De Clarke/ Cortes Currents - Evidence of climate destabilisation -- aberrant weather -- is now everyday news. "Record-breaking" has become a routine description of wind speeds, rainfall, flood levels, mudslides, wildfires, high temperatures and drought.

The drought which afflicts BC this October of 2022 is a record-breaker and a tragedy; near Bella Bella, tens of thousands of salmon have died trying to return to their breeding grounds in streams now too warm and shallow for them to survive in. Over the last few summers, BC has lost millions of hectares of forest and entire towns to wildfire; "fire season" and multi-day smoke palls are becoming business-as-usual in mid to late summer. In December last year, flooding destroyed livestock and crops in the lower mainland. These events are happening more frequently and their severity is ramping up, slowly, year by year.

As we discussed in Part One of this story, logging plays a significant part in accelerating the ongoing slow catastrophe. For decades, the logging industry has been destroying old-growth "carbon sponge" forest, burning slash, destroying soil ecosystems, destroying the forest's water-retention and -respiration capacity -- the damage is so profound that BC's forests which were once net carbon sinks, are now net carbon emitters. So, despite its claim to exploit a "green and renewable" resource that ensures a prosperous and healthy future for BC, the logging industry today is a major contributor to BC's status as a world-class carbon emitter... and hence to climate disaster.