Tallest Spruce Deserve Protection
No Public Input
MacMillan Bloedel Ltd. (MB) originally scheduled logging to begin in Carmanah Valley starting in 2003. But, in 1984, at the first hint of interest in the valley by conservationists, the company bypassed the normal public review process and advanced its logging plans by 15 years. These plans were approved by the provincial forest service with no public review or input.
By May 1988, logging roads had reached the edge of the lower Carmanah drainage and were surveyed into the heart of the valley. MB applied for and received permission from the B.C. Forest Service to accelerate the logging even more.
Only the combined efforts of the Heritage Forest Society, Sierra Club and Western Canada Wilderness Committee resulted in Canada's largest forest company halting its road building. MB decided not to build any roads into the valley until the Carmanah's value could be assessed.
Norm Godfrey, the company's Port Alberni region forester commented, "We hope that these trees aren't the biggest or the tallest, so that we can just come in here and log them." MB proceeded to identify 49 sites on Vancouver Island it felt contained comparable trees - 46 of which are scheduled to be logged. Of the remaining three areas, two are small sites in remote Cape Scott Provincial Park. The third, Strathcona Provincial Park's inaccessible Moyeha River, is Canada's only major Pacific coast wilderness drainage entirely within a park and it does not have the same dominate spruce component. In contrast, Carmanah Valley is just four hours from Victoria, and lies adjacent to the heavily used West Coast Trail portion of Pacific Rim National Park.
Priceless Ecological Treasure
Facing the open Pacific, Carmanah Valley catches moist sea air that brings upwards of 380 cm of annual rainfall. Rich alluvial soils, combined with the longest growing season in Canada, helps create one of the most magnificent forests in North America. Along the banks of meandering Carmanah Creek and its old flood channels are groves of Sitka spruce unparalleled in size and grandeur. They are undoubtedly the finest stands of this tree species in Canada, and equal to the finest stands preserved in Olympic National Park, a UNESCO world heritage site in Washington State. Many of the Carmanah spruces are three metres in diameter measured at breast height and estimated to be more than 700 years old. The tallest towers almost as high as a 32 storey building.
Sitka spruce are fast becoming rare in B.C.'s coastal rain forest. They are even rarer in the park system. They grow best in the rich silty soils found along flat river floodplains that are close to the ocean. Only two percent of the remaining coastal old-growth forests in B.C. are of this species.
Sitkas are remarkable in several ways. Flakes of their bark deposited over hundreds of years mound at the base of the ancient trees. For its weight, Sitka spruce is one of the strongest woods. The tight-grained knot-free wood of the old-growth giants, besides being used for airplane construction in the first and second world wars, is still used to make the best sounding boards for pianos and guitars.
Joe Foy in clearcut
Logging operation
Big Trees or Big Stumps?
According to a spokesman for MB, which has the rights to log the valley under Tree Farm Licence (TFL) 44, each of the massive spruces are worth $40,000 as a log on the ground. But nobody knows what their long term ecological and scientific values are; their secrets were born in the twilight of the ice age and carried through more than 10,000 years of evolution.
The licence agreement with the government allows for withdrawal of land representing up to five percent of the allowable annual volume of wood cut. This would easily allow for the preservation of the entire Carmanah watershed. Company claims of massive job losses resulting from wilderness preservation are weak and misleading, considering the fact that Carmanah represents only 1.81 percent of the total productive area of TFL 44. The real threats to forest industry jobs are the company's common practices of over cutting, wood waste, raw log exports, environmental degradation and automation in the forest industry.
