Those are interesting comments, and that is a valid debate that is always ongoing when you have catastrophic losses like the ones we've seen. I can tell you a story about what we're dealing with in British Columbia currently.
As I said, we had the mountain pine beetle go through, and at that time the provincial and federal governments made the decision—with the support of the people, obviously—that because British Columbia is so forestry-dependent, we should try to get as much economic value off these dead trees as we possibly could, while at the same time trying to mitigate any potential losses into the future, trying to be on the leading edge of the infestation.
At that time, we didn't know how long the shelf life would be. When I say “shelf life”, I mean the value of the wood when you can get a product out of it, rather than having it rot. We did a salvage program. We did what we call “uplifts”. We increased the amount of cut that was available to licensees to be able to get at the leading edge of the infestation and also get the wealth we could generate off the land base, all for good reasons.
Looking back now—history is 20/20—we know that in some areas it helped very much. In other areas it was very difficult to maintain a level across the land base where we weren't impacting habitat, areas that had other values.
Now we have the spruce beetle coming through, and one train of thought says that we should do the same thing, get the economic value off that land base, which is true. However, as chief forester responsible for forest management, regulations and policies in place, this time around we've said that there are some areas we will not get into. This spread is happening too fast for us to recover everything and try to pretend we can manage it.
We can do a better job of trying to plan for resilience in the future. We can leave some areas in retention, knowing that they're going to be dead and dying, and leave some areas for salvage operations where we can get some economic value. We understand that there are specific valleys that we will not have the opportunity to get into because of timing and infrastructure needs and costs. Let's find some research dollars to evaluate those effects, so when the next epidemic comes through, we know what the right levels of intervention are.
With regard to stopping some of these pests, it's like a wildfire. It's dependent on the climate. If we get long enough and cold enough spells in our climate, it maintains the populations and they don't increase. When we don't get that, which we're seeing with climate change, we see the bugs changing their life cycles and we see an increase. When the host is no longer available, the populations of the pests die down, or they go next door and find the next host.
Is it controllable? I would say that depends on Mother Nature and the weather.
Is there an opportunity to situate the forest so there are more options for us to manage? I would suggest there absolutely is.