Commercial logging near Star Creek concerns citizen

David McIntyre, Letter to the Editor

You'll see in today's Calgary Herald, its version of the story that, last week, I also attempted to bring to your attention:

The story: Expert warns against commercial logging near Star Creek


The full story: http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/alberta/Expert+warns+against+commercial+logging+near+Star+Creek/8180602/story.html

The report exposes the fact that ESRD and the U of A intend to log—via Spray Lake Sawmills—the Star Creek valley, and it appears clear that each is engaged in damage control.

The apparent irony: that either would promote the logging of a landscape in order to engage in research that would reveal the degree of further degradation the logging would create.

ESRD's (via MacDonnell) statement—"It's not a commercial operation"—is absurd. Since when is a commercial logging operation that involves ESRD and Spray Lake Sawmills not a commercial operation? I guess it isn't when ESRD doesn't want it to be, when it's part of what I've termed a "new brand" of logging.

The next step, I suggest, is to expose the planned logging operation for what it is: a plan that, when taken to its logical conclusion, reveals that the GoA intends to test, rationalize, justify and then apply its chosen Star Creek-brand of logging throughout the headwaters of the South Saskatchewan watershed.

It's crystal clear that the targeting of the Star Creek watershed is nothing more than a "test" designed to prove what's already known: Logging the headwaters can—and will—increase water "production." And as long as the added runoff can be captured, it's available to industry. (Thanks to the Oldman Dam, the collection component of the described equation is already in place. Other dams in other places set the stage for similar captures.)

The proposed logging of Star Creek has little to do with Star Creek. The real story is all about water, and the GoA's obvious attempt to "create" more water, seemingly at any cost.

It was the GoA's targeting of the Star Creek valley, a publicly visible, atypically beautiful, relatively pristine Crown of the Continent drainage that's home to an endangered fish, a threatened bear and the rarest forest in Alberta that, on the surface, proved so incongruous it threw red flags into the air. Why would the GoA engage in a study that would result in the active further degradation this extremely rare, iconic headwaters landscape simply to have the U of A monitor the resultant degradation?

Clearly, absolutely, there had to be more to the story. And there's only one logical reason for the so-called study: increased water production.

Once the GoA's we-want-to-milk-the-headwaters component of the equation is exposed, it gives rationalization to the U of A's strange vilification of the Lost Creek Wildfire in its so-called Lost Creek Wildfire Study, which is really a cumulative effects study of more than a century of landscape degradation (in which wildfire remains an unknown component). It also explains ESRD's previously incongruous love affair with the logging of Alberta's Eastern Slopes, a nearly worthless—from a commercial logging perspective—forest, and it explains Spray Lake Sawmills' sudden active promotion of its ability to offer society a brand of logging that produces water, not wood.

The proposed logging of Star Creek is a huge story with colossal implications. Please don't let it die in today's news.

Best wishes on all fronts,

David