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Comment by charles_f | Hacker News Reader

> The provincial government of British Columbia says old-growth forests are particularly important and that companies should put off logging them.

Why, then, selling those licenses in the first place? Sounds like something that could be made illegal if there was an actual will to do so.

https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/industry/forestry/forest-...

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Because old growth is also the most desirable wood and therefore valuable, and money is more important than literally anything else in the history of everything?

(I'm just spit-ballin' a guess here, as I don't really know the answer either…)

Don't worry, those trees will (maybe) grow back in hundreds of years. What's so bad about taking some short term profits in the mean time, right?

Hey, assuming humanity is still alive, that's just in time for our great-great-great-great-great grandchildren to enjoy them!

I wonder if trees grown in periods of high CO2 result in higher or lower quality timber.

Unscientific guess - trees are mostly carbon, so more CO2 can support more wood. Of course, we aren't simply adding CO2 while keeping everything else equal. Worse growing conditions due to drought or whatever don't help trees.

Fast growing trees tend to make inferior lumber. This is readily apparent with modern plantation grown species like fir and poplar that are not as high a quality as the same trees grown in natural forest conditions where their growth is slowed by competition for space.

Inferior perhaps but adequate for purpose e.g building houses. In that sense fast growing trees are superior.

not true for all woods.

fast grown oak is better:

https://blog.lostartpress.com/2020/11/17/slow-growth-oak-why...

>Fast-growing oak has widely spaced annular rings, sometimes up to 1/4″ per year (see fig. 3.3, above). This timber is exceedingly strong because it has fewer rings, which creates a great concentration of the dense latewood that grows in the summer. But the resulting timber is visually distracting. Its radial face comes out looking heavily striped. It can also be difficult to work; it has an uneven texture resulting from the widely spaced transitions between the earlywood and latewood.

Faster growth is generally less dense growth as well. In the physical sense that is - tree rings are bigger, the material is lighter, and as you might guess - weaker.

Reminds me of this: https://www.derekchristensen.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/...

For reference there has been a significant amount of protests in recent months about old growth logging in BC so this is a controversial issue.

The current government has "deferred" a bunch of old growth logging licenses as part of damage control efforts in response to the criticism.

A complicating factor is the fact that indigenous nations of BC are gaining more and more strength and control over their traditional territories and are not necessarily opposed to logging. Recently a nation on Vancouver island asked protestors to go home.

Is it a federal license or a provincial one? It would be ironic if they were granted one from the province

Would be even more ironic if it were the federal[1]

[1] https://globalnews.ca/news/8346968/cop26-pledge-deforestatio...

resources are a provincial thing so I'm not even sure if it's really possible for this to be a federal license. I mean, maybe so if the feds owned a bunch of land (ie. say from an old military base) that was wooded and they logged it, but this seems like an edge case.

The "crown" land in BC is controlled by the Province.

Recently a bunch of the old growth logging was on First Nations land so it was up to them iirc.

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