Loggers Find Canada Rain Forest Flush With Foes
10/25/99
OVERVIEW & COMMENTARY
Canada's temperate rainforests, "the Brazil of the north", are of
global biological significance -- "a vast, barely disturbed sea of
trees, one-quarter of the world's remaining temperate rain forest."
Unfortunately, the increasingly desperate Canadian timber industry is
poised to destroy this ecological treasure -- in the next 25 years,
logging 50 of the coastal forest's largest valleys. However, there
is increasing local and global opposition. It is problematic to
expect developing countries to forgo development of their forests
based on ecological appeals, when the World's richest countries can't
stop gorging themselves on the trough of once over, liquidation of
forests, for illusory economic benefits at the cost of permanent
ecological simplification.
g.b.
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Title: Loggers Find Canada Rain Forest Flush With Foes
Source: New York Times
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: October 22, 1999
Byline: JAMES BROOKE
BELLA BELLA, British Columbia -- Disembarking from an inflatable boat
at James Bay, a party of eco-tourists hiked one recent morning into a
primeval cathedral of the world's largest temperate rain forest.
Wreaths of mist lifted from moss-draped cedar trees, revealing stream
banks strewn with salmon carcasses, their copper-colored skins
freshly punctured by black bears. Sailing low overhead, bald eagles
patrolled, beating the humid air with their wings. Once, the
stillness of a forest glade echoed with the distant howling of a wolf
pack.
The only discordant note was a string of construction flags marking
roads and a log dump for the day next spring when James Bay is to be
logged, when its ancient western red cedars are to be converted to
window sills and decks for American houses.
After cutting 70 percent of the old-growth forest from Vancouver
Island -- forest that has never been logged -- Canadian logging
companies are now moving into what environmentalists call "the Brazil
of the north" -- a vast, barely disturbed sea of trees, one-quarter
of the world's remaining temperate rain forest. Over the next 25
years, 50 of the coastal forest's largest valleys are to be logged.
Now, a collision of powerful forces is taking shape on this remote
coast, an archipelago where 4,500 people live, largely in Indian
villages, sprinkled over a land area larger than Massachusetts and
New Hampshire combined.
On one side is the logging industry of Canada, the world's largest
exporter of timber, pulp and newsprint. Half of the nation's timber
cut, or harvest, comes from British Columbia. Here, Canada's largest
trees grow in forests where 15 feet of rain can fall in a year. But
after suffering the nation's worst economic performance last year,
British Columbia has slashed logging royalties to jump-start the cut.
Although King Timber still rules Canada's Far West, logging companies
now face a trio of new players determined to defend what many call
the Great Bear Rain Forest: tour operators, Indian tribes and a
cross-border alliance of environmentalists.
With three tourists visiting British Columbia for each of its four
million residents, tourism now employs more people -- albeit at lower
wages -- than the forest products industry. With half a million
tourists, largely Americans, taking cruises every summer up the
inland passage from Vancouver to Anchorage, logging companies have
been forced to leave "beauty fringes," or waterfront skirts of trees
that create illusions of deep forest.
"This is one of the last great intact ecosystems of the world, and
more and more people want to see it," said Eric Boyum, the captain of
Ocean Light I, as he piloted his 67-foot cutter from James Bay, where
sea otters slipped off rocks, to open waters where porpoises arced
playfully. "Our bookings are up 20 percent over last year."
Opposition to wholesale logging also is emerging from many of British
Columbia's 47 Indian tribes, which have long seemed to be spectators
to economic development. By one survey, 90 percent of logging company
workers are flown in from the southern part of the province. In Bella
Bella, the rundown waterfront capital of the Heilstuk Nation, only 20
local men have been hired for logging jobs. Here, as elsewhere,
natives have little legal access to trees they consider their own.
"It is hard for our people to see so many of our resources sailing
by, when our treaty has not been settled, while there are so many
unemployed," Phil Hogan, a tribal treaty negotiator, said of barges
that pass, stacked with logs.
Peace treaties were never signed with American Indian tribes west of
the Continental Divide because the tribes were never considered
conquered.
[On Thursday Parliament started debate on approval of a treaty with
the Nisga'a tribe, the first land-rights treaty reached with a
British Columbia tribe in this century.]
In a move strengthening Indian forest claims, the Supreme Court ruled
two years ago that in areas where no treaties had been signed, tribes
retained proprietary interest in the land and resources. Impatient
with the slow pace of treaty negotiations, one interior tribe, the
Westbank Nation, started logging Sept. 7 on Government land without
provincial consent.
Half a dozen other tribes have since started logging Government land,
and several called for "an international consumer boycott of
companies who are destroying forest resources with destructive
logging of aboriginal title lands."
But for logging companies on the coast, the most threatening boycott
campaign is being waged by environmentalists who have made successful
appeals to companies in the United States, the largest consumer of
Canadian forest products.
Traditionally, Canadian environmentalists tried to slow rain forest
destruction by focusing on Government officials. In 1993, in the
largest demonstration of civil disobedience in modern Canadian
history, 856 people were arrested for blocking a logging road on
Vancouver Island.
But in a province where forest products account for 1 in 17 jobs,
politicians have long been swayed by the industry, either by powerful
companies or by powerful unions. Glen Clark, the provincial premier
who resigned in August, once called environmentalists "enemies of
British Columbia." His successor, Dan Miller, a former millworker
from the north coast, used the term "Soviet-style" to describe
Government lumber policies and called for privatizing provincial
lands.
Environmentalists have long suspected that the public was more
sympathetic to their cause than the politicians. Last fall a poll of
provincial residents found that 70 percent opposed clear-cutting on
the central coast and that 74 percent said they would pay more for
paper or wood if they knew that the trees had been harvested in a
"sustainable" way -- without lasting harm to the forest.
In a poll of Americans this year by Yankelovich Partners pollsters,
62.5 percent of respondents said companies should not use or sell
products made from old-growth wood, 58.5 percent said they supported
legislation to end old-growth logging, and 43.5 percent said they
would be less likely to do business with a company using old-growth
wood.
"The Government is irrelevant; it is the marketplace," said Merran
Smith, a forest campaigner for the Sierra Club of British Columbia.
"We give Home Depot 25,000 postcards. Home Depot responds."
In a major victory for the boycott campaign, Home Depot, the vast
home improvement retailer, announced on Aug. 26 that it would phase
out sales of wood from endangered forests by 2002.
With 856 stores worldwide, the Atlanta-based chain says it is the
largest wood retailer in the world, selling about 10 percent of the
world's marketed supply.
The chain's turnaround came after environmentalists, led by the
Sierra Club and Greenpeace, deluged the company with postcards, sent
a Great Bear Rain Forest exhibit bus to a shareholder meeting and
erected a Home Depot protest billboard over a clear-cut patch near
Vancouver.
"The Government didn't listen, so we realized that the only way to
turn the situation around was to go directly to consumers," said
Tamara Stark, a forest campaigner for Greenpeace in Vancouver. After
making inroads in Europe, Greenpeace has won pledges in the last year
to phase out use of old-growth wood from 20 Japanese companies and
from 27 United States-based Fortune 500 companies.
In a new phase this fall, the Sierra Club is campaigning for city
ordinances in New York and Los Angeles that would phase out purchases
of wood from old-growth forests that is not harvested in a
sustainable way.
"Government purchasing accounts for 20 percent of wood consumption in
the U.S.," said Susan Holmes, the New York City-based director of the
club's Buy Good Wood campaign. "In Riverside Park, they are creating
a bikeway-walkway that is using hemlock from the coast of British
Columbia."
A. Gifford Miller, a Democratic City Councilman in New York and
sponsor of the "selective purchasing" legislation, said by telephone:
"If Home Depot can do it, we can, too. New Yorkers would be horrified
to learn that the park benches they sit on, the boardwalks they walk
on, are constructed at the expense of beautiful old-growth forest
that can never be replaced."
The message is rattling Vancouver's largest lumber companies. Over
the last decade, the provincial tree harvest has dropped by one-
quarter, depressed by Asia's economic contraction and by growing
consumer resistance.
"It used to be, you harvest a tree, you cut it into lumber, and you
put it on a boat; the customer was pretty abstract," said Tom
Stephens, president of MacMillan Bloedel, long a leading timber
company here. But, he added, "if customer attitudes change, we have
to change too."
Last year, MacMillan Bloedel broke ranks with other companies in the
province and promised to phase out clear-cutting by 2002. This year,
about half the company's harvest is by "variable retention," a new
sustainable system that relies on thinning or cutting small patches.
To minimize the destruction caused by logging roads, the company
increasingly uses helicopters to pull high-value trees from the
forest. Stephens has consulted extensively with environmentalists.
"The company that is not sensitive to those issues simply will not be
in business very long," he said.
The Weyerhaeuser Company, which is considering a proposal to buy
McMillan Bloedel, has said it will honor the promise to phase out
clear-cutting.
MacMillan Bloedel and two other major companies want to defuse the
boycott by winning certification from the Forest Stewardship Council,
a Mexico-based group founded six years ago by environmental and
social groups. But the council is not expected to develop harvesting
standards for the rain forest here until the end of next year.
With profits low in the timber industry here, most companies refuse
to abandon clear-cutting. Bill Dumont, the chief forester for Western
Forest Products, which wants to log James Bay next year, said, "We
have tried to come to an agreement with the greens, but we are not
going to put ourselves out of business."
On Sept. 15, in the provincial interior, dozens of angry loggers
burned a protesters' camp, smashed video equipment, and beat up
several environmentalists. Most of the loggers worked for
International Forest Products, which has cut its timber harvest --
and its payroll -- by one-quarter in the 1990's.
Understanding came from Ted Plosz, a logger here who said he is
counting on working next year at James Bay. "Most of us were working
only three or four months last year," he added.
On the coast, green groups want companies to adopt less destructive
logging practices, methods that usually cost more money. They want to
place 41 watersheds permanently off-limits to logging.
Officials of British Columbia, which owns 95 percent of the
province's land, note that about 300 parks have been added here in
the 1990's, preserving 15,400 square miles.
"There are a lot of valley bottoms that will not be logged," David
Zirnhelt, the provincial Minister of Forests, said in an interview.
Noting that the allowable cut from the midcoast forest has been
reduced by one-third, he added, "Two-thirds of the old growth that is
on the landscape today will be there 200 years from now."
But Canadian environmentalists demand more forest protection,
dismissing many of the new parks here as protection for "rocks and
ice."
Protecting trees costs money, however. In early September, the
provincial government agreed to pay MacMillan Bloedel $70 million for
the loss of cutting rights on 162 square miles of land set aside for
parks on Vancouver Island. The government had resisted paying cash
because it faces a $600 million budget deficit this year.
But defenders of the forest say there is economic value to standing
trees, and the wildlife they support.
On a recent afternoon, the Queen of the North, a province-run ferry,
steamed up the inland passage, gliding by forest-cloaked fjords and
waterfalls. Passing Princess Royal Island, the ship seemed to list to
port as tourists with binoculars clogged upper and lower decks.
There, in the shade of an old-growth cedar, stood a rare white
Kermode, or "spirit bear," crunching on a freshly caught salmon, its
cream-colored jowls streaked red with blood.