The lawyer for a West Kootenay environmental organization has sent a formal cease-and-desist letter to BC Timber Sales, requesting that the agency drop its plans to log a piece of forest near Castlegar.

The contested cutblock is located in the Cai Creek drainage near the Bombi Summit.

B次元官网网址淐ai Creek should be protected," says Joe Karthein of the Save What's Left Conservation Society. "It is a biodiverse forest full of old growth trees, and B.C. Timber Sales' logging plans would irreversibly disrupt this forest."

Biologist Matt Casselman of Castlegar is pushing to save the same forest through his website entitled Save Cai Creek.

"We're losing an intact watershed," Casselman says. "It has limited disturbance, and that, in and of itself, is really rare to see these days, and carries a lot of value for wildlife and ecosystem integrity."

The letter, written by lawyer Benjamin Isitt representing Save What's Left, asks that "BCTS immediately remove Cutblock TA2185-3 from its Sales Schedule and cease and desist from any further actions toward the development or advertising for auction of Cai Block 3."

A cease and desist letter is a formal request to stop an activity that might be infringing on someone else's rights. It is not enforceable by the courts on its own, but it can be used as a way of avoiding litigation, or it can signal the possibility of litigation.

BC Timber Sales is an independent organization within the BC Ministry of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development, created to develop Crown timber for auction. BCTS plans and designs logging operations, builds logging roads, then sells the timber to the highest bidder.

BCTS has laid out three cutblocks in the Cai Creek drainage, but it is specifically Cutblock 3 that Casselman and Karthein are concerned about.

They say Cutblock 3 may not be fully an old growth forest but it has some old growth in it. It is valuable for being an 80-per-cent intact watershed, which Casselman says is rare.

"I think anyone who drives through this province or takes a flight can pretty easily see that we don't have many intact areas left that haven't been and left with roads and cut blocks," he says. 

Intact watersheds

In the 2021 document entitled , the provincial government's Old Growth Technical Advisory Panel wrote that intact watersheds are those that are free, or largely free, from modification by humans:

"Intact watersheds maintain biodiversity, support wildlife habitat, act as climate refugia, and provide a suite of ecosystem services that include regulating local climate, regulating hydrology, and maintaining hydro-riparian ecosystems and aquatic values. By allowing natural processes to continue at the landscape scale, intact watersheds have high ecological integrity and resilience."

The panel's report recommended that such watersheds not be logged because they are "critical to maintain or recover landscape-scale resilience."

Issit's letter states that Cai Creek was identified by the panel as a watershed that is 70-80 per cent intact.

BCTS should have told the public about this intact watershed status, the letter states, when in 2024 it carried out online public engagement about its intentions for Cai Creek. Issit characterizes this as an omission that deprived the public of valuable information.

BC Timber Sales and the Ministry of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development, while acknowledging they had received Issit's letter, declined to comment on it when contacted by the Nelson Star. 

Old growth

Karthein and Casselman are advocating on behalf of what they describe as an intact watershed, but they point out that the presence of old growth forest is also an important part of their advocacy.

They say there are old growth trees in Cutblock 3, including the largest documented ponderosa pine in B.C., four other ponderosa pines ranked within the top 30 in size provincially, two white pines ranked eighth and ninth in the province, and many large Douglas fir, western red cedar, western larch, and grand fir. Some of these have been accepted for inclusion in UBC's . (Inclusion on that list does not come with any form of protection from logging.)

"These (large trees) and associated plant and animal species are found in low elevation, highly productive forests exhibiting old forest characteristics, including many veteran trees that survived the most recent documented fire in 1934," Issit's letter states.

Casselman says BCTS has agreed to reserve old growth trees from harvest except if the old growth tree is within the right-of-way of a road or trail, is a forest health concern, or a safety risk to workers. The company will leave these individual trees with buffer zones around them, but Casselman calls this a piecemeal approach. He says that many of the old growth trees will still be lost through road building and harvesting, and that buffer zones are not enough to maintain an intact watershed.

"BCTS is focused on retaining individual trees," he says, "but in doing so, they are neglecting or ignoring the larger loss that's occurring in this watershed."

Old growth boundaries are fluid

North of Cutblock 3, there is a provincially designated Old Growth Management Area (OGMA) in which the company is not allowed to cut. But there is nothing but small trees and stumps in that OGMA, Casselman and Karthein say.

This is not unusual. OGMA boundaries are and provincial regulations allow forest managers to move the boundaries of OGMAs around at will.

B.C.'s professional reliance model, instituted in the early 2000s, allows professional foresters working for resource companies to make timber cutting decisions formerly reserved for ministry scientists, including changing the boundaries of OGMAs.

In B.C. there is old growth that is not located in OGMAs, and many OGMAs that contain no old growth.

A spokesperson for the forest ministry with the Nelson Star in 2022, stating that the calculation of old growth targets in the Kootenays is B次元官网网址渁spatial,B次元官网网址� meaning that the amount of old growth is calculated as a percentage of the total forest across large parts of the landscape, not as lines on a map. Asked if there is old growth that is not in OGMAs, the ministry spokesperson at the time agreed there is.

Revenue and conflict of interest

Issit's letter also proposes that logging Cutblock 3 will add little to BCTS' gross profit and net revenue while providing few long-term jobs and little economic benefit to the community.

The letter also contains an allegation of conflict of interest across all BCTS operations, stating that the same BCTS officials responsible for the economy of the logging operation (developing and advertising cutblocks) are also responsible for the ecology of it B次元官网网址� "independently and objectively" approving cutting permits and road permits. 

Casselman says BCTS's rationale for logging Cutblock 3 may be that they want to stem a fir beetle infestation, but he says this rare forest type demands methods that are more subtle than in other forests. He likens it to methods used to mitigate the risk of wildfires. 

"I've hiked other areas where they've done wildfire management, and you wouldn't even know they were in there. They can go in and then leave a place relatively undisturbed if they want to."