VICTORIA: #303-3 Fan Tan Alley – access via elevator in courtyard. *NOTE: We're currently on summer hours. Please call 250.896.4007 to see if we're in. We carry: Calendars! Greeting Cards! Posters! Stickers! Adopt-a-Tree Certficates! T-Shirts! & More!
*** If you support the completion of the boardwalk this summer in the legendary Avatar Grove near Port Renfrew, please join the Ancient Forest Alliance (AFA), local tourism and green businesses, renowned forest ecologist Dr. Andy MacKinnon, and other supporters for the “Avatar Grove Boardwalk – Let’s Get it Done! Special Event and Fundraiser” in Sooke. Help us complete this important eco-tourism project this summer!
“It was odd to be standing in this giant, record-size tree in the middle of a clear-cut and watching stuff fall not too far away,” he said. Mr. Watt said it was “kind of sad” too, because he suspected there were more trees like Big Lonely Doug that might be stumps by the time his crew finds them. “It shows the need to have legislation in place as quickly as possible to protect remaining old-growth forest so we don’t have to keep coming across these things too late,” said Mr. Watt. Three years ago, the provincial government promised it would bring in regulations to protect the best and biggest groves of B.C.’s dwindling stock of giant old-growth trees. Mr. Watt, Mr. Wu, and Big Lonely Doug are still waiting .
“Big Lonely Doug”, the recently found, second-largest Douglas-fir tree in Canada, has been scaled by a team of professional tree-climbers. The climbers with the Arboreal Collective are collaborating with the Ancient Forest Alliance, a BC-based conservation organization, to highlight, research, and document the largest old-growth trees and grandest groves in British Columbia. Big Lonely Doug stands alone in a 2012 clearcut, hence its name.
For a few hours last month Big Lonely Doug was a little less lonely. On may 25, a group of climbers and environmentalists scaled the giant tree, which was confirmed as Canada’s second-largest Douglas Fir earlier this year.
“It’s a humbling experience exploring the tops of centuries-old trees and in a place no human has been before. I hope the novel images that come from this initiative to climb and document the largest trees and grandest groves in B.C. will help to raise awareness… about these highly endangered ecosystems,” said T.J. Watt of the Ancient Forest Alliance.
Many of us have climbed a tree or two in our lives, but how many of us can say that tree was as tall as an 18-storey building?
A group of professional tree climbers scaled Canada's second-largest Douglas-fir — fondly referred to as Big Lonely Doug — and there are some amazing photos to prove it.
Climbers from Arboreal Collective partnered with Ancient Forest Alliance, a B.C.-based conservation organization that discovered Big Lonely Doug, to complete the ascension of the tree near Port Renfrew on Vancouver Island.
View gallery at: https://www.timescolonist.com/news/local/gallery-tree-climbers-scale-big-lonely-doug-1.1118808
Tragic photo of a logged and burnt old-growth forest on Vancouver Island, taken in January by Ancient Forest Alliance photographer TJ Watt, highlights the environmental destruction taking place in British Columbia’s “Tree Farm Licences” (TFL’s). The BC government’s plan to expand TFL’s to give exclusive logging rights to major logging companies on BC’s public lands is in its final week of public input. The image has chosen by the Atkins CIWEM Environmental Photographer of the Year competition to be featured in an exhibition this summer at the Royal Geographical Society in London and around national forest venues across England.
"The only evident plan [of the BC government] is to keep the rates of timber harvesting unsustainably high, thereby making the eventual collapse of available timber even more painful for forest-dependent communities, a policy based on the premise that it is better to have more jobs today and none tomorrow rather than fewer jobs today and some tomorrow.
…the government is preoccupied with rewarding an oligopoly of companies with exclusive timber rights over public forests within quasi-private timber farms (Tree Farm Licences)
In its zeal to justify further enclosure of The Commons and increased corporate control over the commoners’ timber, the government’s twisted thinking becomes so bent that it defines mountebank politics."
"How did we get to this point? It is no secret that this redressed proposal is especially aimed at companies operating in the Interior. After the mountain pine beetle epidemic, the province allowed a significant increase to the annual cut to deal with massive quantities of dead or dying trees in this region. But that process has almost run its course: dead wood is running out and forest companies are cutting down more and more living trees, also known as green timber. In a headline-making case, West Fraser and Canfor took one million cubic metres of green timber over and above the allocated cut, without penalty by the B.C. government."
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