Wildwood
road in
This weekend I tagged along on a visit to Wildwood, the famous British Columbian model for sustainable forestry, and a famous little chunk of British Columbian history. I’m a bit embarrassed to note that fame, because I had never heard of the place. Nor had I heard of Wildwood’s famous visionary and founder, Merve Wilkinson, who began managing the place in 1938 (yep), and is still there.
As is the case with many pioneers of conservation (Ducks Unlimited comes to mind), Merve didn’t start out an ideologue. Rather, he was a man with a wood lot, who just happened to be paying close enough attention to notice that the trees grew better with the whole ecosystem intact. Ecoforestry as a philosophy seems to be as simple as that: ecosystem function trumps timber volume; but as a methodology it takes knowing your forest intimately.
Because Merve has logged enough hours (ouch) in the field to earn a rest, Wildwood is now run by Jay and Nina Rastogi, who give weekly tours, and do indeed know the forest intimately. Individual trees are selected for harvest based on what job they are doing in their area – who they’re shading out, competing with, sheltering, housing, and if they if they have already done their job then they can retire as an expensive table, or a beam for Merve’s house.
Hugh Stimson enjoying cookies with Merve
Before going and meeting the old man himself for a few stories, Jay showed us around and it was a great field trip. One thing I learned is that kids are usually bored by sustainable forest management (admittedly not a sexy discipline) unless you let them eat ants, which makes it fun and cool. Another thing I learned is that eating ants makes sustainable forest management more fun and cool for adults too. I also learned that the most lucrative Non-Timber Forest Product in BC is field trips, so if you are looking to subsidize your sustainable woodlot and the chanterelles are a little too soggy to sell this year, you might try fieldtrips. Or maybe ants.
One of my sillier new habits for 2009 is to constantly relate everything to Cameroon, and so the obvious thing is to try and map Merve’s (and Jay’s) model for forest management onto forests there, but that’s the thing with site-specific ecoforestry: it isn’t applicable elsewhere. Not only are growth rates and species interaction are all different, but market conditions and all different, and so is land ownership/tenure.
But so long as I am insisting on relating everything to Cameroon, I will say, with mind to my conservationist friends over there who believe that the only sustainable timber harvesting is absolutely none at all: there is such thing as doing it right. Wildwood is not a cashcow, but it has kept a family afloat for generations, and still looks like a lot of old growth. Part of that might be related to another fundamental harvesting principle.
