The B.C. government committed itself to designating some areas of the province for 'special management' above and beyond what was required by the Code.
These areas known as "Special Resource Development Zones" were intended to showcase cutting-edge 'light-touch' forestry and were to be based on consensus agreement of stakeholders for long-term land-use planning. Several SRDZs have been created in two regions: the Kootenay area, and the Cariboo-Chilcotin region. The Cariboo-Chilcotin Land Use Plan (CCLUP), announced in October 1994, has been touted as a provincially significant breakthrough, a "made in the Cariboo" solution to land use controversies and is often held up as a provincial model for land use strategies. The key to the success of the CCLUP was supposed to be the zoning of 26% of the region as SRDZs, where timber harvesting would respect other values such as fish, wildlife, ecosystem, backcountry recreation and tourism.
The CCLUP was legally designated as a higher level plan under the Forest Practices Code by ministerial order on January 23, 1996. District Managers were given the clear authority and obligation to legally require licensees to amend their forest development plans to comply with the CCLUP. But again, District Managers and the forest industry are subverting the intent of the legislation.
The reality in the Cariboo-Chilcotin region is:
The Special Resource Development Zones are being ignored in order to continue the current level of logging. In fact, the data indicates that the forest industry is planning to log at a greater rate in the SRDZs, which were supposed to receive less intensive logging than in the ERDZ's (Enhanced Resource Development Zones), where intensive logging was supposed to occur.48
Coinciding with their plans for an increased rate of logging in these supposedly "special" zones, the forest industry also intends to use that silviculture method it knows best:
92.5% of the logging approved in these areas is conventional clearcutting, while only 7.5% is approved for modified harvesting.49
The B.C. government had set targets of 64% modified harvesting and 36% conventional harvesting [clearcutting], but the forest industry and the approving agencies have come nowhere near this objective for the Cariboo-Chilcotin area.
Under the current development plans for the region, about 1,700 cutblocks over an area of 56,000 hectares will be logged in the SRDZs. That translates to ll.5 million cubic metres of timber, or well over 300,000 logging truckloads of trees.50
The Cariboo-Chilcotin Land Use Plan ignored scientists' recommendations that the winter feeding range of the woodland caribou in the region be protected.51 Clearly, it's business as usual for the timber industry, despite all the clever land-use jargon and rhetoric.