It will take patience and ingenuity to harvest a forest submerged in a Ghana lake
Harvesting an old-growth forest when it is submerged in 8,500 square kilometres of water, sometimes as deep as 60 metres, requires a whole new kind of ingenuity, equipment, technology, know-how - and considerable moxie.
Last week, Vancouver Island-based Clark Sustainable Resource Developments Ltd. launched its first sophisticated survey boat on Ghana's Lake Volta equipped with state-of-the-art sonar systems.
Wayne Dunn, the company's co-founder, president and CEO, said of the project: "It's really invisible. You can't see it.... We're developing absolutely new ways of doing inventory analysis and understanding this resource that is underwater."
The high-tech survey last week is just the first of many that must be done on the vast basin created 40 years ago when the newly independent Ghanaian government dammed the White and Black Volta rivers to flood the forest in order to create a massive hydroelectric generator.
Aerial maps from the time prior to the flooding have been located and pieced together, while historic reports on forest density conditions in the African country have been retrieved from the archives of European universities.
Besides assembling the puzzle of how much hardwood is on the floor of Volta Lake, the pioneering Canadian company must also devise an entirely automated method of extracting dead, dense water-logged trees that won't float and could weigh as much as 50,000 kilograms, having taken the decision not to risk lives by sending scuba divers with chainsaws into the depths.
At executive committee meetings in Vancouver this week, Mr. Dunn expects a progress report on equipment being designed especially for the Volta Lake project.
The machinery will harness technologies used by the off-shore oil and gas exploration to move large objects beneath the surface, by traditional logging to grab large bunches of trees and marine engineering to see what's going on underwater.
"One of the criteria we gave the designers is there's no man in the water," he said.
"I have never seen a safe methodology for cutting trees underwater with people."
And as if all that weren't challenge enough, Mr. Dunn and his partners - including former prime minister Joe Clark, Goldman Sachs and the government of Ghana - are determined to harvest the timber leaving as small a footprint as possible on local ecology and society.
He says social and environmental impact studies are underway.
But that has not stopped environmental groups and local fishermen who earn their livelihood on the water from raising tough questions about what the world's largest underwater logging operation will mean for the future.
While the lake is man-made, the tangled root systems of the giant trees are now a habitat for tilapia and other fish.
And though the lumber industry will generate local jobs, fish are an essential source of food as well as income.
What a World Bank economist wrote off only a few years ago as being worthless - and locals in Ghana feared as a lurking danger for the hundreds of lives that have been lost when underwater tree branches have torn open boat hulls - Mr. Dunn sees as a business venture worth between $400-million and $2-billion, depending on how much can be recovered and what condition it is in.
Born into a logging family in the lumber town of Big River in northern Saskatchewan, the 51-year-old never finished high school before he, too, ended up in the brush.
"My father started logging when he was 12. I just naturally went in to it," he said.
"I was always ... on the grunt end of a chainsaw or a skidder or a choker. I left there when I was about 30 and was sure I would never go back to logging and certainly had no desire to."
Mr. Dunn instead began a career advising corporations on social responsibility and environmental sustainability, later earning a master's degree in business from Stanford University despite never having gone to college.
It was a CBC documentary that rekindled his interest in logging - but in a way that fit with his new area of expertise.
After learning about smaller-scale logging of submerged softwood in reservoirs in Saanich, B.C., "I thought, Wow, that's interesting.' The planet needs trees to absorb carbon, for biodiversity, and we're busy cutting them.
"And yet here's a whole source of trees that we can bring out that will not have a carbon impact on the planet and will have a minimal biodiversity impact ... but I don't see the economics working with softwoods with the value per tree."
Then a short time later, while visiting Ghana, where his wife is from, he started wondering what was under the surface of Volta Lake.
"I just started one step after another trying to find out more about if there might be trees there, whether Ghana might be interested in letting a concession on it and starting to pull together a team around it," Mr. Dunn said.
"I called my father who has a lot of practical experience in logging, but also just a lot of common sense growing up in the bush like we did.
"He didn't tell me the idea was crazy.... So that was sort of the genesis of it."
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