Great Bear Conservation Support Grows...
While logging companies delay cutting, waiting for the election of a more sympathetic BC governemt
Heiltsuk researchers record evidence of aboriginal sustainable forestry. A plank has been split from this redcedar centuries ago.
At 3.5 million hectares in size, the Great Bear Rainforest is the single largest coastal wilderness area ever pro-posed for preservation by B.C.'s conservation community.
The name "Great Bear Rainforest" was first coined by the McAllisters--founders of the Raincoast Conservation Society— a legendary family of wilderness explorers and advocates that includes Ian and Karen as well as Ian's father, long-time wilderness campaigner Peter McAllister.
The Great Bear Rainforest covers a labyrinth of wilderness inlets, fjords, estuaries, islands and over 100 pristine, rainforested watersheds over 5,000 hectares in size. It extends 600 kilometers up B.C.'s rugged coast, from the Stoltmann Wilderness in the south to the Alaska "Panhandle" in the north. It is called "Great Bear" because this region has the highest concentration of grizzly bears in Canada.
This vast coastal wilderness harbors over 1,000 distinct races of salmon as well as B.C.'s healthiest population of wolves and grizzlies. In the center of the Great Bear Rainforest is the home of B.C.'s rare Spirit Bear — a population of black bears where up to one in ten cubs is born with a white coat of fur. In 1988 the Valhalla Wilderness Society began conducting bear research in the area and then advocating a Spirit Bear Park to protect this unique population of bears.
Since the early 1990s, when the McAllisters began their fight to preserve the Great Bear Rainforest, many other conservation groups have joined the battle including Greenpeace, Forest Action Network, the Sierra Club of B.C., the U.S.- based Natural Resources Defense Council and the Wilderness Committee.
In 1998 WCWC campaigners undertook several expeditions into the Great Bear Rainforest to see both active clearcutting and pristine wilderness. On one trip Ian and Karen guided the Wilderness Committee team into the spectacular Johnstone, Koeye and Allard valleys where they saw grizzly trails along the rivers worn deep into the soil by generations of bear use.
On an expedition in September of 1998 Heiltsuk First Nations people took the Wilderness Committee team to old village sites in the Roscoe Inlet and other sites of cultural significance near Bella Bella. "The sight of the moss-covered house poles raising out of the forest floor and the huge cedar trees, everywhere showing the scars of centuries of use, is a memory that will stay with me forever," said Joe Foy.
David Garrick measures oldgrowth Sitka spruce tree on Yeo Island, in the Great Bear Rainforest.
On that expedition the Wilderness Committee brought along David Garrick, an expert on Culturally Modified Trees (CMTs). CMTs are usually redcedars that have been scarred when First Nations foresters used their traditional methods to harvest bark or planks. These scars last for many centuries and help tell the generations-old story of sustainable forest use. During the September 1998 expedition, David led a CMT field workshop that was attended by 5 Heiltsuk people keen to develop their skills in this field of research. David and the Heiltsuk participants traded tips and stories about CMT identification and documentation.
A few days later, on the advice of several Heiltsuk people, the Wilderness Committee team visited a Western Forest Products logging site on Yeo Island. "What we saw shocked and saddened us," explained Adriane Carr. "The loggers had clearcut a huge area of ancient forest and left a small, wind-blown stand of CMTs in the middle of the destruction. Half the trees in the CMT patch had already blown down. We left Yeo Island more determined than ever to stop the clearcutting and save the Great Bear's forests—for their biodiversity and their cultural heritage values," said Carr.
In the summer of 1999 WCWC provided support for another CMT workshop for First Nations people this time on Hanson Island at the south end of the Great Bear Rainforest, where David Garrick conducted extensive CMT research (published in 1998 by WCWC in the book authored by David, Shaped Cedars and Cedar Shaping: A Guidebook to Identifying, Documenting, Appreciating and Learning from Cultural Modified Trees). First Nations participants came from Kitkatla, Hartley Bay and Alert Bay to learn David's CMT techniques.
Early in 1999 WCWC and Raincoast Conservation Society (RCS) collaborated on the production of a new educational newspaper about the Great Bear Rainforest. The paper features the ongoing clearcut destruction of pristine Great Bear areas by major logging companies and spelled out our goal of protecting all of Great Bear Rainforest's pristine valleys and ecologically significant habitats. We were worried about the "Lands and Resources Management Plan" (LRMP) initiated by government for the "middle" part of the Great Bear Rainforest in 1998. We knew it would ultimately lead, as similar processes have in other parts of B.C., to only partial, fragmentary protection of the area.
In a concerted effort to more broadly raise the profile and public support for protecting all of the Great Bear Rainforest, WCWC printed 150,000 copies of the new newspaper and distributed them to every small community on the coast, to politicians in Ottawa and Victoria, to our members and supporters across Canada and to environment groups in the U.S., Japan and Europe. We also used this paper to establish a new "grassroots distribution network" of over 100 individuals and local environment groups who have pledged to distribute WCWC papers on an ongoing basis in their home communities.
Our Great Bear Rainforest banner has been unfurled at many timber company shareholder meetings, on several occasions at the B.C. legislature - even at the year 2000 N.D.P. Leadership Convention!
Ancient redcedar tree, estimated to be 1,300 years old on Hanson Island, where local First Nations are fighting Tlmberwest's plans to log the area.
In the fall of 1999 we continued our public mobilization efforts with the production and printing of 60,000 Great Bear Rainforest 3-part "opinion poll" mailers. We found these mailers really worked on other issues (for example, over 10,000 mailers were sent to the B.C. Premier's office - and we figure a similar number to Prime Minister Chretien - in support of establishing a Stoltmann National Park Reserve).
In Toronto we hired a University student, Aurita Withers, to expand the outreach efforts of our door-to-door canvas and use student networks to distribute both our Great Bear paper and 3-part mailers. Aurita is now working on a consumer's guide for Torontonians, to help them identify which wood products are "good" or "bad" based on their connection to rainforest destruction. WCWC has seen, especially in the Clayoquot Campaign, the compelling effect of consumers letting corporations know they won't be party to the logging of precious oldgrowth forests. WCWC will continue to support the "market campaigns" of environment groups in the U.S. and Europe, especially by hosting delegations of wood product purchasers, politicians and media - taking them to see the clearcut mess and the threatened rainforest glory of the Stoltmann Wilderness (the southernmost tip of the Great Bear Rainforest).
Over the year 2000 WCWC will also work with other environment groups and with First Nations to map out a full "Conservation Vision" for the Great Bear Rainforest - a network of proposed protected areas including Provincial or Federal Parks, Tribal Parks, grizzly sanctuaries and salmon sanctuaries. John Richardson, a law student, has joined WCWC on a short term contract to help produce this vision paper as well as a legal handbook for First Nations people living along the coast to help them in their efforts to protect their territories from illegal activities such as tree poaching, bear poaching and illegal fishing.
The public pressure to save the Great Bear Rainforest must continue to build. The big companies are trying to look good by gaining phony eco-certification for their barely-changed clearcutting and by extending temporary moratoriums on some pristine valleys in the Great Bear, no doubt hoping that the environmentalists' campaigns will sputter out and a very pro-industrial-development government will soon get elected in B.C. These companies have not yet given up their plans to log most of the remaining Great Bear Rainforest's remaining intact valleys. Conservationists must increase their efforts on all fronts to succeed!
What to know more? Contact us and ask for this Wilderness Committee free education report:
CANADA'S GREAT BEAR RAINFOREST
Vol. 18, No. 1 1999 Special Edition co-published with the Raincoast Conservation Society
Order a copy of the Great Bear Rainforest book by Ian and Karen McAllister.
