Preservationists and First Nations can both achieve their goals when the giant corporations' forest tenures are rescinded
Recognizing aboriginal title creates as much heated debate in B.C. as the preservation of more wilderness. Why? Because both threaten the tenure of the multinational forest companies. It is in interest of these companies to have forest workers feel threatened by the claims of preservationists and natives and to inflame irrational prejudices and fear while continuing to reap the rich profits form liquidating the ancient forest.
There is plenty of forested land in B.C. to arrive at a just settlement of aboriginal land claims (which we're legally and morally obligated to do), create an adequate wilderness preservation system and sustain a "working forest" that could supply many more jobs than the woods do today. But it necessitates the redistribution of land now licensed to the multinationals and the institutionalization of a new set of forest practices.
When, in 1992, the provincial government set up the Vancouver Island Commission on Resources and Environment (CORE) to determine needed additions to the protected area system, it announced that this process would not prejudice the settlement of native land claims. Many of the Island's native leaders were skeptical. Their skepticism is justified. Current clearcutting practices leave parks as the only places where the biodiversity of the temperate rainforest and other forest ecosystems might be preserved. This means that, once lands are designated as protected wilderness and withdrawn from the forest land base, there is little chance that they will be given to natives for their economic use as part of a just land claim settlement.
The solution - for First Nations, preservationists and local communities on Vancouver Island - lies in simultaneously revamping forest practices at the same time as we justly settle land claims and establish an ecologically adequate protected areas system. This can only be accomplished through tenure reform - removal of the privileged forest licence arrangements with the big companies and redistribution of the control of forest lands to First Nations, local communities and to the common good - the wilderness protection system.
