Stop the Spray BC will be holding a protest at the Ministry of Forests office in Prince George on September 11, from noon until 2 p.m.
The purpose of the rally is to protest against ongoing herbicide spraying of provincial forests, the failure to disclose the locations of that spraying, and the failure of the NDP to implement their election promise to end this practice.
Typically forestry spraying occurs between mid-August and mid-September. While in recent years companies have voluntarily backed off on spraying in the Central Interior, last year 3800 hectares of forest was sprayed in the Discovery Islands off Vancouver Island. It remains legal for forestry corporations to initiate more spraying at any time.
“Quebec banned herbicide spraying in 2001 in their forestry operations and the sky has not fallen,” said Stop the Spray BC founder James Steidle.
Recent science has added to the 2015 International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) assessment that glyphosate is a probable carcinogen. This has included findings in recent months that multi-generational exposure to glyphosate in rats led to higher rates of cancers and other negative health outcomes.
In 2021 researchers at the University of Northern British Columbia discovered that a significant proportion of blueberries that survived spraying had levels of glyphosate far higher than what is allowed in grocery stores. This contamination has been found in forest plants over a decade after being sprayed.
“It’s wrong that we are contaminating berries and food on traditional unceded territories of our Indigenous nations, without public maps of where this is happening,” said Steidle. “And for what purpose? To eliminate the forest type that is least likely to burn?”
Recent research out of the United States has shown that aspen, the main target of spraying across Canada, “impedes wildfire”, an advantage over conifer that remains even as fire weather grows more severe.
Aspen also sequesters the most carbon and has the highest albedo meaning it absorbs significantly less sunlight than conifer and can have major impacts on mitigating climate change. Aspen forests also are known to have amongst the highest biodiversity values, have important mycorrhizal functions and like other deciduous species fertilize soil and utilize water more efficiently than conifer.
“The chemical war on deciduous diversity in this province is counter-productive, it exposes the public to risk, and it is increasing the risk of wildfire,” he said. “This practice needs to end immediately.”