A path meanders through Merve Wilkinson’s Wildwood, a 137-acre old-growth woodlot he’s selectivly logged for 70 years

Credit: Darshan Stevens

Tall Timber Tales

Merve Wilkinson’s Wildwood offers an alternative agenda for a failing forest industry

A culture is no better than its woods. —W.H. Auden

“You only garner the interest and never touch the principle,” says Merve Wilkinson. The uninitiated listener might guess Wilkinson was talking about high finance, but he’s actually discussing the delicate nature of forestry—single-tree selection, to be precise, a method of forestry practiced extensively in Europe, where the forester thins out trees in a process similar to weeding a garden. Not usually seen in B.C., Wilkinson has been successfully practicing single-tree selection in Wildwood, his own 137-acre old-growth forest just south of Nanaimo, for over 70 years.

Taking five minutes to complete the 100-metre trek from the kitchen to his living-room chair, Wilkinson’s determination as he pulls his aging body up the stairs mirrors the story of his life. A pioneer in alternative forestry, Wilkinson is used to facing challenges head-on. He’s lived on Vancouver Island his entire life and, when he purchased Wildwood in 1938, most people couldn’t comprehend his idea not to clearcut the land. But because of Wilkinon’s foresight, at 95 years old—surrounded by the largest free-standing organisms on earth—he doesn’t have to worry about being the eldest thing on the property.

“You have so many species of trees in the forest; you want to keep that balance,” Wilkinson continues. “Just like the good farmer rotates her crops, you have to let nature do that and not interfere.”

It’s a drastic paradigm shift for anyone who thinks of forestry in the one-dimension of B.C.’s standard clearcut, but with the previous 10 years showing the highest industry job loss in the history of B.C. forestry, it’s time to stop postponing the inevitable. Jobs in value-added manufacturing that produce end-products like furniture and houses have the potential to outnumber jobs in an unsustainable model based on slash, burn and export.

“Our economic system is flawed,” says Jay Rastogi, the current site manager for Wildwood. “It doesn’t take externalities into account at all. If the forest company can pass off erosion costs for streams and hillsides at the cost of communities’ waters, then they can make more money in the short term. It comes down to how our economic system is set up. It doesn’t promote long-term thinking at all.”

Crunch the numbers and you’ll actually find more standing timber on Wilkinson’s woodlot today than when he bought the land seven decades ago—and don’t forget to add in the fact that he has harvested nearly twice the original number of trees from the land.

Back when Wilkinson purchased Wildwood, it had 1.3 million board feet of standing timber and, after 70 years of selective logging, he has pulled out some 2 million board feet of lumber—with an astounding 1.6 million board feet of timber still standing. Compare that to B.C.’s traditional industrial logging methods: it took 25,000 years for Vancouver Island’s forests to grow and, according to 2004 satellite imagery, we’ve cut down 73 percent of our productive old growth in about 100 years.

Wilkinson cut his last tree a couple of years ago, when he was in his late 80s, and recently sold Wildwood to The Land Conservancy. TLC is currently raising funds to ensure Wildwood remains an educational facility as a living example of sustainable forestry.

“I’m not a threat to the forest industry, I’m a threat to big business,” Wilkinson says, then pauses. “Big business is pretty powerful.”

The industry as it stands—and falls

“I believe Merve Wilkinson is the best example in the country of truly sustainable forestry,” says Ken Wu, Victoria campaign director for the Western Canada Wilderness Committee. “To have a B.C. example in old-growth forests—counterpoised against mainstream logging—has been a big bonus for those looking to conserve forests and work for sustainable forestry. It’s no longer a theory, it’s actually something being practiced.”

Single-tree selection is defined as a method of harvesting trees in which individual merchantable trees are removed periodically; natural regeneration is then typically relied on to fill in the resulting gaps. Wu explains that although it may seem counter-intuitive, over time, single-tree selection enables the forester to pull out more timber than clearcutting.

“When you have these huge, three-dimensional trees with great heights and great girths, every year they are adding on a tremendous amount of wood over a bigger area than if you clearcut the whole thing and start from scratch with little seedlings.”

Wu points out that with alternative forestry you can’t just pull out the big high-value trees. “It’s about logging the forest profile, logging more slowly and logging more selectively,” he says. “That way you always have a canopy, you minimize soil erosion and you have a forest for the wildlife that needs a forest standing.”

And that’s just what Wilkinson has done, notes Wu: he’s left the giant trees on his property while taking down more of the intermediate and smaller trees.

So far, single-tree selection has only been implemented in second-growth forests, for the most part, making Wildwood’s old growth a unique destination for industry analysts around the world—a bit ironic, considering the avid distaste the B.C. government seems to have for anything beyond clearcutting at a highly unsustainable rate. Given the current state of our forest policies, it looks as though the two-hour drive from the parliament buildings to Wilkinson’s old-growth backyard is too strenuous for most of B.C.’s politicians; perhaps if they made the journey, they might rethink their mandate of exporting massive quantities of raw logs while reducing investment in value-added facilities.

According to statistics compiled by the Wilderness Committee sourced from BC Stats and the Ministry of Forests and Range, we get roughly one job for every 1,000 cubic metres of wood harvested, the U.S. gets about three jobs for the same amount and some European countries manage about five jobs per 1,000 cubic metres. Since the Liberals came to power in 2001, we’ve been losing several thousand B.C. milling and value-added jobs every year to foreign mills.

“If you take it in totality, this is the B.C. government’s forestry agenda for Vancouver Island and the Lower Mainland,” says Wu. “Liquidate the old growth, shut down the old-growth dependent sawmills as the old growth runs out, liquidate the second growth and export the raw logs because they haven’t invested in second-growth milling facilities—then flip over the cut land for suburban sprawl and development. You could not find a more backward set of forest policies than what’s going on right now on Vancouver Island. And it’s what has caused the massive loss in forestry jobs.”

The next level: value adding

Bill Friedel is a builder and designer working in value-added manufacturing—where domestic processing increases the value of a good. He primarily sources his materials from salvage, but has recently implemented Wilkinson’s model of forestry on his 137-acre plot of communally owned land on Cortes Island.

“For years we have kept track of value-added here on Cortes,” says Friedel. “Mostly, we use second growth, but occasionally we acquire an old-growth fir, usually a windfall or industrial-waste salvage log. Since these trees often contain commercial defects, their value in the industry is usually quite low—somewhere between $20 and $50 a cubic metre. We recover a value as flooring of about $3,500 a metre, with the money staying on Cortes Island in the hands of those handling, milling, kiln-drying, sorting, machining, installing, sanding and finishing.”

“If forests were cut sustainably at their annual growth rate, not only would we have a healthy forest completely functional in perpetuity but we would see more projects, producing up to thousands of times higher value,” Friedel continues. “Our population needs access to a permanent, healthy forest—not a fast-track to no forest at all.”

Arnold Berkov, vice-president of the Pulp, Paper and Woodworkers of Canada, agrees.

“I’d like to see log exports completely ended. If you’re not going to mill the logs here, you might as well leave them in the ground . . . We need to involve more communities in forestry to help out smaller industries.”

The convenient myth that conservationists are to blame for unprecedented industry job loss doesn’t stand up in the face of reason. The BC Liberals have not created a single park to protect land from logging companies in eight years.

“If you want to know why people are losing their jobs and mills are shutting down, it’s a very simple fact: elimination of the resource,” says Wu. “What they’ve done is taken the trees that provide high returns in the easy-to-access areas . . . and now they’re left with the guts and feathers, the small lower-value trees that yield lower returns and cost a lot to access . . . In recent years, forestry workers and environmentalists have shown unprecedented solidarity, standing shoulder-to-shoulder at rallies and even union pickets, calling for an end to raw log exports and deregulation.”

Back on Cortes Island, Bill Friedel adds it all up. “If we did the math and calculated the loss to the public in terms of the degradation to the environment after clearcutting, no deforestation/development company in the history of B.C. could have stayed in business,” he says. “If they paid the actual cost of the damage they create, they would be bankrupt their first day in business. What’s it worth to have to produce and clean water because it’s undrinkable, what’s the cost of topsoil and no salmon in dollars?”

Ken Wu feels the only future lies in making a transition to second-growth logging, and then managing it carefully so it can become old-growth again. “The Wilderness Committee admits that doing ‘Merve-style forestry’ would be more labour-intensive, but feels it would result in more manufacturing jobs, because you could produce a higher quality of wood,” he says.

The clock is ticking

There’s a small, still silence in Wilkinson’s log home, the clocks on the wall seem to mimic his slow movements. Scattered remnants of the bookends of his life surround him: carved cedar boxes, photographs of people touring Wildwood, clippings from newspapers. He sits in the midst of these keepsakes—the physical testaments of his legacy—and looks out at the forest of his backyard coated in the spring soak of a rainy March day.

“It’s a resource that does re-grow, and that’s wonderful,” he says. “Most resources don’t.”

He’s right, of course; forests do regenerate, but with our current model of forestry it takes too much time and the cost in environmental degradation is simply too great. Wildwood is a blueprint offering an opportunity for a large-scale transformation in the way forests are managed, a completely radical and perfectly pragmatic shift that should be considered necessary to keep the ecosystem of our forests intact.

Instead of being a sad reminder of the wrong way to do things, we could be—and should be—proud of the health of our woods and look at B.C.’s forests as both our cultural and economic inheritance, a sustainable source of wealth allowing us to prosper as global providers of high-quality products made from the world’s highest-quality timber.

That’s a dream worthy of Merve Wilkinson’s legacy. M