Drawing the line to preserve wilderness
Some people argue that you should never draw a circle on a map and designate a piece of land as "wilderness", because once you bring a wilderness area under some form of control, it ceases to be wild - like a killer whale in a public aquarium.
They may be right, but today, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, we don't have the choice of leaving the wilderness undefined. Our choice is simply whether or not we want to protect any more wilderness at all. If we do, we have to start putting boundaries around it - and fast.
Otherwise, within two decades virtually every remaining wilderness valley will have been roaded and at least partially logged. Not that every tree will be gone from the mountains and every creek piled high with debris, but that "the imprint of modern man" will predominate on every landscape. As this happens, the existing wilderness park systems will come under more intense public pressure, slowly losing their ability to provide what they were created for in the first place.
Unfortunately, every area under consideration for a wilderness reserve already is encompassed within boundaries - usually for logging. MacMillan Bloedel's TFL44 alone covers 453,000 hectares, or approximately one-seventh of the entire area of Vancouver Island (3,175,000 hectares). Fletcher Challenge's TFL 46 is just over 181,000 hectares in size, and Canadian Pacific Forest Products' TFL 19 takes in 195,000 hectares. All west coast forests south of the Brooks Peninsula that are not in TFL's or parks are administered by the Forest Service. They account for some 317,000 hectares.
By comparison the entire area of Pacific Rim National Park is 27,300 hectares, of which 59 percent contains old-growth forests. The total area of mountainous Strathcona Provincial Park is approximately 219,000 hectares. The park's west coast rainforest covers 95,000 hectares, but only part of this territory actually contains intact old-growth forests. Similarly, the 29,000 hectare Brooks Recreation Area contains only small amounts of productive old-growth. And less than half of the 15,000-hectare Cape Scott Provincial Park contains old-growth rainforests. The total area of these four major parks and reserves - not just the forested area - is approximately 290,000 hectares. That is barely more than half the size of MacMillan Bloedel's TFL 44.
Overlaying the logging and park boundaries that cover the west coast of Vancouver Island is the boundary outlining the Nuu-Chah-Nulth peoples' traditional lands. On top of that, the designation of new wilderness areas will require yet another set of boundaries. Ideally the stewardship of these new wilderness areas should put the conservation of the natural ecosystems above all other concerns.
