Rainshadow wilderness - critical wildlife corridor
It is a sign or BC's staggering diversity that in just a few hours you can pass from rainforest to near-desert environments, with spectacular dry pine and fir forests providing the transition. This 1.12 million hectare (2.8 million acre) ecological treasure is known variously as the Lillooet Forest District, the South Chilcotins and the Rainshadow Wilderness.
With the east slope of the Coast Mountains forming its stunning backdrop, the Rainshadow provides a critical corridor for wildlife - including California bighorn sheep, mule deer and mountain goats - moving between coastal and interior forests. It is also home to one of Canada's southernmost population of grizzly bears, who use the area as their only link between more northern populations and the North Cascades grizzly recovery zone south of the border.
But loss of forests is degrading migration corridors and the winter range that is critical to these species' survival. Recognition of the high ecological values of the area has not translated into protection: the bunchgrass and ponderosa pine forests for which the area is famous have only 10% and 4.47% protected, respectively, province-wide.
Digging up parks?
In the 1990s the BC government initiated a land-use planning table for the Lillooet area. Talks were often heated, and at the end of the day mining and logging interests could not agree with other participants. In 2001 separate proposals were submitted to the government, which chose to uphold the proposal that respected conservation, recreation, tourism and community interests. As a result one of the longest-standing park proposals in BC was resolved with the creation of the 72,000-hectare (190,000 acre) South Chilcotin Mountains Provincial Park.
Two months later the newly-elected provincial government began undoing the agreement. The planning table was disbanded, casting doubt over the future of 13 other proposed protected areas and any possibility of shifting to progressive land-use practices. Government officials started talking about the new park in the past tense.
The timber and mining industries were particularly aggressive in their lobbying. The latter asked that the park boundaries be shrunk by over 95%. Curiously, a report commissioned by the government strongly suggested that there was little prospect for increased mining activity in the area because of "continuing low metal prices" which had "depressed metallic mineral exploration effort in BC over the past decade." The tourism industry, which is a major employer in this sparsely populated recreation paradise, has come out strongly against any reduction of the park's boundaries. Over the long term tourism has a brighter future in the area than either mining or logging.
A Small Price to Pay
Any time a timber company cuts down trees on publicly-owned land in BC it pays the government a fee known as stumpage. Stumpage payments vary depending on the value of the timber and on operating costs.
Government and independent analysis both show that due to high operating costs in the rugged Rainshadow area, timber companies operating around Lillooet pay on average about one-quarter of what their counterparts in the wider region pay by way of stumpage. As a result, conservative estimates put the price tag of upholding the planning table proposal at a paltry $256,000 CDN in lost stumpage revenue: easily offset by the tax revenue from tourists to the region. That's a small price to pay for protecting diminishing dryland forests, the South Chilcotin Mountains, and critical habitat for threatened grizzly bears, mountain sheep, spotted owls, and bull trout.
