Goods from the Woods

For the vast majority of people raised amidst B.C.’s timber hegemony, it can be hard to see the forest for the trees—especially with revenue from lumber resources so low. Enter Royal Roads’ Centre for Non-Timber Resources and the Buy BC Wild Initiative, who have been exploring ways to find a sustainable future in our forests that doesn’t involve clearcutting—or even logging, per se. And the public face of their research is this weekend’s third annual Shop the Wild Festival, where more than 50 exhibitors stand ready to educate and entertain with edible offerings and wild chef demos fresh from the woods. We talked to festival coordinator Holly Caine about Shop the Wild and what life after timber could look like.

Monday Magazine: No pun intended, but what’s Shop the Wild in a nutshell?

Holly Caine: This initiative started in 2005 and it was the first gathering of all the businesses in B.C. coming together to showcase all of the products that come from our forests. The people at CNTR realized very quickly that they needed to bring everybody together—the stakeholders were all over the place and nobody was really talking to each other. So they created the Buy BC Wild Initiative to do that, as they were really all over the map—it went from mushroom pickers and essential-oil distillers to food manufacturers—and now we’re educating the public to say, “If you want to buy a local product, it’s not just farms.”

MM: So we’re not talking about farmers here?

HC: Farms make up about 50 percent of the businesses in our directory, but it’s also the wild products that come out of forests—and that is local. It’s indigenous and locally foraged, and what we wanted to do was give the people who do the foraging the opportunity to sell those products, as opposed to going through a distributor. We want the money to go back into the community.

MM: Do you think the general public still sees timber as the only real resource in our forests?

HC: Yes. If you look at the Ministry of Forests, although there is biodiversity in the research branch, the majority of the ministry is about timber. For those of us who are in non-timber forest products, it’s actually everything but timber. We’re trying to do some branding, so we’re not a negative: we’re not non-timber, we’re actually B.C.’s wild sector. And the forest industry is in such a downturn right now, the opportunity for us to increase our public awareness is huge.

MM: Are there any sort of numbers for the non-timber resources available in our forests?

HC: There aren’t any industry analysis numbers yet—the researchers at the CNTR are working on compiling them and on the argument that there is a need for these numbers to be established. For anybody wanting to put a business plan together, you need those types of numbers to be able to say something like, “The industry has grown 25 to 30 percent each year.” That’s all in the works.

MM: But there’s enough people doing things off the land to have a Shop the Wild Festival?

HC: Absolutely. We have 153 businesses in our Buy BC Wild directory this year . . . this is the once-a-year opportunity for the public to come and shop all wild, local products. A lot of it is just educating the consumer; we want people to talk to the businesses, because nobody has more passion for these products than the people who actually do it.

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Shop the Wild Festival
10 am-4 pm Saturday-Sunday, October 4-5 
Royal Roads University • Free
buybcwild.com/shop-wild