Just like his patronizing predecessors have misled the public for decades and counting, controversially acclaimed Premier Dweeby is trumpeting once again about how Beastly BC needs to emphasize value over volume when it comes to harvesting our precious trees that should be priceless, as his colonial government’s fraudulent old-growth policy continues to mean log everything without pause, while his orange kool-aid drinking supplicant ministers flaunt the time-honoured tradition of dither and delay until it’s all gone.

Back in the grungy nineties when Bruce Cockburn had already sung for years about the “mangy B.C. hills” in his incredibly prescient song “If A Tree Falls in the Forest”, and Midnight Oil and the Tragically Hip were capturing the world’s attention with their advocacy for sustainable forests for all to enjoy and benefit from, Brutish Colonia stood at a cut-block crossroads where it could have wholeheartedly adopted the traditions that succeeded over millennia for our farsighted Indigenous peoples and left us with a golden green legacy of holistic landscapes, healthy water & purified air among other irreplaceable communal assets and invaluable resources. But no, successive moronic white male supremacist regimes decided it was in their best interests to perpetuate the damaging destructive practices that have ended up in an apocalyptic disaster thirty years later, wherein the business case which they and their corporate cronies worshipped has failed miserably, leaving us with bombed-out clearcuts, fearful forest-fire nightmares, closed mills, lost jobs to the Disunited States, pine-beetle moonscapes & mutant plantation monstrosities to say the least.

Imagine a natural world we could all live in with old-growth and regenerated forests surrounding each of our navy-boat occupation encampments which provide us with renewable food, material sustenance, flourishing watersheds, ecological employment, touristic destinations, wildlife viewing opportunities, ample building supplies, educational stewardship, artistic mediums & medicinal wealth, etc., if only we had listened to the pleas of our First Nations and all their relations who know that making decisions for those born seven generations after our own is the only way to go if you want to keep going. By now, it’s been scientifically proven all around the planet that natural spaces governed by their local Indigenous populations are far more pristine, productive & bio-diverse.

Instead, we’re left with what Dweeby and his sycophantic minions acknowledge is an abject letdown that has prioritized short-term cash above all, leaving us with a devastated environment overly dominated by private industrialists that has run out of supplies and careers after far too many debauched years of maximum-yield cutting, unchecked exports of raw logs, cost certainty kowtowing & rampant oligarchic greed. According to the premier dweeb himself, our raped and pillaged forest sector has “never been under greater stress,” as “short-term thinking” has left us with “exhausted forests”. The mayor of Quesnel, which is surrounded by mind-blowing disheartening silviculture wastelands, hits the wood nail on the head when he says that our patriarchal province is “stuck in a time warp, carrying on with clear-cutting and exporting raw logs and lumber at a pace ecosystems and the timber supply cannot maintain”.

These placating penitent words all sound fine and dandy coming from the new kids on the block who get to critique their old bosses now that they’ve retired with bloated severance packages and inflated pensions, unless you’ve heard the same idle rhetoric from such similar imperial mouthpieces since the nineties and beyond with nothing of any substance coming from their blowhard gas exhalations. Of course, these particular white power enablers might surprise us all and set our provincial cult on a logging road toward actual sustainability, but how many Indigenous parties are being collaborated with and listened to when the latest settler power-brokers bemoan how much they and their gilded ilk have done nothing to change our iceberg-melting course. A lily-white scarlet woman who used to be our forest minister and is now our finance minister might claim that they’re “laying the groundwork for a new system of 10-year forest landscape plans to be developed in partnership with First Nations with input from local stakeholders”, but how much money have they given these Indigenous entities in order to help transition their inherent land-use licenses for the benefit of their essential efforts to claw themselves out of the systemic poverty enforced on them by the late and not-so-great Queen’s armed paramilitary goons? According to most First Nations’ sources, not a whole heck of a lot thus far.

So if the white-bred figureheads pulling the strings insist we don’t have much time to change, why do they take so much overdue time to monetarily compensate the Indigenous stakeholders so they can can stop rightfully doing what the rich good old boys have been doing for centuries since colonization? As the finance minister makes patronizingly clear, these top-down decreed “changes would put (imperialistic) government, together with First Nations, ‘back in the driver’s seat'”. Unfortunately, those of us who have been paying attention to the long line of overpaid leaders’ broken promises since well before the nineties know all too well that even when the entitled politicians invite the rightful powers of this stolen land to sit at the legislature table, or ride in their fossil-fuel burning car, our true Indigenous rulers since time immemorial still don’t get to sit at the head of the table, or take a hold of the wheel, according to the oblivious do-gooders who still think they’re doing the right thing when it’s all gone wrong.