An international speaking tour advocating against the use of pesticides in local watershed forests will make a stop in Peachland on Thursday, June 27, 7-9 p.m., at the 50+ Centre, 5672 Beach Ave. 

Sponsored by the Peachland Watershed Protection Alliance, the event will also be accessible via Zoom. 

The alliance has called for a ban on herbicide use and what it calls "the industrial war" on broad-leaf trees from watershed forests which is changing the watershed ecology, killing funghi, killing broad-leaf species, starving out beaver and moose, impacting other wildlife, and making forests drier, hotter and more likely to burn.

Currently labelled as 'pests' and 'weeds', the alliances charge the forestry sector and the B.C. government has declared a war on all aspen, birch, willow, cottonwood, alder and berry bushes.

The guest speakers will include local Syilx elders Grouse and Pamela Barnes, wilderness committee conservationists Cedar Georg-Parker and Lucero Gonalex, and keynote speaker James Steidle of Stop The Spray BC.   

Topics the presentations will key in on include saving biodiversity in forests for food production, medicine plants, food sovereignty, wildfire forage, and water production, storage, filtration and distribution. 

"The value of B.C.'s forests does not lie solely in commercial toilet paper, pellets and 2x4 production, but in the natural benefits and essential assets including biodiversity, habitat, food, water and climate control," states a Peachland Watershed Protection Alliance news release promoting the event. 

In a press release for an earlier stop in the tour at Rockaway Beach, Oregon, Steidle said pesticides are used widely to remove deciduous tree species with a goal to grow commercial conifer plantations of one or two species for maximum harvest benefit. 

"Forestry in the Pacific Northwest, from Oregon to British Columbia and beyond, has become more like thinking of forests as an agricultural crop, and this has led to significant impacts on wildlife, resiliency and wildfire," Steadle said.

To register for the Zoom presentation, go to  .