Clearing the Air

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Dirk Brinkman likes to describe himself as a “hegemonist,” which by one definition is somebody who wields “predominant influence.” This title is a tad self-aggrandizing, but there’s no doubt that Brinkman’s four-decade-long career in the forestry and silviculture industry has been characterized by a maverick creativity, energy and tenacity that sets him and his business, the Brinkman Group of Companies, apart from the crowd. From the crisp fall days of 1970 – when Brinkman and a friend scored a contract from the Ministry of Forests to plant trees in barren clearcuts up Wild Horse Creek near Cranbrook – the company has grown into a diverse and thriving concern with annual revenues topping $25 million and a workforce of more than 1,500 during the peak season. The tentacles of its tree-planting and forest management operations stretch across Canada and the United States and as far away as Central America.


Industrial-scale reforestation remains the Brinkman Group’s bread and butter – its crews have planted more than 900 million trees over the past 35 years – but the company also undertakes controlled burning, brushing and spacing contracts, as well as urban-based ecosystem restoration projects such as those carried out at YVR and Stanley Park. However, what truly distinguishes the company these days are its foreign endeavours. In the early 1990s, the hegemonic Brinkman started dabbling in subtropical forestry, which in turn led to his present – and most controversial – preoccupation: climate change and the still-emerging science and economics of carbon sequestration through tree planting and forest management.


“I’ve always felt like I’m on a mission, and right now my mission is to stop global warming,” says the 64-year-old Dutch native. “Twenty per cent of global carbon emissions come from deforestation. We have to stop that.” 


A visit to the Brinkman Groups’s headquarters – situated in a drab, almost-neglected-looking two-storey office building in an equally nondescript New Westminster neighbourhood – seems to confirm the sincerity of this new mission. Bookshelves in his spacious office are lined with everything from soporific forestry policy pamphlets and ecosystem restoration manuals to treatises on climate change and carbon trading. A well-thumbed copy of James Lovelock’s gloomily prophetic The Vanishing Face of Gaia – about humankind’s urgent need to adapt to imminent catastrophic ecological change – is perched on the edge of his desk.


Brinkman comes from hard-working immigrant stock. He was born in Zaandam, Holland, the year the Second World War ended. In 1950 his father moved the family to Ontario and, with his wife, proceeded to raise a family of 10 children on the salary he earned as a State Farm Insurance agent, while juggling a personal interest in Christian education and labour associations. In keeping with his father’s pious values, in 1965 the younger Brinkman enrolled in liberal arts at Michigan’s Calvin College, later pursuing studies in the philosophy of religion. On his first summer excursion out west, Brinkman landed a job falling trees ahead of the advancing waters of the Williston Lake reservoir in northern B.C. He was instantly hooked on the B.C. bush life, and religious studies were left behind.

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It was also in the woods of the west where he would meet his future wife, Joyce Murray, who he says was a “highballing,” or high-production, tree planter at the time. They married in 1977 and would go on to co-own and manage their tree-planting company for 25 years, while raising three children. In 2001 Murray resigned from the company and entered politics, earning a seat in the provincial legislature as a B.C. Liberal, during which time she served as both environment minister and minister of management services. Seven years later, she joined the federal Liberals and was elected as the MP for Vancouver-Quadra. Having a wife positioned close to the corridors of political power suited a policy wonk like Brinkman, but public life wasn’t for him.


“Politics takes an innately balanced and cautious person, and Joyce seems to do it with ease. For me it’s an ordeal, so this is a perfect partnership,” says Brinkman, who shares a West Broadway home with Murray in the heart of her federal riding. In other words, Brinkman favours changing the world through business over the glacially slow pace of political change. 


Brinkman’s interest in international projects came about organically, at about the same time as climate change was becoming a major concern. Tree planters, who tend to be a nomadic bunch, would return from their travels to tell Brinkman about all the projects that could be done in the developing world. Inspired, Brinkman began fishing for new opportunities in countries that could offer business security and affordable land, and where trees grow relatively fast. Costa Rica, with its stable democracy and respect for rule of law, was a natural fit, and in 1992 Brinkman’s international operations were launched. After learning about intact rainforest and denuded grazing land available for almost fire-sale prices, Brinkman dove in, leading to a succession of so-called Brinkman International Reforestation Development projects, or “BIRDs,” that now total some 400 hectares on Costa Rica’s Pacific coast. The model: buy land with other investors, plant trees, manage the land for long-term sustainable forestry and generate a return from timber.


“We have restored these ecosystems to the point where tapirs are coming back. There’s not just value in the trees; some of the parcels are now worth as much as $50,000 per hectare, five times the original amount paid,” Brinkman says, suggesting that real estate speculation formed part of the appeal of the original investment.


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In 2001 Brinkman partnered with a Dutch hardwood importer called Terra Vitalis to manage roughly 1,500 hectares of mostly teak forest to rigorous standards established by the Forest Stewardship Council, a seal of approval that guarantees wood products come from responsibly managed sources. While Brinkman’s interests in Costa Rica diversified, climate change economics were rising to the top of the global political agenda – a paradigm shift that meshed well with Brinkman’s vision of a profitable company with an overarching social mission to help address the pressing problems of global warming. 


Of particular interest to Brinkman are so-called REDD projects, which stands for reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation. Through the process of photosynthesis, plants and trees consume carbon dioxide and water, and then release oxygen as a waste product. REDDs, in effect, attach a dollar figure to the carbon sequestering services of a forest, allowing landowners to receive carbon-credit payments for stewardship of a particular piece of land through replanting or prevention of deforestation. In turn these credits can be traded or sold. Brinkman says he’s not interested in becoming a carbon trader but rather in managing projects that are eligible for carbon credits. 


His company’s involvement in an ambitious initiative at Pico Bonito, a 107,000-hectare national park in Honduras, is an example of this. Historically, the park had suffered from slash-and-burn agriculture on its borders as well as animal poaching – environmentally destructive practices that also represented a livelihood for local people with few other options. In 2006 Bosques Pico Bonito, a quasi-private company and conservation organization, hired the Brinkman Group as its forest manager to replant the land with native species, manage future timber harvesting and stickhandle a REDD project through the onerous certification process, while providing alternative forms of local employment compatible with long-term conservation, such as selective tree thinning and the harvesting of non-timber products from the forest such as medicinal plants. 


The Pico Bonito project has some heavyweight support: it happens to be one of just 20 projects endorsed by the World Bank’s BioCarbon Fund, a US$90-million fund that buys carbon credits from forestry projects around the world. The Brinkman Group is now leveraging its Pico Bonito experience into another innovative opportunity, this time in the form of a forest management contract with the Embera and Wounaan of Panama, indigenous peoples who were recently awarded title to more than 400,000 hectares near the notorious Darien Gap. Similar to Pico Bonito, the partnership will include timber harvesting and a REDD project.


John Betts, executive director of the Western Canadian Silviculture Contractors Association, first met Brinkman at a planting show in Kingcome Inlet in the mid-’70s and has watched with interest as his company evolved from a strictly planting-focused outfit into a sophisticated forest management firm. He says right from day one, Brinkman was never content to be just another player in a ragtag roster of outfits vying for planting contracts. According to Betts, Brinkman always enjoyed debating policy and moulding the way forestry is conducted as much as he did running a tight, competitive contracting company. He credits his colleague for helping to reform the stumpage system and enable contractors to build long-term relationships with forest licensees, developing camp standards around health and hygiene, and in general introducing a level of stability to a sector that in the early years was ruled by fly-by-night low bidders. 


“Dirk has a vision and it helps him come up with some different and interesting ideas about what a silviculture company should be,” Betts says over the phone from his office in Nelson. He sees Brinkman’s international foray into the cutting edge of carbon sequestration as a logical progression of his vision of a tree-planting company that’s much more than a bunch of itinerant workers sticking seedlings into the ground in summer and collecting employment insurance in the winter.

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As enthusiastic as Brinkman is about his global-warming mission, forestry-based carbon-sequestration projects such as REDDs have their critics. Planting trees is easy, but things get complicated very quickly when it comes to calculating the amount of carbon stored in a given piece of forest or ecosystem, considering that different species store carbon at different rates. A report released by the David Suzuki Foundation in 2008 expresses substantial doubt about the efficacy of REDDs, claiming that a tonne of carbon sequestered and stored in living plant biomass cannot be considered equivalent to leaving a tonne of carbon in the ground in the form of fossil fuel deposits never to be burned. 


Rose Murphy, a PhD candidate at SFU’s School of Resource and Environmental Management, is similarly skeptical. Murphy is studying various carbon-offset programs, and she says that forest-based carbon-sequestration programs require rigorous oversight and standards; otherwise they’re just smoke and mirrors. “With forestry projects, a huge problem is permanence,” she says. “You would have to have a pretty sophisticated set of policies in place to keep a piece of land forested in perpetuity.” She also worries that support for one sequestration project might simply displace the problem of deforestation to another chunk of land beyond the scrutiny of managers. This could happen if dedicating land to forestry inflates the cost agricultural land, creating an incentive for people to deforest new lands for farming.


Brinkman admits REDD projects have potential problems that make them ripe for exploitation by carbon-credit charlatans. That’s why he says his company is only interested in projects that meet the standards set by the Clean Development Mechanism, a complex and unwieldy initiative managed by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change that nevertheless authorizes so-called certified emission credits for projects in the developing world. “We want our projects to work to the highest bio-ethical standards,” Brinkman says.


Despite the critics and doubters, Brinkman soldiers on. After the 2008 federal election, he hired his wife’s nomination manager, a venture capital specialist named Cameron St. John, to be the finance point man for the company’s international projects, ferreting out new opportunities for carbon sequestration around the globe. Among the esoteric projects currently being explored is a venture with a landowner in Argentina to grow carob trees – which, St. John says, may encompass a three-way profit strategy to harvest trees for wood, seed pods for food and carbon credits for the carbon market. 


None of these seemingly outlandish ventures would be possible if Brinkman didn’t know how to turn a profit – and nearly 40 years after its founder planted his first tree, the company continues to reforest the clearcuts of Canada and grow its multi-faceted international arm. For Brinkman, helping to green the planet, stop global warming and make money are not mutually exclusive goals. “There’s a movement that sees capitalism and profits as bad, but having your projects be profitable and efficient is not a bad thing,” he says. “I think we have an obligation to be responsible on a business, social and environmental front.”


Brinkman has always been outspoken, never one to shy away from trumpeting the fact that his grassroots, B.C.-born tree-planting company has learned to punch above its weight in the world. Colleagues such as John Betts have been observing, with interest, for decades.


“I would dispute that he invented tree planting as he sometimes claims, but he was one of the early ones,” Betts says with a laugh. “Clearly he’s on a mission, and it has something to do with planting the world.”