WELCOME TO THE WILDERNESS COMMITTEE
WCWC director exploring the Boise Valley
Cedar Spirit Grove. Ancient red cedar trees along Fool's Gold Route.
Western Canada Wilderness Committee (WCWC) is a non-profit charitable society headquartered in Vancouver BC. Founded in 1980 by a few concerned citizens, we are now over 20,000 members strong. Hundreds of active volunteers strengthen our organization far beyond the limits set by our donations, sales of educational publications and membership income.
Our job is preserving wilderness, the natural life-support system of planet Earth. Our tactics include production of educational newspapers like the one you are now reading. We produce posters that celebrate the beauty of endangered wilderness areas and we build trails into endangered wilderness areas so that people can hike and experience for themselves the power and mystery of ancient forests and pristine streams. We hold public meetings about threatened wilderness areas and we mount slideshows in communities both big and small. We produce videos about wild places that air on your local cable channel and that you can rent or buy. We build research stations in wild areas to enable scientists to study the lifeforms found there and we conduct essential research ourselves. We also advocate better ways of logging and how to get more jobs per tree cut.
We are not against all logging. We are against the way it is currently being done. We are against clearcutting. We are for selection logging methods. To hang on to the strands that hold Earth's fabric of life together we believe we must expand our protected areas network and improve our ways of using resources outside of protected areas. Then we can have both jobs and protected ancient forests.
Our store-font office is located in Gastown in old Vancouver. But most of our wilderness saving projects are in the hinterlands of BC. We have been leaders in helping save some magnificent ancient forests including South Moresby, Lower Carmanah, Khutzeymateen and the Megin.
We have been actively working to preserve the Pinecone/Burke area since 1991.
- Spring 1991 - We first heard stories of a legendary cedar grove somewhere west of Pitt Lake. The area was about to be logged. Our first expeditions located the cedar grove in the Boise Valley and discovered much, much, more - a land of extraordinary natural diversity and beauty.
- Spring 1992 - We produced 30,000 copies of our first information report about the Pinecone/Burke area and distributed them throughout the Lower Mainland.
- Summer 1992 - WCWC volunteers cleared the 12 kilometre Boise Valley section of the Fool's Gold Trail.
- January 1993 - We accepted the BC government's offer to sit on a Study Team considering the area for park protection.
We believe that this area is an outstanding park proposal. The fact that it contains the last valley-bottom big-tree ancient forest located right next to Canada's Pacific metropolis should make its preservation irresistible.
I hope that after reading this newspaper, you will decide to become a member of WCWC (if you are not already a member) and work with us for the protection of Vancouver's one and only Backyard Wilderness.
Sincerely yours, Paul George, Founder
