Foreshore to Forest: Restoring the Integrity of the Shawnigan Watershed and Securing Clean and Abundant Drinking Water to 12,000 Citizens in perpetuity.
by Bruce Fraser
by Bruce Fraser
Our two largest landowners in the Shawnigan Watershed are Timberwest and Island Timberlands. In the normal course of forestry planning, these two firms must project the current status of their timberland holdings forward for at least the length of a rotation, and in many cases for several rotations. In order to pursue forest management over such lengthy time scales they, out of necessity, have developed very comprehensive inventories of the physical and biological characteristics of their land base. This information is much more specific and much better recorded than almost any other aspect of the Shawnigan Basin environment.
Because the forest holdings of the two major companies have just passed through the harvest phase of the last rotation it will now be approximately 50 years before the next harvest phase is likely to take place. In the meantime, maintaining reforestation success and road network stability, tracking market demands and regulatory requirements and estimating the effects of changed physical conditions on forest health must continue as their resource base is managed for the long term.
The context for upland forest management in the Shawnigan Basin extends well beyond the direct land base and tree growth considerations of a forest company. In the next fifty years, climate change on the east coast of Vancouver Island is projected, by the University of Victoria, to create increasingly volatile changes in hydrology, including longer and more severe summer droughts and milder winters with more frequent and intense rainstorms. These changes will have direct impacts on the viability of both natural and planted forest species, the stability of road systems on steep slopes, vulnerability to pests and pathogens and risks of major wildfires. They will have impacts on the stability of upland forest and shoreline areas that provide domestic and ecosystem sustaining water supplies. They will also have reverberating effects on public health, the aquatic ecology of the lake and the attractiveness of its surroundings for recreation and sustained property values.
Over the next 50 years, the Shawnigan Basin will see growth in population, increased water demand, increased impact of habitation, increased extraction of gravel, more dense housing tracts, more sewage, more fertilizer usage, more domestic chemical pollutants, more invasive aquatic species, more road development, more recreation intensity and much more public concern for the environmental security that underwrites their health, their property values and their investments. All this will occur in a relatively small and crowded basin held largely in a multitude of private hands. Compounding this complexity is the numerous agency jurisdictions that are largely independent of one another and lack any established mechanism for dealing with cumulative impacts of the human footprint. Even our local government Official Community Plans are expected to lose relevance in a single decade.
Shawnigan is a classic case history of the march of cumulative impact in which each user of their portion of the area pursues the exploitation of their “entitlement” without a requirement to assess the overall outcome for the basin or the lake and certainly without measures to address it as it emerges. So, how do we proceed to bring a sense of the whole basin and the integrity of the lake into everyone’s thinking when there is no single formally mandated authority to conduct the process?
Timber West and Island Timberlands have agreed to collaborate as partners in this challenge. The Shawnigan Basin Society’s responsibility will be to reconvene the Shawnigan Roundtable initiated in 2012, inviting land owners, government agencies and the public to participate in preparing a 50 Year Plan for the Basin. It will use the generation-spanning, rotation length of forestry planning as the model and add in the climate projections, the ecological information, the technical advice and the public interests already assembled by the Society. To begin with, the forest companies will undertake to illustrate how their fifty-year rotation plans are constructed and what they reveal about their environmental change assumptions. Then, each other participant will be invited to project their interests forward for fifty years, considering what changing conditions are expected to apply to them and how they will need to respond. What could arise out of this thinking is that all parties would begin to think of Shawnigan as a whole, how their aspirations interact and what they each must contribute to ensure that in 50 years we will still have an environment that serves our many existing interests. Of course, we will also have to anticipate that new interests will inevitably emerge as conditions change and that any plan will have to be adjusted accordingly.
Creating a 50 Year plan for the Shawnigan Basin is a magnificent challenge of multigenerational vision. Our grandchildren will inherit our results, let’s turn what could be a burden into a gift.
Because the forest holdings of the two major companies have just passed through the harvest phase of the last rotation it will now be approximately 50 years before the next harvest phase is likely to take place. In the meantime, maintaining reforestation success and road network stability, tracking market demands and regulatory requirements and estimating the effects of changed physical conditions on forest health must continue as their resource base is managed for the long term.
The context for upland forest management in the Shawnigan Basin extends well beyond the direct land base and tree growth considerations of a forest company. In the next fifty years, climate change on the east coast of Vancouver Island is projected, by the University of Victoria, to create increasingly volatile changes in hydrology, including longer and more severe summer droughts and milder winters with more frequent and intense rainstorms. These changes will have direct impacts on the viability of both natural and planted forest species, the stability of road systems on steep slopes, vulnerability to pests and pathogens and risks of major wildfires. They will have impacts on the stability of upland forest and shoreline areas that provide domestic and ecosystem sustaining water supplies. They will also have reverberating effects on public health, the aquatic ecology of the lake and the attractiveness of its surroundings for recreation and sustained property values.
Over the next 50 years, the Shawnigan Basin will see growth in population, increased water demand, increased impact of habitation, increased extraction of gravel, more dense housing tracts, more sewage, more fertilizer usage, more domestic chemical pollutants, more invasive aquatic species, more road development, more recreation intensity and much more public concern for the environmental security that underwrites their health, their property values and their investments. All this will occur in a relatively small and crowded basin held largely in a multitude of private hands. Compounding this complexity is the numerous agency jurisdictions that are largely independent of one another and lack any established mechanism for dealing with cumulative impacts of the human footprint. Even our local government Official Community Plans are expected to lose relevance in a single decade.
Shawnigan is a classic case history of the march of cumulative impact in which each user of their portion of the area pursues the exploitation of their “entitlement” without a requirement to assess the overall outcome for the basin or the lake and certainly without measures to address it as it emerges. So, how do we proceed to bring a sense of the whole basin and the integrity of the lake into everyone’s thinking when there is no single formally mandated authority to conduct the process?
Timber West and Island Timberlands have agreed to collaborate as partners in this challenge. The Shawnigan Basin Society’s responsibility will be to reconvene the Shawnigan Roundtable initiated in 2012, inviting land owners, government agencies and the public to participate in preparing a 50 Year Plan for the Basin. It will use the generation-spanning, rotation length of forestry planning as the model and add in the climate projections, the ecological information, the technical advice and the public interests already assembled by the Society. To begin with, the forest companies will undertake to illustrate how their fifty-year rotation plans are constructed and what they reveal about their environmental change assumptions. Then, each other participant will be invited to project their interests forward for fifty years, considering what changing conditions are expected to apply to them and how they will need to respond. What could arise out of this thinking is that all parties would begin to think of Shawnigan as a whole, how their aspirations interact and what they each must contribute to ensure that in 50 years we will still have an environment that serves our many existing interests. Of course, we will also have to anticipate that new interests will inevitably emerge as conditions change and that any plan will have to be adjusted accordingly.
Creating a 50 Year plan for the Shawnigan Basin is a magnificent challenge of multigenerational vision. Our grandchildren will inherit our results, let’s turn what could be a burden into a gift.
Web Design by VedaWorks and the Shawnigan Basin Society