Upper Carmanah canyon
Volunteer takes a break from packing planks for boardwalk construction.
Hydrologist measures stream flow rate in upper Carmanah.
An entomologist prepares a trap to catch light seeking insects which is left overnight in the upper canopy. In the morning he counts and classifies the captured insects.
VOLUNTEERS AND SCIENTISTS WORK TOGETHER TO SAVE THE WHOLE VALLEY
by Paul George
April 10, 1990. A bottle of warm, B.C. "Champagne" sat on the table in front of us. One of the volunteers had rushed out to get it just in case B.C. Forest Minister Claude Richmond announced full preservation for the entire Carmanah Valley that day.
Ken Lay, Joe Foy, Adriane Carr and myself, all long time WCWC directors, sat together behind the table in the back room of our Gastown office. We peered over the champagne bottle at the dozen or so waiting reporters and three TV cameras poised on the other side.
Pinned to the wall behind us was a copy of our Carmanah Big Trees Not Big Stumps poster - our most successful poster to date - with over 15,000 copies up on other walls across the nation.
One of the reporters was talking on a cellular phone to a colleague attending the legislative press conference in Victoria. He was the only one who could hear what was going on there. Ken asked him to hang up and dial back using our speaker phone, so that everyone in the room could hear the minister's announcement. It worked. Suddenly it was just as if we were there.
Although I was 99% certain of what his announcement would be - preservation for only those areas best known for their big Sitka spruce - I felt a pang of disappointment when Claude Richmond's voice boomed the announcement that his government intended only to establish a half valley park in the lower part of the Carmanah watershed. He went on to say that they planned to let MB log the upper valley, once the company finished studies to prove that such logging would not harm the park downstream.
About six weeks earlier Joe Foy, Derek Young, our Victoria Branch director, and I met for a half hour with Mr. Richmond in his plush legislative office. It was obvious even then that he had a closed mind on this issue. He was not interested in hearing our suggestions for creative and feasible win-win solutions that would provide both logging jobs and full preservation in Carmanah.
We suggested, for example, that the government provide low interest loans to help estabilsh a new secondary manufacturing plant in Port Alberni that would use less wood while employing more people. He told us that he had already heard all the arguments. He said that, in general, the new value added wood manufacturing plants could barely keep up with the jobs being lost every year due to increasing automation in huge saw and pulp mills.
He seemed disinterested in the fact that the small area around Carmanah Valley commonly but unexpectedly experiences some of the heaviest 24 hour rainstorms in North America, with torrential two day downpours delivering over a foot of rain. Even the fact that the valley harbours marbled murrelets, seabirds theoretically protected under the federal Migratory Bird Act and dependent on the old-growth for nesting sites, did not sway him.
Nor was he swayed by our arguments, based on scientific studies in other watersheds, that logging would trigger increased erosion and landslides, which would in turn increase the stream's sediment load and destroy the giant spruce habitat.
But the minister did promise to give us all the scientific information and studies which his Forest Service would be using as a basis for their recommendations to cabinet. And he promised to give them to us before he made his decision, leaving us an opportunity to respond.
Trail map posted near the start of the Headwaters trail.
Cedar boardwalk winds through the old growth with ramps and stairways and featuring some very fancy carpentry work.
He broke that promise. Despite many tries on our part, we never received any information from Mr. Richmond. All along we suspected that there were no independent hydrology, windthrow or slope stability studies; only the incomplete ones done by MB.
It was obvious to us that if there were to be any independent scientific studies, our society would have to take the lead and help make sure that they were done.
All of a sudden the minister was through and we faced the inevitable questioning: How do you feel about the decision? What are you going to do?
For a second we hesitated. We looked at the bottle and each other. Should we open it, and drink half of it, celebrating half a victory? Without a word spoken, perhaps by telepathy, we unannimously decided to leave it corked. For just like logging the upper half of the valley would eventually spoil the rest, the half full bottle of champagne, no matter how well re-corked, would quickly spoil.
As Adriane said, it was like Solomon choosing to cut the baby in half. We wondered where the natives fit into the park picture. Why weren't they consulted? We knew that we must work harder than ever to finish the research station and the tree top platforms and get the badly needed research started.
In the weeks to come, we continued to raise money to fund our Carmanah research and boardwalking activities through "adopted" trees. Bythe thousands, faithful Carmanah supporters sent in their $25 adoption fee donation with a name they had chosen for "their" tree. In appreciation we sent them a beautiful certificate sealed with the WCWC logo.
Incredible thought and effort went into ensuring the platforms did not hurt the tree and were safe and easily removable.
Few accepted the half-baby, ecologically unworkable solution and most agreed that logging companies have already taken their "share" of coastal rainforest. Only six out of 89 primary watersheds - those over 5,000 hectres - on Vancouver Island have not been logged! A patchwork of tiny preserved parcels across B.C. would fail to protect large animals and genetic diversity.
The faster people come to understand the valid and compelling ecological arguments for entire watershed protection, the sooner all of Carmanah will be fully protected.
