Dear editor:
Spray Lake Sawmills (SLS) gets Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification. Whoa! A few vital facts were missing from the Oct. 31 article.
First, this certification is conditional, to be re-evaluated next summer. And, it comes with one unresolved major nonconformity and 60 lesser ones. Not a single Alberta conservation or watershed group supported SLS’s application.
To experience SLS non-conformities Cochranites have only to travel a half hour west into the lovely Wildcat Hills. Until this fall the area east of the Waiparous River and surrounding the outstanding wetland complex of Aura Creek was still beautifully intact.
It was a rarity in being almost untouched foothills nature so close to urban development. The area represented perhaps Alberta’s best hope for a wild horse preserve.
In fact, this area appears in a SLS report prepared for its certification application as a HCVF (High Conservation Value Forest).
But suddenly, the forests of west Wildcat Hills lie in vast piles of scrawny logs, new roads carve the slopes and its conservation values are forfeited.
Aura Creek is the very area where the renowned local artist, writer and wildlife conservationist Maureen Enns spent the last six years studying wild horses and wolves.
Her findings have recently been published in a stunningly illustrated new book called Wild Horses, Wild Wolves that epitomizes why the west Wildcat Hills were classified as an HVC Forest.
On three separate Sundays in the summer and fall of 2013, I visited the west Wildcat Hills, finding SLS operating equipment and apparently working fast to ensure this HCV Forest will never be protected for its wildlife, source water or the amazement of future generations, much less as a wild horse preserve.
On my visits I photographed various SLS non-conformities such as water traps designed to protect streams that had failed, a culvert too short to function and cutblocks and roads against ephemeral streams and riparian areas.
Perhaps most galling were the piles of logs where approximately 50 per cent had butt ends only 10-15 cm across. What can be done with these - perhaps a 2X4 and the rest for garden mulch? What sort of publicly responsible, much less certifiable, exchange is this - HCV Forests and watersheds for garden mulch? May the Lord have mercy!
Vivian Pharis
