Twenty years after a protest led to massive arrests on logging roads in Clayoquot Sound the organizers say a lot has changed – but a lot hasn’t, and they predict a new generation of activists may soon be on the barricades again.
It is the quiet amid the chaos just as the logging trucks and police rolled in that Tzeporah Berman remembers acutely about the War in the Woods, the fight by environmentalists 20 years ago over Clayoquot Sound. Every day for almost three months during the summer of 1993, Berman and hundreds of other protesters stared down the logging trucks destined for some of Canada's most pristine old-growth forests on Vancouver Island, B.C.
The protests at Clayoquot Sound, which lies just off Tofino on Vancouver Island’s outer coast of pristine beaches, rugged coastlines, islets, inlets and tranquil sheltered coves, represented the coalescing of public objections to clearcut logging plans by corporations who were following government policy in majestic old-growth forests.
Thanks to Seventh Heaven Bio Salon in co-operation with Green Circle Salons (https://bc.greencirclesalons.ca/) for their "Haircuts not Clearcuts" fundraiser for the Ancient Forest Alliance this past Sunday, August 4th, at the Spirit of the Sea Festival in White Rock!
A scant 10 minute walk off a logging road near the BC's West Coast town of Port Renfrew is Avatar Grove, a stand of old cedars so majestic, powerful and gnarled that T. F. Watt said he and his colleagues from the Ancient Forest Alliance "were running around like kids in a candy story" when they found it in 2009.
The government has until 3 p.m. Thursday to submit a bid to buy 395 hectares of waterfront property for sale by forest company Merrill & Ring, based in Washington state. Quadra Island’s roughly 3,000 full-time residents have led a charge to raise more than $200,000, to try to push the province into action to save the property from logging or development.
“Island Timberlands has built a road right up to it, and there’s flagging tape right at the entrance,” said Ray McLellan, who has tracked and watched cougars at the small cave since he was growing up in Port Alberni in the 1970s.
If you can stave it off until Sunday (Aug. 4), you can get a cut from noted Vancouver master stylist Champ Waterhouse at the Spirit of the Sea Festival – and help protect endangered old-growth forests in B.C. in the bargain.
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