Forest $ustainability: a rumination on the once and future forests of British Columbia, provoked by five books and a screenplay

[...]in the manner of Hollywood epics, the film script reprised the long history of interaction between humans and forests in a series of cameos stitched together with commentary from the historically minded narrator: a Phoenician merchant trading lumber for grain, yet aware that "we leave the desert in our footprints"; Plato in once-fertile Attica comparing the stony slopes to "the skeleton of a sick man"; King Henry VIII of England signing "The Bill for the Preservation of the Woods"; Martin Allerdale Grainger, British Columbia's second chief forester, "telling what it was like in ... [the] early days of timber speculation"; and, improbably, Frederick J. Fulton, Gordon Sloan, and Peter Pearse, the authors of four Royal Commission reports on the state of provincial forests (produced in 1910, 1945, 1956, and 1976, respectively) comparing their contributions in the Library of the BC Legislature. According to the third forester, in the employ of an environmental organization, none of this was sufficient.