Corky Evans - Keeping forests in community hands

My quote-thought for the day:

The bottom line is, land in the hands of a person rooted on the land, or a community, or even a company, is a thousand times better than land in the hands of footloose capital.

In the West Kootenays, we're very different than the rest of B.C. We have, in the main, avoided the consolidation disease that has destroyed the market for wood and the affinity for the land that has occurred in almost every other Timber Supply Area in the province. In the '90s, we created more and different forms of tenure here than just about anybody else. Actually, I would like to see the forest industry operate like the dairy industry, where it is against the rules for a person who milks cows to also be the person who processes the milk. The vertical integration and monopoly systems -- that have destroyed so much of the creativity and enterprise in the forest industry -- is simply not allowed in B.C.'s agriculture sector.

- from an Interview with Corky Evans in The Tyee