Bugaboo Rainforest - Canada's Next National Park?
The proposed 500,000-hectare Bugaboo Rainforest National Park is located in the heart of the world's only temperate inland rainforest, in BC's Columbia mountains. Typified by narrow river valleys and lined with corridors of towering oldgrowth cedar and hemlock, the rainforests in this region are spectacular to behold. Widely spaced trees, notable for both their size and age, help anchor this unique ecosystem that is home to a wide range of species such as mountain goats, grizzlies, wolves, wolverines, and many species of owls.
Photo: Michael Wheatley
Unfortunately, these high-biodiversity, high-productivity rainforest valleys — the areas that are most important to old-growth dependent species for critical habitat and connectivity corridors — are the very areas that are easiest to access, and hence the first to fall to chainsaws.
Already, because of habitat loss predominately caused by logging and industrial development, the Columbia Mountain region has 85 wildlife species, 88 plant species and 8 plant communities listed as threatened or endangered.
Opponents of the Bugaboo proposal have said that there are already five national and provincial parks in the inland rainforest and that's enough. But these parks are too small and isolated from each other and do not conserve enough habitat to sustain healthy populations of mammals. A case in point is Glacier National Park to the north of the Bugaboo proposal. A hundred years ago when Glacier was established, it was not common practice to take into account the ecological needs of species such as the mountain caribou. Now this island of extinction has seen the accelerating decline of large mammals, with only 10 mountain caribou, 5-8 wolverines and 33 mountain goats remaining in the park.
In addition to being too small, parks in the area also fail to adequately represent the Interior Cedar Hemlock (ICH) ecozone which typifies the ecologically valuable, low-elevation, oldgrowth inland rainforest. In fact, only 9% of the province's ICH ecozone is protected, while 23% of BC's rocky mountain tops and glaciers (what wilderness advocates refer to as 'rock and ice') enjoy park status.
The proposed Bugaboo Rainforest National Park would link together 1.2 million hectares to make the largest network of parks in southern BC and would provide essential connectivity corridors between existing high mountain parks. By basing our protected areas on ecological boundaries, the federal and BC governments would show that they are indeed committed to protecting endangered wildlife and the world's only inland rainforest.
Read our report to find out more about the need to protect this unique ecosystem in the Bugaboo Rainforest National Park.
