NATURE

Sea, land, river

PLACE

Books+

REALTY

Coming soon

So did a decade of NDP change anything??

Not much, this book says (the 6% solution) and then asks “why not?”

Written by political science academics, of apparently different views (free market to NDP insiders), the reader is provided with some tools of pol sci trade and then taken on historical review in each semi-independent policy area: land use, stumpage, tenure etc.

Liquidation-conversion model

I see Search for Sustainability as Talk and Log updated. Wilson saw the model entrenched in the 1940s as still controlling forestry in 1990s. Depending on your viewpoint, this is providing investor assurance, or a trap that will inevitably lead to loss of old growth dependent species.

The trap is that commodity 2x4s and slow growing “Tree Farms” does not look like a smart investment from the 21^st century perspective of globalized trade.

Researching the authors

Benjamin Cashore home page

George Hoberg home

Michael Howlett home

Amazon book list

Jeremy Rayner

Jeremy Wilson courses

Talk & Log excerpts

Institutional tools

This is part of the poly-Sci tool box. One can concentrate on the ‘policy regime’: who are the actors, what alternatives have they ready to fill a policy gap etc.

Still without looking at the wider social perspective this is sterile—thus BC was ‘ready’ for change in forestry even if NDP had not been elected.

Harcourt was able to put his stamp on a movement that began with Social Credit.

When Asian Crisis withdrew the coastal forestry “good times” the conditions turned and pro-forestry became ‘inevitable’

Policy tools

So you want to make an impact on BC politics?

This is how poly-sci people think things actually take place.

The trick is to control one of the significant nodes along this structure.

BC’s Ministry of Forests is one such closed node which is almost impervious to outside influence (except for their main clients: integrated forest companies). The act gives them virtual control of BC’s public lands and the conversion to tree farms paradigm controls their unquestioned premises.

Any real change will have to remove MOF control from all but most trivial of technical decisions about zoned forests.

(my interpretation)