South Vancouver Island's most spectacular ancient rainforest unprotected and threatened
This near-record-sized five meter-in-diameter redcedar, nicknamed "The Castle," grows in the unprotected Lower Castle Grove within Timberwest TFL 46 lands in the Upper Walbran Valley. Photo credit: Geoff Huber.
On the southwestern coast of Vancouver Island, only a three-hour drive from Victoria, Canada's glorious old-growth temperate rainforest reaches its most magnificent proportions. In the Upper Walbran Valley, western redcedar, Douglas Fir and Sitka spruce grow to mammoth proportions. It's a home for big trees and it's threatened!
Experts believe that the Walbran Valley, like the adjoining Carmanah, has one of the highest amounts of biomass (organic matter) per hectare of anywhere in the world and more than in any other place in Canada. Here, ample year-round rainfall and very mild winters thwart fires and maximize year-round photosynthesis. The Walbran is the southern-most large tract of lowland, big-treed, oldgrowth forest left in BC...and very rare! About 87 percent of the ancient forest south of Barkley Sound on Vancouver Island has already been logged.
The Walbran is the traditional territory of the Pacheedaht First Nation. Their ancestors have used this valley's ancient cedars, salmon, and wildlife to sustain their culture for millennia.
Whole valleys not half valleys make ecologically viable parks!
In 1994, at the conclusion of the Vancouver Island Commission on Resources and the Environment (CORE) land use process, the BC government added Upper Carmanah Valley to the already protected lower valley to provide park protection for the entire Carmanah watershed. Ignoring the call for protecting the entire Walbran watershed, it protected the Lower Walbran but left the 5000-hectare Upper Walbran Valley open to industrial logging. Conservationists didn't give up and the fight to save the whole Walbran continues today.
TimberWest and Weyerhaeuser are, cutblock by cutblock, steadily clearcutting the Upper Walbran. With every heavy rainfall, silt from the new clearcuts and logging roads is washing into the salmon-bearing Walbran Creek. This logging increasingly affects the park downstream and it fragments habitats of endangered species. It makes complete ecological sense that the entire Walbran watershed be protected as a park.
About 25 percent of the Upper Walbran (15 percent of the entire watershed) has been clearcut to date. While the campaign to protect the Upper Walbran has dragged on for seven years, its spectacular forest has diminished. The BC government must protect it now...or it'll be too late.
Logging will destroy ecotourism gem
Timberwest continues to liquidate the Upper Walbran's ancient forest with its "variable retention" logging such as shown in this photo, which is virtually identical to clearcutting. April 2000
Next to the Pacific Ocean, a narrow corridor including the mouths of the Walbran and Carmanah is protected in Pacific Rim National Park's West Coast Lifesaving Trail. It's one of the world's premier hiking destinations. Unfortunately, this National Park protects only a very narrow strip of land—in many parts not even a kilometre wide. Hikers often hear the roar of chainsaws and machinery through the thin strip of trees as logging encroaches on the park's boundary. Pacific Rim National Park is not viable on its own as a recreational paradise or as a protector of biodiversity. Saving the entire Walbran Valley is key to this Park's survival.
TimberWest: greedy or shrewd Multinational Forestry corporation?
TimberWest's holdings in the Upper Walbran are, according to current land use plans, part of a so-called `Special Management Zone' (SMZ), which calls for the retention of some "mature" and "old-growth targets" However, these old-growth "reserves" do not have to be located in the ecologically vital valley bottoms and lower slopes where the big trees grow. In fact, they can be moved around in the SMZ when cutover lands become "mature" which is defined by the Forest Service as being 125 years of age. Simply put, the SMZ leaves most of the Upper Walbran's ancient forests open to logging.
TimberWest acts ruthlessly towards its own workers. The Youbou sawmill at Cowichan Lake operated for 73 years until TimberWest shut it down on January 26, 2001, laying-off 220 employees. The Youbou mill had in recent year been retooled to handle smaller second-growth logs. Closing the mill has not reduced TimberWest's rate of logging. Now the logs are being shipped elsewhere for processing. TimberWest is, in fact, BC's largest exporter of raw logs.
Recently TimberWest was one of the logging companies implicated in a "grade-setting" scam, misrepresenting the value of the timber logged from our public forest lands and cheating BC taxpayers out of millions of dollars in stumpage payments for the logs they've taken. The future of our forests and secure jobs for forest workers are not safe in the hands of companies like TimberWest. It's community-controlled forest licenses, local value-added manufacturing and protection of precious places - including the Upper Walbran's remaining ancient forests - that will sustain jobs and local communities in the long run.
