This year we will hold our Annual General Meeting (AGM) at the heritage Homestead in Wildwood, located in Yellow Point at 2929 Crane Road. (south of Cedar). For those who can’t attend in person, we will also provide a Zoom link.
EIS is proud to present our 2024 AGM speaker Ben Parfitt!
Ben is a long-time journalist who first started covering forestry and environmental issues in British Columbia as a reporter with the Vancouver Sun in the late 1980s and early '90s. He has written or co-written two books on forestry - Forestopia: A Practical Guide to the New Forest Economy (with Michael M'Gonigle) and Forest Follies: Adventures and Misadventures in the Great Canadian Forest. He is the recipient of numerous awards for his journalism. For 20 years, he worked as a public policy analyst for The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, where his focus was natural resources, including forests, water, natural gas, agriculture and mining. In 2024 he retired from the CCPA and is currently working part-time as a journalist with The Tyee.
The Case for Rezoning British Columbia's Forestlands
Ben will focus on the current crisis confronting our forests - rampant and unsustainable logging - and what we as a society are collectively inheriting: tree plantations with radically less biodiversity than the primary forests they replaced. What should we be doing with these lands? Should all of them be treated as fibre farms, there solely for the production of timber? And if this is not the desired outcome, which Ben believes most people would say is the case, then what should we as a society be doing instead?
Past proposals to zone the province's forestlands have been met with skepticism at best and outright hostility/opposition, particularly from more conservation-oriented citizens. But as the years go by and more and more primary forest is cut down, the need for some kind of rethinking of what we are doing is desperately needed.
As things now stand, we effectively have just two zones in the province: protected areas and resource development zones. Is this sufficient given the myriad challenges we face after nearly two centuries of industrial exploitation of our forests?
For Members Only
AGM - 11:00AM at the Homestead (Members only Meeting starts at 11am, Pacific time. )
Membership is annual, from January 1 - December 31. If you are not yet a member and would like to participate in the AGM, there is still time to become a member and register. We’ll accept registration until midnight, November 1, 2024.
Come to the AGM and hear about some impressive accomplishments in the past year, and what we have planned for 2025!