{"id":225822,"date":"2021-04-13T18:42:16","date_gmt":"2021-04-13T15:42:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/the-battle-to-save-b-c-s-old-growth-trees-before-its-too-late\/"},"modified":"2021-04-13T18:42:16","modified_gmt":"2021-04-13T15:42:16","slug":"the-battle-to-save-b-c-s-old-growth-trees-before-its-too-late","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/the-battle-to-save-b-c-s-old-growth-trees-before-its-too-late\/","title":{"rendered":"#The battle to save B.C.\u2019s old-growth trees\u2014before it\u2019s too late"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#The battle to save B.C.\u2019s old-growth trees\u2014before it\u2019s too late<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n It came as a bit of a shock to Shawna Knight, a 43-year-old mother of two who runs the Buddha Box, a locally sourced food outfit in Shirley, on Vancouver Island\u2019s southwest coast. Co-founder of the famous Cold Shoulder Cafe in the local surfing mecca of Jordan River, Knight says she figured she was as clued in as anyone to what was happ<\/a>ening in the wild world around her. \u201cWe hunt for mushrooms, we do nettles every spring. I felt like we were connected. But we weren\u2019t. We so obviously were not.\u201d<\/p>\n

Knight says she\u2019d taken it for granted that the days when British Columbia was internationally notorious for cutting down the world\u2019s last remaining stands of temperate old-growth rainforest were well and truly over. She thought the \u201cWar in the Woods\u201d that had brought thousands of protesters to Canada\u2019s West Coast from all over the world, when she was in her teens, had been fought and won. \u201cBoy, was I wrong,\u201d Knight tells me. \u201cI just assumed we weren\u2019t old-growth logging anymore. Turns out we\u2019re doing it as fast as we can, right now.\u201d<\/p>\n

The realization came like a bolt out of the blue following a chance find on a Facebook<\/a> chat group last summer\u2014the ancient trees were still falling. It\u2019s what prompted Knight to shut down the Buddha Box and spend her time ever since, a week on and a week off, where I met her: at a blockade on a remote logging road known as the Edinburgh Main, a branch of the Gordon River Main, in the mountains above Port Renfrew, an old fishing and logging town about two hours\u2019 drive northwest of Victoria.<\/p>\n

The camp on the Edinburgh Main is one of a half-dozen protest sites that have been springing up and moving around since last August on roads that the Teal-Jones logging company has been trying to punch into the Fairy Creek watershed, one of the last unprotected old-growth valleys on Vancouver Island.<\/p>\n

The Teal-Jones Group is a 70-year-old logging and milling firm that bought the provincial timber rights to a huge tract of Vancouver Island\u2019s southwest forests\u2014Tree Farm Licence 46\u2014in 2004. Ever since the first blockade appeared last August, the company has been in and out of court, hoping for an injunction that would order the dozens of protesters who have been encamped on its roads to get out of the way.<\/p>\n

READ:\u00a0Human remains found on Vancouver Island have opened a door into a lost world<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Although no cutblocks had been authorized within the Fairy Creek watershed, Teal-Jones says it is within its rights to log there, and it intends to take trees from only about 200 hectares of the 1,200-hectare watershed. The company is just trying to build logging roads to get at the trees. It sounds like a fairly straightforward contest. But it isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just about the Fairy Creek watershed, and it\u2019s not just about TFL 46. In some ways, it\u2019s as though the War in the Woods that began in the mid-1980s and lasted a decade is still going on. \u201cIt never really ended,\u201d Knight tells me.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s a lot that\u2019s different about \u201cprotest\u201d this time around: digital technologies, the rise of social media, the new capacities available to First Nations authorities, the economic transformation of formerly logging-dependent communities, and the realigned roles of the federal and provincial governments.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not even clear how it came to pass, exactly, that all those protesters suddenly showed up last summer camping in cars, tents and old buses in the mountains around Fairy Creek. But it would appear that word of a Teal-Jones logging road breaching a ridge line above the watershed first came from Joshua Wright, a 17-year-old activist and filmmaker with highly developed computer skills. Wright had been live-monitoring road construction in the area using advanced digital-mapping software from his home across the Juan de Fuca Strait and across the Canada-U.S. border in Olympia, Wash.<\/p>\n

\"Knight<\/p>\n

Knight in a camp bus at a blockade (Photograph by Jen Osborne)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

That\u2019s a far cry from what might be called the first shot fired in the War in the Woods back in the 1980s. You could situate that event on Nov. 21, 1984, when Tla-o-qui-aht Chief Moses Martin stood on the beach of Meares Island, just off Tofino in Clayoquot Sound, and addressed a group of MacMillan Bloedel officials and loggers who\u2019d arrived to start clearing the forest. Martin told them their provincially issued logging rights counted for nothing against Tla-o-qui-aht law, and that they were welcome to stay for a meal but they\u2019d have to put down their chainsaws first.<\/p>\n

The MacMillan Bloedel party withdrew, but not without a fight in the courts. They lost, and so did the provincial government. Sixteen years later, Clayoquot Sound, with its giant trees still standing after 1,000 years, towering as high as 20-storey buildings, was a UNESCO biosphere reserve. Along the way, thousands of protesters had made their way to Vancouver Island to protest old-growth logging. In one protest, at the Kennedy Lake Bridge, 859 people were arrested and eventually convicted on contempt charges for violating an anti-blockade injunction. It\u2019s still considered the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history.<\/p>\n

The activists and the Tla-o-qui-aht won most of their demands, and further prohibitions on industrial-scale logging were secured in the nearby Megin River Valley, portions of the Walbran and Carmanah valleys and other remnants of ancient forest on Vancouver Island immediately north of Teal-Jones\u2019 TFL 46. On B.C.\u2019s mainland coast, where much of the readily accessible timber had already been taken out, the Great Bear Rainforest was made off limits to further large-scale logging.<\/p>\n

READ:\u00a0A heartfelt protest in B.C.\u2019s Clack Creek Forest<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Over the years, there were other compromises between the lumber and conservation interests as the industry went through a series<\/a> of convulsions, including a pine beetle infestation that carried off much of B.C.\u2019s Interior woodlands. Then came years of forest-protection backsliding during the Liberal party governments of Gordon Campbell and Christy Clark.<\/p>\n

When New Democrat John Horgan was elected with a Green-backed minority in 2017, hopes were high that Vancouver Island\u2019s dwindling ancient forests would win some reprieve\u2014TFL 46 falls entirely within Horgan\u2019s home riding of Langford-Juan de Fuca. There was much consultation and study, including a key \u201cOld Growth Strategic Review.\u201d When Horgan beat back the Greens and the Liberals to form a majority in last September\u2019s snap election, he had his eye on the public\u2019s hardening mood: a 2019 opinion poll showed 92 per cent of voters wanted action to protect endangered old-growth forests, partnerships with Indigenous people and a more diversified economy.<\/p>\n

\"Logging<\/p>\n

Logging truck drivers protesting forest-industry layoffs in 2019 (Darryl Dyck\/CP)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Logging truck drivers protesting forest-industry layoffs in 2019 (Darryl Dyck\/CP)Teal-Jones, too, insists the company intends to meet the high standards the public increasingly demands. In a recent statement, Gerrie Kotze, the company\u2019s chief financial officer, declared: \u201cOur work on this tree farm licence will be done in a way consistent with our values of sustainable forest management.\u201d Teal-Jones, he added, \u201cis committed to harvesting with the care and attention to the environment.\u201d<\/p>\n

Conservationists heralded the Old Growth report and its recommendations as the makings of a welcome \u201cparadigm shift\u201d in B.C.\u2019s dysfunctional forest policies, putting ecosystem health above all other considerations. While Horgan\u2019s government committed to following the review panel\u2019s recommendations, further consultations would be required. Horgan nonetheless pledged to protect \u201cnearly 353,000 hectares of old-growth forests,\u201d in nine large areas, saying, \u201cthat\u2019s just the beginning.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then the caveats began to reveal themselves. The nine parcels weren\u2019t being \u201cprotected,\u201d exactly. Logging was merely being deferred for two years. As for the \u201cold-growth\u201d in the deferral areas, half the landscapes were either alpine bonsai trees, or not even forest, or second-growth, or old-growth that was already protected. The Ministry of Forests had to clarify that only 196,000 hectares of \u201cold-growth\u201d was involved. In any case, when would the \u201cparadigm shift\u201d laid out in the review actually begin?<\/p>\n

Maclean\u2019s<\/em> reached out to newly appointed B.C. Forests Minister Katrine Conroy\u2019s office for answers. Will the review\u2019s recommendations be implemented within the deferral\u2019s two-year timeline? Conroy\u2019s spokesperson, Tyler Hooper, explained by email that it\u2019s going to take time because the government is committed to \u201cdoing this right,\u201d adding that the Old Growth panel\u2019s timeline \u201crelated to when work should be under way,\u201d not completed. Besides, he noted, the recommendations came before the COVID-19 crisis: \u201cWe\u2019ve started high-priority work in keeping with the report\u2019s recommendations. But it will take engagement with the<\/em> full involvement of Indigenous leaders, organizations, industry and environmental groups to find consensus on the future of old-growth forests in B.C.\u201d<\/p>\n

A closer review undertaken by forest ecologists Karen Price and Rachel Holt with professional forester Dave Daust, authors of the report \u201cB.C.\u2019s Old-Growth Forest: A Last Stand for Biodiversity<\/em>,\u201d reckon that only 3,800 hectares of Horgan\u2019s deferred 350,000 hectares contain forests of the type that the Old Growth panel classified as in need of immediate action. So about one per cent, in other words, was forest of the ancient, tall-tree kind that most people imagine when they hear the term \u201cold-growth.\u201d<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

You have to squint at all these numbers to notice the point that the activists are trying to make when they say the bad old days in British Columbia are back. It\u2019s complicated, and that\u2019s where Ancient Forest Alliance photographer TJ Watt comes into the picture. He\u2019s one of the main reasons that a handful of activists who first met at Lizard Lake near the Teal-Jones Granite Main logging road last August have acquired so many friends and well-wishers.<\/p>\n

The 36-year-old Watt has been cutting through the cacophony of data with photographs. After a childhood in rural Metchosin, just outside Victoria, and summers in Port Renfrew, where his parents ran a marina, Watt has emerged as a key figure in the campaign to save the few groves of ancient forest that remain on Vancouver Island\u2019s southwest coast. He\u2019d found himself enchanted by the forest early on, and by his early 20s he\u2019d developed a fascination with photography.<\/p>\n

Watt\u2019s leadership in the Ancient Forest Alliance grew out of a random event, in his early 20s, when he came upon the Western Canada Wilderness Committee\u2019s storefront office on Johnson Street in Victoria. He walked in and hit it off right away with WCWC\u2019s veteran campaigner, Ken Wu, who put him to work taking photographs of a forestry protest rally in town. Ten years ago, after Watt and Wu struck out on their own and founded the Ancient Forest Alliance, Watt found himself drawn deeper into Vancouver Island\u2019s distant groves of cedar, fir, hemlock and spruce.<\/p>\n

READ:\u00a0This American caribou is the last of its kind\u2014and it lives in Canada<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cThe more remote landscapes were a blank spot on the map to me,\u201d Watt says. \u201cYou spend three or four hours on a logging road, and then you arrive in this wonderland, with cascading waterfalls and emerald green pools and rivers, and these ancient forests, with trees that are nearly five metres across. I was just blown away how these forests were not protected.\u201d<\/p>\n

Watt\u2019s early photographs of the still-standing trees in the unprotected portions of the Walbran Valley, and his 2018 portraits of the just-felled giants in the entirely unprotected Nahmint Valley near Port Alberni, caused a sensation. The photographs were partly a catalyst for the Horgan government\u2019s old-growth review.<\/p>\n

But it was last November that his disturbing \u201cbefore and after\u201d pictures of Teal-Jones logging operations in the Caycuse Valley drew international attention. \u201cThat was an explosion,\u201d he says. \u201cPeople from around the world get it, when they see the striking contrast in a tree that\u2019s lived for 800 or 1,000 years, and the next day, it\u2019s gone.\u201d<\/p>\n

His methodology is straightforward. He finds a big tree, picks an angle, sets up his trip<\/a>od, shoots his photographs, and keeps careful notes\u2014measuring the distance from the camera to the tree with a range finder; taking reference photographs of his set-up; noting the camera lens he\u2019s used; noting the focal length; and recording the GPS coordinates so he can accurately retrace his steps through the logging slash to the \u201cbefore\u201d location, to take an \u201cafter\u201d photograph.<\/p>\n

Watt posted his first Caycuse \u201cbefore and after\u201d photographs on his Instagram account on Nov. 24, and they\u2019ve since shown up in the U.K.\u2019s Guardian<\/em> news<\/a>paper, Outside<\/em> magazine and countless social media posts. The scenes he depicted have been seen by millions of people.<\/p>\n

\u201cHumans are visual creatures, and photography allows you to understand an issue in an instant,\u201d Watt says. \u201cPeople see that it\u2019s a permanent loss. Old-growth forests do not come back. We get one chance, and one chance only, to save these trees.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Wu<\/p>\n

Wu in the Avatar Grove forest (Photograph by Jen Osborne)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Because of the mischief they\u2019ve been making in and around TFL 46, you\u2019d think TJ Watt, Ken Wu and the Ancient Forest Alliance would be considered villains in a town like Port Renfrew. They\u2019re not. They\u2019re more likely to be considered heroes.<\/p>\n

In the forests above the town, Wu and Watt have drawn widespread public attention to several patches of old-growth\u2014like Avatar Grove and Eden Grove\u2014and to individual trees with names like Big Lonely Doug, the San Juan Spruce and the Red Creek Fir. Avatar Grove, named after James Cameron\u2019s blockbuster 2009 science<\/a> fiction movie, is now classified as a forest ministry recreation site, and it\u2019s become world-famous. Every year, tens of thousands of people visit the strange and mossy stand of giants, while Port Renfrew has taken to billing itself as the \u201cTall Tree Capital of Canada.\u201d What the forest industry took away, the tourist industry is giving back.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s another huge difference from the 1980s and 1990s. Back then, the whole point of forest policy on Vancouver Island\u2019s west coast was to convert old-growth forests, with their wolves, Roosevelt elk, black-tailed deer, black bears and cougars, into monocultural tree plantations. In those pseudo-forests, as the celebrated B.C. environmentalist Vicky Husband used to put it, \u201ca deer would have to pack a lunch.\u201d<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

The Teal-Jones Group isn\u2019t simply the villain of the piece, either. The company is one of the loudest industry voices behind a broad-based move spearheaded by environmentalists to push back on the pace and scale of raw log exports from B.C.\u2019s coastal forests.<\/p>\n

Dozens of sawmills have closed over the past 20 years, and B.C. forests ministry records show that from 1998 onward raw log exports to China, the United States and elsewhere grew from about one per cent of the coastal cut to 30 per cent by 2018, reaching a recent average of four million cubic metres annually.<\/p>\n

To put that in perspective: because a standard logging truck can hold around 40 cubic metres of timber, the volume of unprocessed logs from coastal forests shipped out of B.C. has been adding up to the equivalent of 100,000 fully loaded logging trucks in a bumper-to-bumper convoy stretching roughly from Vancouver to Winnipeg, every year.<\/p>\n

Another big change from the days of the War in the Woods: First Nations are increasingly becoming major players in the forest industry.<\/p>\n

\"Watt\u2019s<\/p>\n

Watt\u2019s photos of old-growth logging (like his drone image of Caycuse, above) exploded on social media (TJ Watt)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The Fairy Creek watershed, along with almost all of TFL 46, falls within the traditional territory of the Pacheedaht Nation, a community of about 300 Nuu-chah-nulth people. While the Pacheedaht forestry initiatives include a set-aside for 400 years\u2019 worth of cedar sufficient for their traditional ocean-going canoes, the Nation now also manages or co-manages an annual cut of about 140,000 cubic metres and runs its own small sawmill. It takes a percentage of the stumpage fees from every tree cut down in its traditional territory and co-owns a portion of Tree Farm Licence 25 in the Jordan River watershed. The Pacheedaht have declined to take an official position in the Fairy Creek controversy.<\/p>\n

Ken Wu, the veteran forest activist, has since moved on to establish the Endangered Ecosystems Alliance, which works mainly at the federal level. Wu, who now works out of Montreal, tells me a major change from the 1980s and 1990s is that, while logging-road blockades are a necessary \u201ccatalyst\u201d to action, the harder and more lasting work involves building broader alliances with \u201cnon-traditional\u201d partners in the resource industries.<\/p>\n

The Trudeau government has committed Canada to achieve 30 per cent protection of marine and terrestrial ecosystems by 2030. Wu says that\u2019s not near enough. The Endangered Ecosystems Alliance is aiming for 50 per cent. As for holding the line to protect the last stands of Canada\u2019s West Coast temperate rainforest, Wu says the key is offering Indigenous communities a viable alternative to the trap between a rock and hard place\u2014between old-growth logging and poverty.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe point is, there\u2019s hardly any of the high-productivity old-growth left,\u201d Wu says, \u201cand we have to protect everything that remains. B.C. is one of the very last jurisdictions on earth that still condones and supports the large-scale logging of 500- and 1,000-year-old trees. It doesn\u2019t grow back. Once it\u2019s gone, it\u2019s gone forever.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

This article appears in print in the May 2021 issue of<\/em> Maclean\u2019s magazine with the headline, \u201cFalling fast.\u201d Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here<\/a>.<\/em>
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