-ARTISTS VOLUNTEER TO SAVE CARMANAH-
Robert Bateman in Carmanah
In the spring of 1989, Carmanah Valley was the site of an amazing gathering of some of Canada's top artists. Western Canada Wilderness Committee invited them to come to the Carmanah Valley in a bid to use their talents to raise public awareness of the endangered home of Canada's tallest trees.
Over the space of a few months almost one hundred artists made their way down the newly built Carmanah trail to paint, draw and sculpt amidst the towering trees. Like the trail builders before them and the scientists that came after, the artists were all volunteers. They slept in small backpacking tents, spent their days exploring and studying the rainforest and their evenings gathered around the campfire on a gravel bar beside Carmanah Creek.
Unusual for the rainforest during the time of the project, the sky was cobalt blue in the day and a velvet bowl of brilliant stars at night. Campfire conversations would often turn to the stark contrast between the haunting beauty of Carmanah's virgin forest and the slash-choked, burned and blackened clearcuts that lie just outside the watershed. The artists spoke of how the distant growl of heavy logging equipment, carried by the wind from the next valley, affected them...a constant reminder as they sketched and painted, of why they were there.
All the artists' creations were donated to the Wilderness Committee to be auctioned to raise funds needed to counter the growing logging company campaign and to be used in a book to popularize the issue.
By summer, as MacMillan Bloedel intensified its lobbying efforts to convince the B.C. government to allow logging in most of the valley, the Wilderness Committee worked nearly round the clock to produce a high quality art book containing the works of 70 of the artists that had travelled to Carmanah.
On Oct. 18, 1989 Carmanah: Artistic Visions of an Ancient Rainforest , was officially released in hard cover. A stunning collection of art, the book is a powerful call for people to take action now to protect Earth's special wild places.
