walk through a clear-cut you can see so many invasive species, it’s just overrun. Invasive species thrive in disturbed environments because the ecosystem is weaker there. Whereas these old growth forests have little to no human disturbances so they're more natural. You won’t see the invasive species, you’ll just see wild life being wild. And you don’t see that at a clear-cut. You see the stumps left behind and all of the invasive species and small trees.
The invasive species are a huge one because the invasive species management is super lacking and it’s not really environmental. There’s a couple of options - you can physically remove them or you can use pesticides, which are going to have a bio-accumulation effect and is really bad for the environment and it could have unintended consequences. Invasive species can also be competition for native species or can be insects as well, I’m sure you’ve heard of the mountain pine beetle and that’s a huge problem in the interior. They create this environment that is very susceptible to the pine beetle and it’s not helping their forestry because they have to take into account the mountain pine beetle. But they don’t really have realistic numbers for that because you can’t anticipate a mountain pine beetle spread or attack on a forest. Circling back to the idea of how their idea of sustainable is meeting the numbers.

Okay, I'll leave it at that because we both have to head out. Thank you so much.