Archive for month: August, 2013

Twenty years after a protest led to massive arrests on logging roads in Clayoquot Sound the organizers say a lot has changed – but a lot hasn’t, and they predict a new generation of activists may soon be on the barricades again.

The issue next time could be pipeline development or, once again, logging.

Where or when remains unpredictable, as was the Clayoquot rally. That summer thousands of people flocked to camp out in the Black Hole, just outside Tofino on Vancouver Island, and to stand in ranks across logging roads despite threats of arrest by the RCMP.

Hundreds were dragged away. But the Australian band Midnight Oil rocked through the night and the next day people got up and defied the law again.

The event threw the NDP government into shock – and led to a negotiated compromise. Clear-cut logging, then a practice favoured by industry and government, would be ended and a scientific panel would guide logging in the area.

It was a dramatic victory – but it didn’t end the environmental problems in B.C. Clayoquot Sound is still being logged and a mine is proposed in the area. B.C.’s Interior forests are currently being logged at a rate many say is unsustainable. Old-growth trees, some more than 1,000 years old, are routinely cut down. The Port of Metro Vancouver is pushing for increased coal shipments – and two separate oil pipeline projects are being proposed in B.C., despite widespread public concern.

“People have asked me many times, is there going to be another Clayoquot? Is this the next Clayoquot? Is that the next Clayoquot?” said Valerie Langer, a key organizer of the 1993 protest who was then with Friends of Clayoquot Sound.

“But I don’t think you manufacture things like Clayoquot ’93,” she said. “That was a factor of a broad provincewide tension about forestry, a good place to focus that [concern] – and a group that was ready to fly with it.”

However, all those factors could easily come together again in B.C., said Ms. Langer, who is now with the environmental group, ForestEthics Solutions.

“I do feel that kind of happening with the tar sands/pipeline campaign,” she said, referring to the movement to stop Enbridge Inc. from building its proposed project across B.C.

Ms. Langer said the Clayoquot protest seemed to come out of nowhere, but the mood that drove it had actually been building for years, as the government allowed industry to clear cut the forests of B.C., despite growing public objections.

She senses that same “kind of desperate feeling” simmering in the public now over the prospect of a pipeline snaking across the province to feed a parade of oil tankers plying the waters of the Great Bear Rainforest.

“I don’t think the federal and provincial governments have really cottoned on to that [public unrest] yet,” said Ms. Langer. “But this is something that builds and then there is a moment – and you never know exactly where and exactly when that will be – when it explodes.”

Vicky Husband, who was head of the Sierra Club in B.C. in 1993, said one of the reasons the Clayoquot protest got so big so fast was because people could easily drive to the area to see for themselves what environmentalists were complaining about.

The highway from Port Alberni to Tofino cut right through an active logging area, including the Black Hole, where the old-growth forest had been stripped, and then the landscape burned.

“Clayoquot Sound and Tofino were at the end of the only paved road to the open Pacific. And that’s critical. People could get there. They could see the horror show of what was going on with the logging,” she said.

Ms. Husband said she’s alarmed at the level of logging now taking place in B.C., and at government plans to privatize public forest lands. She’s horrified by the prospect of oil pipelines crossing B.C.

Do you think, she was asked, that we need another big environmental protest in B.C?

“Yes, I do,” she said, “because I don’t think we have a government that understands.”

Read more: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/mass-arrests-during-war-in-the-woods-20-years-ago-prompted-lasting-change/article13703844/

Agree with them or not, the graduates of Clayoquot Sound care about the world they live in. They were prepared to fight for it then — and they are still fighting now — and that has made Canada a better place.

A scant 10 minute walk off a logging road near the BC’s West Coast town of Port Renfrew is Avatar Grove, a stand of old cedars so majestic, powerful and gnarled that T. F. Watt said he and his colleagues from the Ancient Forest Alliance “were running around like kids in a candy story” when they found it in 2009. (Globe & Mail, July 23/11).

Watt, along with the co-founder of the Ancient Forest Alliance, Ken Wu, had been searching for just such an iconic stand of trees, one that would dramatize and catalyze enough awareness of old-growth forests to prevent further logging of the tiny remnant that still exists on southern Vancouver Island. Avatar Grove, as this stand was named, just might accomplish such an ambitious feat. Indeed, the Port Renfrew Chamber of Commerce, the BC Ministry of Forests and the company that had the right to log Avatar Grove, Teal Cedar Products Ltd, all concurred that the stand was so sensational that it should be protected.

But it nearly wasn’t. Watt and Wu found a cluster of 20 huge stumps nearby that had been logged the year before. These 900 yearold cedars may have been even more spectacular than the standing trees that were saved. “This would have surpassed Avatar Grove in grandeur – had we found it in time,” said Wu. And shortly after Watt found Avatar Grove, timber cruisers surveyed it for logging, hanging the ominous ribbons of plastic tape that marked a cutting boundary. After 1,000 years of growing, Avatar Grove came within a hair’s breadth of the chainsaw’s bite.

Given the awesome character of Avatar Grove, who cut down the neighbouring trees? What were the fallers thinking as the teeth of their chainsaws bit into millennium-old wood? What thoughts were passing through the minds of the timber cruisers who flagged Avatar Grove for a similar fate? Are “pieces of silver” so numbing of perception and so corrupting of judgment that people simply do not notice or recognize the miraculous when it is manifest? In another time under different circumstances the only appropriate answer to these questions would have been, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Because the trees in Avatar Grove awaken in us the sense of sacred that we do not usually possess, the work of environmentalists such as T.J. Watt and Ken Wu should qualify them as modern-day saints – a status they would probably reject. With their seeing and their conviction, with their dedication and passion, they open the eyes of the blind, bringing illuminating light into a place of dull darkness. They reveal the evident, proclaim the unmistakable, connect us to a wondrous obvious of which we were previously ignorant. What else explains why some trees are felled and others are saved? Whether or not a crucifixion occurs merely depends on the difference between recognizing or not recognizing, between awareness and unawareness.

Show people and they will see. The tourists who now flock to gaze at the massive trees of Avatar Grove are not so much tourists as pilgrims coming to enter the awe of something bigger and older than themselves, something that communes with the slow passage of eon and transcends the limits of self. These pilgrims are doing the same when they flock to such revered places as Banff, Jasper, the wild trails of Strathcona, or to any seashore, lake, mountain, river, valley or forest. Something primal and timeless lures them out of themselves and connects them to a mystery that is greater than anything they can possess, control or understand.

Saints awaken us to such awareness. They make pilgrims of us all. They show us the extraordinary so we will find it in the ordinary. If we are perceptive enough, we can learn to find the miraculous in any tree, any fish, any frog or any blade of grass. The ordinary is no less amazing than the extraordinary. If we are attentive enough, if we are open and receptive enough, every part of nature becomes a wonder that will reduce the greatest of our explanations to an awestruck silence.

No one can understand the utter magic pervading any of the living things that surround us. They are profound because they give context, companionship and meaning to our very existence – the outside of us that enters the inside of us through the miracle of awareness. Then a special stand of trees may infuse us with a moment by-moment sense of magic.

But a pilgrimage does not have to be a physical journey to Avatar Grove. Every time we watch a nature documentary we are paying vicarious homage to the life forces that permeate our planet. Such programs amaze us with the living vigour of reefs, tundra, grasslands, plains, jungles, and all the plants and creatures than enliven them with incredible and diverse vitality – a living planet that we are despoiling and diminishing with an astonishingly blind enthusiasm.

As the Canadian media guru, Marshall McLuhan, so wisely noted, we move through the present looking through a rear-view mirror at what is behind us – we don’t see what is, we only see what is past, where we have been and what we are losing. This principle applies with profound irony when we consider our current fascination with all the myriad wonders of nature that we revere through documentaries and pilgrimages. Just as we are celebrating and learning of nature’s incredible complexity and intricacy, our industrial exploitation is destroying them with alarming zeal.

This is why Avatar Grove is so important, why Watt and Wu were so invigorated by hope. This small stand of glorious trees is a signal, an icon, a symbol, a sign of what remains that we must not lose. It is a warning announcing that innumerable treasures are slipping into an irretrievable past. But Avatar Grove is also a promise and an awakening, if we can understand its deeper meaning. By honouring the extraordinary, perhaps we can learn to protect the ordinary.

Re-printed in the Island Courier:  https://www.courierislander.com/news/avatar-grove-the-extraordinary-and-the-ordinary-1.133466

An avid, amateur cougar enthusiast in Port Alberni fears that logging on the Alberni Hump has destroyed a cougar den used by generations of the big cats.

“Island Timberlands has built a road right up to it, and there’s flagging tape right at the entrance,” said Ray McLellan, who has tracked and watched cougars at the small cave since he was growing up in Port Alberni in the 1970s.

“Now the last little section on top of the hump has been logged. They could have left a nice buffer around it,” said McLellan, whose father was a cougar hunter.

The area was logged last summer, but McLellan hoped the cougars would return to their traditional safe cave — a cut in the rocks that goes back six metres and is about 45 centimetres high.

However, there has been no sign of them, McLellan said. Before the logging started, he had bought a trail camera that he planned to hang in front of the den.

“They won’t put up with this amount of disturbance. They need peace and quiet,” McLellan said.

“These animals would usually take refuge in the Cameron River canyon, but that has been clearcut too. These cougars are now displaced,” he said.

One fear is that the animals could cut along Roger Creek and Dry Creek Park and head into Port Alberni, he said.

“And bad things happen when they hang around town too much.”

Island Timberlands spokeswoman Morgan Kennah said the company was not aware that there was a cougar den in the area.

“If a noticeable den was discovered in timber at any stage of our planning, we would map the location and plan activities around the area accordingly,” she said.

“We have a bear den identified in this area which was protected with adjacent tree retention.”

Usually cougars den in escarpments and rock bluffs that are not conducive to harvesting trees, Kennah said,

No more logging is planned around the Alberni Hump for now, she said.

“Our near-term harvest plans in this area were complete this past winter.”

A Forests Ministry spokesman said Island Timberlands has to abide by the Private Managed Forest Land Act and protect critical wildlife habitat, but cougars are not considered a species at risk.

The provincial government estimates, from a 2010 survey, that there are between 400 and 600 cougars on Vancouver Island and the population is on the upswing.

The cougar population estimate provincewide is between 5,100 and 7,000 animals.

McLellan said it is likely the den had been used by cougars for hundreds of years.

“There have been five generations of animals since I found it in the mid-’70s,” he said.

“When one lot disappears, their place is almost invariably taken by a big male, and that tells me it is prime habitat,” he said.

Read more: https://www.timescolonist.com/cougar-den-may-have-been-lost-to-logging-port-alberni-man-says-1.565546