Retired B.C. government forest administrator A.B. (Tony) Robinson asserts tree huggers are wrong to conserve forests, forest bureaucrats are right to maximize harvest, and B.C.’s NDP government is dabbling in economic witchcraft in its efforts to preserve old-growth forest.

Two-thirds of Witch Hunt in the B.C. Woods is a history of the forest management bureaucracy of British Columbia; the balance is a critique of politicians and environmentalists.

Robinson condemns public ownership of B.C.’s forests, noting that the crown has 95% of the timber. He believes that public ownership inhibits economic development, which is factually wrong. In the western U.S., for example, vast public lands are leased to ranchers for a pittance; critics say this overstimulates the beef business. It all depends on lease or royalty fees.

He says “clearcutting is as natural to the forests of British Columbia as the fires and other disasters that periodically destroy them.” His argument is simple: harvest a forest and it will eventually grow back. But he says nothing about erosion, little about animals harmed by elimination of their habitat, nothing about rivers and salmon devastated by runoff. He fails to mention that trees packed into replacement forests are more burnable than the trees harvested.

Robinson broadly condemns environmentalists, “the extremists, the ones who are conspiring to hijack all our forests for parks and other protected areas, would do credit to the K.G.B.” He makes no effort to distinguish old-growth forest from newer forest, and asserts that if the forest companies don’t harvest the trees, fire and disease will.

He concludes, having tried to clearcut tree huggers, “perhaps there is no real witch in the B.C. woods. But if there is one, it is the government elected in 1991, and it is guilty [of] locking up millions of hectares of forest land… without calculating the effect on the annual cut.”

Self-published, Witch Hunt