Where There's Smoke: Forest Mismanagement, Political Cowardice, and a Pitiful Ecological Resistance Movement Made These Fires

When Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

by Betty Krawczyk - Betty's Early Edition

August 22, 2018

Don’t like it? It’s at dangerous levels? The smoke of burning wildfires is being brought to you courtesy of the BC justice system.

What a stupid thing to say, you might respond, if anything, it’s brought to us because something is wrong with logging practices coupled with climate change.

Yes, those reasons, too. Climate change is upon us and the frantic clear-cutting of public forests has created their own micro climates of tinder-dry forests and tree farms.

The refusal by logging companies to clear out brush on their licenses by employing systematic controlled burns (as BC Indigenous Peoples did) certainly contributes to climate change and to the smoke from the burning untended forests we are currently experiencing.

Another contribution to the wildfires in my opinion was the destruction of an early, active and effective environmental movement by grassroots people in BC (think Clayoquot) by an elitist take over by “professionals”.

The elitist leaders made a devil’s bargain with the BC government that if the government would preserve a large swath of land called the Great Bear Rainforest (and to be fair, it is a large swath of land) there would be no more “wars in the woods”. In other words, give us this and you can do whatever you like to the rest of BC public forests. The result is the smoke and ash we are now all swallowing and coughing up. But to the main point.

The crucial point is the legal framework that has allowed all of this environmental damage to happen. It is the complicity of the BC court system, including the Attorney Generals and the Crown, but specifically the BC judges who are supposed to serve us. If these BC legal entities weren’t colluding with the logging corporations everybody (young and old alike) who could, would be outside these last days of August enjoying the sunshine and fresh air.

This court collusion is so obvious and so predictable that I unabashedly call it corruption. I am not accusing the justices of taking bribes from the logging companies, but honestly, the way the judges unfailingly serve the logging corporations they may as well be taking bribes. They protect the corporations from the people by denying the people free speech, free association and fair trials for the ones who protest the destruction of our land. How do they do this? By giving out injunctions to any logging corporation who asks for one. And it is these injunctions that prevent protesters from ever getting a fair trial.

These injunctions make the protester guilty of disobeying a court order (Contempt of Court) instead of being able to bring a defense of why they did what they did. The judges will only consider whether or not a judge’s order was disobeyed. That’s it. The judges don’t give a tinker’s dam about any protester’s reasons.

The irony is that the judges don’t have to give out the injunctions in the first place. They have a choice of which legal process to apply, arrest by injunction, or arrest by the Criminal Code. Of course they chose the injunction route in order to satisfy their CEO friends, and not the people.

The police in all other situations apply the Criminal Code and are supposed to take care of people who are causing a commotion and then it is simply a police matter. The people causing a commotion would be arrested and brought to trial. But this would be a real trial and an accused’s reasons, under the law, must be listened to.

But BC judges friendly relations with CEO’s of corporations are more important to them than justice, or even whether or not our province burns to a cinder. BC judges and attorney generals must be exposed for their corrupt use of injunctions or that is exactly what will eventually happen to this province.