In Canadian logging dispute, names carry weight
© 2000 Reuters Limited
August 17, 2000
Story by Allan Dowd
PRINCE RUPERT, British Columbia - In the fight over logging on Canada's Pacific coast, what you call the battleground and its resident white bears is a quick sign of where you stand.
International environmental groups created the name "Great Bear Rainforest" for the region of British Columbia between the southern tip of the Alaska Panhandle and the northern end of Vancouver Island. They refer to the animals as "Spirit Bears.
"Use those names around someone from the logging industry, however, and you will be pointedly reminded the region is marked on maps simply as the Central Coast and North Coast and the animal denizens are officially Kermode bears.
"It (Great Bear Rainforest) sounds sexy. It is a name they've decided to give it as part of their business of selling memberships," British Columbia Forestry Minister Jim Doyle complained.
Environmental groups have identified the sparsely populated 28,000-square-mile (70,000 sq km) region of temperate rain forest, rugged mountains and coastal islands as one of the world's most threatened ecosystems.
Anti-logging activists charge that forestry companies are harvesting some of the world's last old-growth trees and that clearcutting the forests eliminates wildlife habitat and destroys streams needed for salmon to spawn.
'RAIN COAST' DID NOT CATCH ON
Green groups began looking for a name for the area in the 1990s as they pushed for international support of a boycott on lumber products from the region, according to Christopher Hatch of the California-based Rainforest Action Network.
"For awhile people had called it 'the Raincoast' and that never really caught on, and then in 1997 'the Great Bear Rainforest' really caught," he said.
Historic or not, the name has been very successful from a marketing standpoint. It is regularly used to identify the region in international media reports and a search of the Internet finds it popular in Web sites.
The name even made its way onto a press release issued this month by U.S. home-improvement retailing giant Lowe's announcing that it would not buy old-growth timber from the area. The release repeatedly used "Great Bear Rainforest," and company officials seemed to be caught off-guard when reporters asked if they knew it was not the region's actual name.
"It's certainly a name that means a lot to a lot of people," company vice president Mark Kauffman said.
The history of the "Spirit Bear" name is somewhat more complicated. The animals are a rare subspecies of the black bear and carry a recessive gene that produces a white offspring in about one of every eight to 10 cubs
The bears, found only in British Columbia, have become the poster children of this environmental battle, with the Washington, D.C.-based Natural Resources Defence Council even using the animal's silhouette in its logo.
It was officially named Urus americanus kermodei, or Kermode bear, by scientists in honour of Francis Kermode, a British Columbia researcher who conducted early studies of the bears.
NAME ROOTED IN INDIAN HISTORY
Advocates of the Spirit Bear moniker say it is rooted in the cultural history of the Gitga'at, Kitasoo/Xai'xais and other Indian nations who have lived in the coastal region for thousands of years.
Gitga'at chief treaty negotiator Art Sterritt says the bear does have some cultural significance and appears on the crest of the Gitga'at hereditary chief. But he says both sides are off-base in the name dispute.
"Masala is the name of that bear. Not Spirit Bear. Not Kermode bear," said Sterritt, who traces the name Masala to ancient Indian languages in the region.
While natives have occasionally joined environmental groups in fighting clearcut logging, many Indians object to the name Great Bear Rainforest as an encroachment on their cultural sovereignty.
Sterritt said the Gitga'at are willing to keep their objections "less strenuous" for now. "However, in the future, if people want to get involved in our territory they have to go through us," he added.
Hatch said environmental groups are sensitive to Indian concerns about the Great Bear Rainforest name. "The thing is that we had to call it something. We had been looking at native names but then we thought, 'No, that's appropriation, and that's not really right either,'" he said.
Hatch dismissed industry objections to the name as little more than frustration at the success logging opponents have had in winning international support. And he accused the industry of renaming itself in a bid to improve its public image.
"The logging industry use to refer to themselves as the logging industry and then turned it around in a marketing thing to be the forestry industry ... and all of these entities exist for cutting down forests."