From Common Ground magazine, October 2006.
By Noba Anderson
Cortes is my home, both in people and place. From the specific scent that pervades my awareness in late August of green arbutus skin, dry moss and sea salt, all sun-baked together with a hint of cricket song, the people and this place go back to the very beginning of my memory. My awareness began here. Cortes is home. For me, this is the heart of community forestry, of people in place.
Community forestry is about land rights. It seems that public awareness is being informed by the undistinguished land rights and treaty claims processes of theFirst Nations. All people, regardless of colour or history, want a sense of responsibility, permanence and purpose relating to land. Community forestry is about logging. Yes, it is about cutting down trees, creating forest industry jobs and building things with wood. It is also about other community values, such as walking trails, tourism, berry and mushroom collecting, sacred spaces and forest health. It is about community engagement, public process and working with your neighbour, however pleasant or tough. It’s about standing up, being involved and taking responsibility.
BC context
Community forestry is a way of engaging with the wild spaces within which we live. It is simply local people making local decisions about their wild places. The vast majority of public forest lands in BC are allocated to large, international, industrial forest companies. More and more, rural BC is demanding increased community engagement and benefit. Five years ago, our provincial government took back a significant amount of cutting rights from major forest operators and have been redistributing them to communities in various ways, including the expansion of the Community Forest program. Community Forest Agreements give communities management rights over nearby public lands. Although this is a breakthrough in the BC forest tenure system, there is reason for cynicism. Areas allocated to communities tend to be very socially contentious or heavily logged, situated in community watersheds, or accompanied by other operational and social difficulties.
Once communities begin the planning and cutting processes, we find ourselves working within a system designed for huge companies that does not suit our specific needs. Economically, it can be very hard to survive in the world of big business, but for many, there is simply no other acceptable alternative to local control. It seems that our provincial government is a bit overwhelmed, if not perplexed, by the outpouring of communities that want community forests. It is truly a global movement that has seemingly caught on overnight in BC. Although there are pitfalls and gaping holes in our provincial program, I find the whole movement very exciting.
Working with community forest initiatives in South America, South East Asia and around BC, I am struck by the universality of our desire for community forests. This vision resonates everywhere, both with left-leaning eco-folk and people from right-leaning industry towns. Cortes is not alone in wanting the decision-making process about its public forests to be returned to its community.
Cortes
Through my travels, I learned about peoples’ struggles and successes and came to believe that Cortes Island had the necessary pieces to allow it to become a community forest success story. As an island, we are a defined area and people, giving us a clear land base and associated community. We have well educated, passionate and extraordinarily engaged community members. There is broad-based local support for the community forest vision and a model of native/non-native partnership. We have an extensive ecosystem-based plan for the island that, when implemented, will leave a fully functioning forest over time and throughout space. We have had and especially now continue to have strong political support, and above all, we have a real love of place. We are not going away and neither is our vision of a community forest.
In the ‘90s, the Klahoose First Nation, within whose traditional territory we reside, led the way in pursuing ecosystem-based forest management both on Cortes and in its broader territory. Cortes residents, led by the Cortes Island Forest Committee (CIFC), shared with Klahoose many common interests and concerns regarding local forest management issues. As a whole, the Cortes community was not opposed to logging. However, like people everywhere, we did want the resources – plants, animals and water – of our forests maintained, as well as access to the economic opportunities from timber cut in our neighbourhood.
We realized that, in order to make this happen, we needed tenure over the public forestlands. So the CIFC, along with the Silva Forest Foundation and Klahoose, embarked on an extensive ecosystem-based analysis and mapping project of the island. The intention was to encourage both industry and government ministries to look beyond the boundaries of their respective jurisdictions by creating a landscape level planning framework that viewed the island as a whole, interconnected living system. This work was well under way by the time the provincial government created the formal Community Forest program in the late ‘90s.
In early 1999, the CIFC formally incorporated and became the Cortes Ecoforestry Society (CES). A few months later, we signed a model memorandum of understanding with the Klahoose to work collaboratively under ecosystem-based principles on the forests of Cortes. The two communities celebrated this model community partnership with a signing ceremony and feast at the Klahoose village. Both parties agreed to work together to protect common interest in healthy island ecosystems through ecosystem-based forestry, and CES stated its support for a fair treaty settlement for Klahoose.
There has been extensive planning and preparation for the Cortes community forest for 15 years now. A draft management plan, business plan and Community Forest proposal have been prepared for the approximate 5,000 hectares of Cortes public forest land. Industrial private forest lands owned by Island Timberlands – previously Weyerhaeuser, and before it, MacMillan Bloedel – also comprise acomponent to the envisioned community forest, but that is truly another story. As for the public lands, our Cortes Community Forest proposal will be fine tuned in accordance with the provincial government’s evolving policy at the time of submission.
Cortes is home and I want to love this island when I die here. My community forest work is far deeper than a job. It is a lifestyle. That is what keeps us all going, year after year. There is simply no other acceptable alternative. We all have community forests. We just need to start taking responsibility for them.
Noba Anderson is executive director of the Cortes Ecoforestry Society 250-935-6885 (noba@cortesecoforestry.org)(http://www.vancouverobserver.com/tags/cortes-ecoforestry-society).