07) WHO IS KILLING BRITISH COLUMBIA SAWMILL WORKERS?
Empire of the Beetle, by Andrew Nikiforuk, Greystone Books & David Suzuki Foundation, 2011, paperback, 232 pages, ISBN 978-1-55365-510-7. Review by Kimball Cariou.
What does climate change have to do with the deadly explosions which have killed four workers at sawmills in British Columbia? Quite a bit, it appears.
Andrew Nikiforuk's latest book, Empire of the Beetle, is a terrifying investigation into the origins and impacts of the beetle outbreaks which have devastated pine and spruce forests across vast western regions of North America. Since the late 1980s, these rice-kernel sized insects have destroyed over 30 billion trees from Alaska to New Mexico.
For tourists driving through the mountains, or anyone flying over this area, the most immediate effect is visual - huge areas of trees turned rust red, dying on a staggering scale. But for working people who have depended on British Columbia's "Green Gold" to earn a living over the past century or more, the impact is often directly economic. There are many factors behind mill closures and the loss of jobs in B.C.'s forest industry, but the beetle infestation has been one of the most important over the past two decades.
Empire of the Beetle examines this development in astonishing detail, peeling back layer after layer of easy assumptions to dig into deeper truths about the interconnections between the natural environment and human economic activities. While Nikiforuk does not name "capitalism" as the system responsible for shaping the forest industry since the European colonists first seized this chunk of Turtle Island from the First Nations, the main impulse for this process is clearly the maximization of private profits.
From the beginning, the author discovers, the interests of forestry companies trumped all other priorities, often with consequences which unfolded only many decades later. Arguing that the resources of the west were so enormous that industrial-scale logging could never inflict serious harm, the companies were given nearly total freedom to clear-cut entire mountainsides.
Only as time passed did most people begin to understand that early warnings against this policy were correct. The destruction of streams caused by unchecked logging, for example, had a terrible toll on the fishing industry, both for First Nations whose cultures revolved largely around the cycle of the salmon, and for the fishermen and shoreworkers who came to British Columbia in search of a better life.
On an even bigger scale, the "fire suppression" policies adopted by private interests and governments had a disastrous impact on the resource they were intended to "manage".
Interviewing a wide range of scientists, foresters and rural residents, Nikiforuk agrees with the conclusion expressed by ecologist Buzz Holling, who argues that the great beetle epidemics are really no mystery, since they were created by human engineers.
"By suppressing fire in lodgepole and ponderosa forests throughout the West, we took a patchy and diverse forest with trees of all ages and turned it into a boring, middle-aged green mall," writes the author. The result is a more dense forest, composed of smaller trees - "a collection of toothpicks less resistant to drought and more vulnerable to insects and disease. Determined fire suppression guarantees, sooner or later, either catastrophic fire or imperial legions of bark beetles."
Enter climate change, in the form of global warming. When the beetle plague emerged as a serious problem twenty years ago, the common assumption was that the outbreaks would be confined when winter temperatures dropped far enough below freezing. But year after year, winters across British Columbia have rarely been cold enough to kill off large numbers of these remarkable insects.
Nikiforuk has researched centuries of attempts by human beings to protect forests from insect infestations, in Europe and later in North America, mostly without success. His accounts are bleakly humorous, such as bizarre inventions to electrocute bugs hiding inside trees.
But there is nothing funny about the possible deadly effect on B.C. forestry workers. Faced with a drastic shortage of fibre to supply mills, the provincial government has encouraged companies to harvest beetle-infected trees before they crumble into stumps. Workers and industry analysts say that processing these trees creates a finer form of sawdust, with far more potential for the type of explosions which destroyed mills in Burns Lake and Prince George. In other words, the scramble for corporate profits which began over a century ago probably set in motion a series of policy decisions which are killing today's millworkers.
Several immediate measures must be taken to end this slaughter, starting with the installation of more effective technology to remove sawdust from the workplace. An end to the shocking export of high-quality logs from British Columbia would save jobs and make the mills safer. There are also unanswered questions about the effect of speed-up on the type of dust created in sawmills.
But Empire of the Beetle raises even bigger issues for the future of humanity. The negative impacts of industrial expansion on the environment are being grasped by billions across the planet. Human beings cannot live without industry. But this important book shows that our common survival depends on finding ways to quickly reduce these negative impacts. Success will certainly require replacing the economic system of capitalism, which depends on constant expansion to generate private profits, with a new socialist system based on the interests of people and the environment. This is the crucial challenge facing the working class and revolutionary movements in this century.
(The above article is from the May 16-31, 2012, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1.)