What’s 12 feet tall and blue all over? If you’ve seen the movie Avatar — and who hasn’t? — you’ll know the answer to that question is the Na’vi, the incredibly cool, nearly naked aliens with cornrows and braids who live on the incredibly cool, beautiful planet known as Pandora, all threatened by the techno-military-industrial (and little) bad guys from Earth, who lust for a metaphorical mineral called “unobtanium.” That’s us, folks.
A patch of the Tahsish River Valley on western Vancouver Island is the new poster child for the ecological impact of old-growth logging — this time on limestone karst, perhaps the world’s most fragile landscape.
The Cowichan Valley Regional District will write to provincial Forests Minister Pat Bell and TimberWest, asking that any timber harvesting within the vicinity of the Koksilah Ancient Forest and the upper Koksilah River corridor be held in abeyance while consideration be given to other potential interests in these lands.
Ken Wu knows how to get attention for ancient forests. When we met at the Bread Garden Café on Broadway in Vancouver just after the news broke a few weeks ago that he and several other tree-hugging stalwarts from Vancouver Island had splintered from the Western Canada Wilderness Committee to form the Ancient Forest Alliance, the former Victoria campaign director for WCWC mentioned how much he enjoyed the movie Avatar.
Flagging tape in the immediate vicinity of the world's largest Douglas fir does not mean the area will be logged in the near future, according to forest company TimberWest. The marked cutblock, less than 100 metres from the Red Creek Fir, was found by members of the Ancient Forest Alliance who say that if surrounding trees are cut, the 74-metre tall tree will be in danger of blow-down.
The provincial government should not let the mostly undisturbed grove in the Gordon River Valley, nicknamed Avatar Grove, be logged. It is a gem of an ecosystem and with so little of our old-growth forests left, it is not something we can afford to lose. With its proximity to Port Renfrew, it will be very beneficial for bringing in tourists, which will support local economies.
A new proposed logging cutblock near the world's largest Douglas fir tree, the Red Creek Fir, has been identified as that of TimberWest, a BC-based logging company. The Red Creek Fir, located 15 kilometers east of Port Renfrew, is recognized as the largest Douglas Fir Tree on Earth, with enough wood to make 349 telephone poles (ie. 349 cubic meters in total timber volume - see https://www.for.gov.bc.ca/hre/bigtrees/docs/BigTreeRegistry.pdf). It is 73.8 meters in height and has a trunk 4.2 meters wide (Diameter-at-Breast-Height or DBH).
The world's largest Douglas fir tree, the famous Red Creek Fir tree, located in Port Renfrew at the southern tip of Vancouver Island, remains vulnerable to the effects of logging in an adjacent old-growth forest, claim environmentalists.
Becoming a field of giant stumps continues to be the fate of many of our last stands of giant trees in southern B.C. and shows a lack of understanding of what draws many people to the best place on Earth.
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