A RARE AND ENDANGERED ECOSYSTEM
Winter In Upper Carmanah Valley
Everything in nature has a
purpose. The possibility that
logging the remaining old-growth
forests will make certain species go
extinct -- before we even know
what they are -- runs against our
basic desire to know and learn.
-- University of Victoria entomologist Richard Ring.
Temperate rainforests are extremely rare, covering about 0.2 per cent of the Earth's land area. About one-half of all the world's remaining temperate rainforests grow along the west coast of Canada and the United States from Alaska to Oregon.
These exceptional forests have most of the world's biggest trees, notably Sitka spruce, western redcedar, and Douglas fir. Far exceeding tropical rainforests in the volume of plant biomass they contain per hectare, the temperate rainforests in North America take on their most luxuriant expression around the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State and the neighbouring southwest side of Vancouver Island. The oldest trees in B.C.'s rainforest may have as many growth rings as there are years on the Christian calendar.
The larger trees in the Upper Carmanah are easily 61 metres (200 feet) tall; their trunks more than 6 metres (20 feet) around. This is about average for the older dominants in the Vancouver Island ancient temperate rainforest, where the tallest trees reach more than 91 metres (300 feet) and the biggest trees are almost 6 metres through.
Prior to the industrial era, some 2.3 million hectares of ancient temperate rainforest blanketed Vancouver Island. Today, approximately 100,000 hectares of that rainforest is protected from development -- slightly more than four per cent of the Island's original forest cover.
Just 25 per cent of the ancient temperate rainforest that existed on southern Vancouver Island in 1954 is still intact today. And much of that exists in smaller patches scattered across the landscape. Only the Carmanah Valley, together with a couple of neighbouring watersheds, remains essentially in a wilderness state.
If the current rate of logging is not decreased, virtually all unprotected forests on the southern half of the Island will be logged by the year 2001, and the northern half of the Island by 2022.
For Neville Winchester, these statistics forecast ecological disaster. "It is essential that we set aside large, unfragmented watersheds if we are to maintain the ecological integrity of these unique forests. And there are so few opportunities left."
-- Statistics courtesy of the Sierra Club of Western Canada
