A commentary by a Saanich resident who spent 15 years in the forest industry and has been advocating for systemic change in forest practices since 1988.

The closure of the Crofton pulp mill is the latest symptom of forest mismanagement. How did we get to this point?

The Indigenous people were always here, but we Europeans started as a colony of Britain, hence the name British Columbia. Even this newspaper is called the Times Colonist.

The purpose of a colony was to grab the land and to send wealth back to the colonizing country. Here, that meant forest products, fish and minerals.

The second purpose of the colony was to be a purchaser of the value-added products made from the raw resources we exported to the colonizer.

We still retain that colonial mentality. Computer printer paper is an example. We don’t make it here in B.C.

We cut down our forests, send the logs to our pulp mills resulting in both water and air pollution, burn methane gas to dry the cellulose pulp and then press into metre by metre by centimetre squares, bundle it up and ship it off to pulp mills in the U.S. where they just add water then sell us back printer paper stamped “Made in........

© Times Colonist