The City of Vancouver is cutting down thousands of trees in Vancouver’s iconic Stanley Park, ostensibly because of public safety reasons. Grassroots activists like Stanley Park Preservation Society are fighting tooth and nail, including pursuing an ongoing lawsuit, to put an end to what they believe is an unjustifiable betrayal of the ecology of Stanley Park and its immense historical value to indigenous peoples, urban dwellers, and international visitors.
Scientists and opponents of the logging (recently reformulated by the city as “risk mitigation – not logging” for public-relations purposes) dispute the claim that conifer snags (dead, standing trees) naturally defoliated by the western hemlock looper moth, a native insect, pose increased danger of wildfire and falling. They point to substantial evidence that logging degrades forest resilience and increases blowdown danger due to canopy loss and creation of wind tunnels. Photographs from the 2024 windstorms show most blowdowns on roads and paths were fully foliated trees – especially cedar.
An initial assessment by forestry contractor B.A. Blackwell Associates recommended removing as many as 160,000 trees: 20,000 larger trees and up to 140,000 smaller ones – almost one-third of the trees in the park. The city now claims that fewer trees will be cut but does not provide a number. Further, there is no documentation showing that removed trees, most of which show no signs of structural failure, have been inspected and determined to be hazardous.
The assessment grossly exaggerated the risk of wildfire engulfing Stanley Park.
In an apparent conflict of interest, Blackwell offered itself as the general contractor for the logging operation. Thus, it stood to profit in proportion to the scale of operation it recommended. The City ultimately awarded Blackwell multiple contracts worth a total of $18.9 million for the multi-year project, including $11.1 million secretly funneled from the city’s general revenue stabilization reserve.
Assumption of risk
Opponents point out that Blackwell’s assessment grossly exaggerated the risk of wildfire engulfing Stanley Park – it assumed, for example, twelve hours with no fire suppression response. This is implausible, they argue, because in the Stanley Park rainforest, soils are persistently wet even in the height of summer (except, notably, in logged areas exposed to increased heating). Blackwell also failed to note the more than 70 fire hydrants that would be deployed in the event of wildfire.
With respect to falling-tree hazards, the City of Vancouver and Blackwell are contravening established forest management practices by failing to correctly assess risk. This leads to arbitrary decisions, resulting in many trees that are not hazardous being cut down. Whether a tree is hazardous can only be determined by inspecting that tree. Only brief walk-throughs are being performed with blanket assessments of large groups of trees. But such generalized assessments identify only potentially hazardous trees, which then must be inspected individually for deterioration, decay, rot and structural instability, and properly documented.
The ultimate cost of removing thousands of trees from Stanley Park will be immense ecological damage.
Properly determining whether a tree should be removed is an ordered, non-arbitrary process beginning with walk-throughs to identify potentially hazardous trees requiring close-up inspections with a mallet or electronic instruments. Rarely can a tree be reasonably determined to be structurally unstable by a quick walk-by. Photographs of areas such as the Chickadee Trail, logged after only general walk-through assessments, confirmed that numerous structurally-sound trees were chopped down. Almost all stumps showed no evidence of structural defects that would have rendered the trees hazardous.
Diamond Head Consulting was retained by the City of Vancouver to make a brief assessment of the forest. Its December 2024 report confirmed the skepticism of logging opponents when it concluded:
“A detailed, tree-by-tree assessment is necessary to properly identify, document, and mitigate hazardous trees. We recommend that the City of Vancouver establish the occupancy rates for each assessment area, adopt a risk threshold for treating hazardous trees, and carry out a more comprehensive risk assessment.”
The real cost
Hours after receiving the report, City of Vancouver staff convinced three Park Board commissioners to accelerate and extend logging operations. After two commissioners left the meeting and two abstained, the motion passed.
The ultimate cost of removing thousands of trees from Stanley Park will be immense ecological damage, as ecologist and habitat expert Dr. Christine Thuring testified in a court affidavit:
“In my opinion, if the climate does indeed get hotter and drier over the years to come, as projected, then keeping this forest intact will benefit the park and region greatly. By contrast, if this forest fragment is disturbed by logging with heavy machinery, I believe it will become more fire-prone and be irreversibly changed due to alterations to the ground and shrub layer and the moist soil currently present.”
If the goal is simply to protect people from falling trees, it is unclear why felled trees are being hauled out of the park. If the concern were flammability of fine fuels such as dead branches and needles, they could be periodically removed while leaving the decaying trunks for ecological benefit. The dollar value of the logs could be millions, but the city won’t say where the lumber is going.
The city claims to be replanting with selectively-bred cedar and fir. Park Board Commissioner Thomas Digby stated that the goal was to eliminate the “doomed” hemlock species in Stanley Park, one of the last ancient coastal western hemlock forests in North America. Tragically, it will be lost if this ill-conceived logging continues, and if Stanley Park’s grand forest is re-engineered into a plantation.
Michael Robert Caditz is a founding director of Stanley Park Preservation Society and long-time resident of Vancouver, with an educational background in philosophy and sustainable energy management.
