Environmentalists explain importance of old growth

With logging in the Alberni Valley not showing any signs of slowing down, Jane Morden and Sarah Thomas of the Watershed Forest Alliance and local biologist Mike Stini spent several hours on Sunday, Feb. 15 showing Coun. Chris Alemany and his wife, Theresa, and kids, Jade and Josh, around the Cameron Firebreak.

While the area is not a part of the city’s watershed, the old growth and steep terrain make it similar to McLaughlin Ridge, a steep slope above China Creek. China Creek is Port Alberni and Beaver Creek’s main drinking water source, with current turbidity levels low enough that that the city is applying for a filtration waiver. According to city engineer Guy Cicon, current water conditions make him confident that the city will receive the waiver.

The WFA is concerned that if old growth in McLaughlin Ridge is logged, the natural filtration it provides will be lost.

Read more: https://www.albernivalleynews.com

Comox Lake watershed logging under the microscope following boil water advisory

Logging company officials maintain harvesting increases in the Comox Lake watershed in recent decades had nothing to do with the extended boil water advisory in the Courtenay area. But as more severe storms wreck havoc on the ecosystem, which provides the drinking water for tens of thousands in the Comox Valley, a local conservation group says it’s time to rethink forestry practices.
“What’s the right level of logging in the watershed? That’s what we have to figure out,” said David Stapley, project manager with the Comox Valley Conservation Strategy Community Partnership (CVCSCP). “We believe from our research that it contributes to turbidity pollution in the lake when we have these high rainfall and snow events.”
Logging has come into focus in the wake of a one-and-a-half month boil water advisory in the Comox Valley, something that will be addressed at a forum called Re-Think Our Watershed to be held Feb. 24 at the Stan Hagen Theatre. CVCSCP is organizing the event which will feature a presentation from a TimberWest Corp. representative, the company most active in the watershed.
Neither BC Hydro nor the Comox Valley Regional District have evidence that logging was directly responsible for the elevated turbidity levels that prevented health officials from lifting the boil water advisory, but the events have sparked a conversation about the impact of logging on the environment.
A review by the CVCSCP found while it took 100 years to log 54 per cent of private forest lands in the Comox Lake watershed, between 1999 and 2009 16.2 per cent of this area was logged – a rate three times higher than before.
Domenico Iannidinardo, chief forester and VP sustainability for TimberWest said the company has full-time staff dedicated to monitoring the watershed and has water quality as a top priority.
“When it comes to forestry and drinking water, these are the two greatest renewable resources the Comox Valley has,” he said. “TimberWest has continued to adapt its plans, integrate science and work with the community.”
Island Timberlands LP and the Hancock Timber Resources Group are also present in the watershed, but don’t log as much in the area.
Some environmentalists are concerned the increase in logging has weakened the ecosystem.
“With that extensive logging you’ve got a network of logging roads, ditching and culverts,” Stapely said, adding that leads to erosion, which causes turbidity in lakes and rivers. “How much of that is from logging, how much of that is natural? We’d have to do a study.”
Not everyone agrees, including some loggers who have spent a good chunk of their lives trudging up and down the hills above Comox Lake.
Ken Cottini was based out of the Comox Valley for 34 years, watching Crown Zellerbach turn into Fletcher Challenge and then into TimberWest.
Before the snippers and other machinery were brought in there would be up to 25 fallers at a time working above Comox Lake, he remembers.
In many ways forestry companies have tightened up their act, he says, but notes loggers have always had a commitment to keeping the watershed intact – although they wouldn’t have phrased it that way decades ago.
“There was always cases of guys not wanting to fall into fish bearing creeks,” he said. “There’s only so much you can do if you’re ordered to do it.”
But things have improved significantly, he says. In the past loggers wouldn’t think twice about cutting into swamps to open up a setting, for example.
And it wasn’t until the 90s that water quality came to the fore.
Meanwhile TimberWest was going through its own changes.
The company had been absent from the Comox Lake watershed throughout the 1980s as second-growth forests were allowed to mature.
TimberWest returned to the area the following decade and began increasing the volume of logs it pulled out of the watershed.
Cottini recalls the TimberWest environmental committee he sat on bringing concerns from loggers about a jump in harvesting from about 300,000 cubic metres in the entire district (which includes Campbell River, Mount Washington and Comox Lake) past 400,000 cubic metres and beyond, in the mid 90s.
After Paul McElligott was appointed president and CEO in 2000, the company’s approach to logging on Vancouver Island took a dramatic turn, with harvesting levels shooting up past a million cubic metres per year, he said.
Workers were concerned this rate just wasn’t sustainable and would hurt both employment levels and the environment in the not too distant future.
“When they brought in the new management team from Quebec and the US it was ‘Screw the labour,'” he said. “It became all about money.”
TimberWest put an American expansion plan behind them and focused on “delivering value to its unitholders from its B.C. operations,” according to a company press release from the era.
One key element opposed by the TimberWest environment committee was the method of determining sustainability on a company-wide basis instead of within a particular district of operations, Cottini explained.
“We questioned them every step of the way,” he said, noting one of the practices that bothered loggers was instances of “robbing areas that are immature.”
TimberWest officials say they only log up to three per cent of forest lands in any given area and are committed to looking at the integrity of the watershed as a whole.
“There are many people who get up every morning looking forward to managing this forest very carefully,” Iannidinardo said. “Drinking water is the top planning priority for our operations in the watershed.”
Collective bargaining in the 2000s brought in significant new changes to how forest lands are managed, Cottini reflected.
“What happened was they got to contract all their lands out,” he said. “They can always download blame.”
And while Cottini says he believes contractors are held to account by TimberWest in the Comox Valley watershed and doesn’t think the company has violated any rules on purpose, he says no matter what way you look at it, things have shifted.
“We would hold them to certain standards,” he said. “It’s a whole different ballgame now.”
Since then, TimberWest has been sold to a pair of pension funds, the BC Investment Management Corp. and the Public Sector Pension Investment Board.
But Cottini doesn’t believe logging played a significant part in bringing on the boil water advisory.
While he conceded timber extraction certainly is one of the many factors affecting the watershed, it’s the changes he’s seen in recent years to the entire climate that have the bigger impact, he said.
“The weather’s going to keep evolving, too,” he said, suggesting what he feels the regional district should do to safeguard water quality. “That’s why I believe in a filtration system. We might as well get ahead of it instead of lagging behind.”
TimberWest officials say they leave buffer zones that range from 5-35 metres depending on the type of stream and soil on the bank.
The company also holds regular training sessions with planning and harvesting contractors.
Rod Bealing, executive director of the Private Forest Landowners Association, maintains the penalties for mismanaging the forest and watershed are so severe it keeps logging companies on the straight and narrow.
“There’s a lot of long-term planning that goes into it,” he said. “We all live in the same communities and drink the same water.”
Lyle Quinn, a Merville resident who logged in the Comox Lake watershed last year for Fall River Ltd., said he didn’t see anything out of the ordinary take place on the cut block this year that would have triggered significant turbidity.
The biggest difference was due to the warm weather they could log longer than usual.
“It was the worst bloody year for rain,” he said. “We used to be shut down all winter. Now we log all winter.”

Company pressured to halt harvesting of old-growth within city’s watershed

Some Island Timberlands' stakeholders are adding pressure to the forestry company over the harvesting of old growth within Port Alberni's watershed.

As logging continues in McLaughlin Ridge near Cathedral Grove, the B.C. Teachers Federation voted to ask Island Timberlands to sell the forestry land it owns in the steeply sloped area. The motion passed Jan. 31 at a BCTF assembly of district representatives, urging the forestry company to sell McLaughlin Ridge to “an organization(s) that will conserve and preserve forest lands.”

The old growth forest is within the China Creek watershed, the drinking water source for more than 20,000 people in Port Alberni and Beaver Creek. Ken Zydyk, president of the Alberni Teachers Union, said the request for Island Timberlands to divest the land was first approved by public educators in Port Alberni.

“There are many teachers concerned about the current practices of Island Timberlands,” he said.

Local teachers wonder if the harvesting in McLaughlin Ridge ensures “the protection of our watershed so that Port Alberni can continue to have high quality, clean water,” added Zydyk.

The Jan. 31 motion also asks Island Timberlands to gain certification from the Forest Stewardship Council, an international system that promotes “strict environmental and social standards,” according to the council's website.

Canadian members of the Forest Stewardship Council include Alberta-Pacific Forest Industries, the National Aboriginal Forestry Association and B.C.-based Brinkman and Associates Reforestation. The teachers' request now goes to the B.C. Investment Management Corporation, a major Island Timberlands shareholder. The BCIMC invests pensions for teachers and other public sector employees around the province.

“Teachers are uncomfortable that we put some of our salary towards our pension, it's like a savings account that we access later,” Zydyk said, adding that the concern was if teachers' funds are “being used in a socially responsible way.”

The forestry company has met with municipal officials on almost a monthly basis since city council voted last August to join a lobbying effort to halt harvesting in McLaughlin Ridge.

This push is being led by the Watershed Forest Alliance, a local environmental group that fears the forestry activity is unsustainable, harming McLaughlin Ridge's wildlife and compromising Port Alberni's source of drinking water.

A letter from Island Timberlands to the city in August 2014 said the company's construction of logging roads, harvesting and replanting is executed with a focus on water quality. The company stated lots are usually replanted within nine months of harvesting.

The administrative body that enforces provincial law on private forestry companies has deemed Island Timberlands to be acting responsibly. The Private Managed Land Council has investigated the company's activities in the China Creek Watershed.

“Their report concluded that our practices are above average for coastal operations,” wrote Morgan Kennah, IT's community affairs manager, in the letter to the city. “The study noted that although harvesting activity has increased in the area in the past decade, the hydrological capacity for the watershed to balance this harvesting with current forest cover and regenerating forests is below the threshold for best management in watersheds.”

Turbidity – or water cloudiness – has been an issue raised in the push to halt logging in the watershed. Turbidity can interfere with municipal water treatment systems, a concern that led Island Health to issue boil water advisories for Nanaimo and the Comox Valley after heavy rain in December. An advisory was not given for the Alberni Valley, as turbidity levels fell within the province's standard for healthy drinking water.

Island Timberlands' letter to the city noted that selling McLaughlin Ridge would be costly and bring no guarantee that water quality will improve.

“Acquiring land in the watershed in an attempt to impact seasonal turbidity will certainly be expensive, and is highly unlikely to eliminate the need for filtration,” wrote Kennah.

Meetings between the Watershed Forest Alliance, city officials and the B.C. Ministry of Forests are expected to continue.

On the agenda for Tuesday's council meeting, a motion proposed to form the Alberni Valley Watershed Management Committee to oversee forestry and drinking water issues.

Read more: https://www.avtimes.net/news/local-news/company-pressured-to-halt-harvesting-of-old-growth-within-city-s-watershed-1.1759064

Walbran Valley at risk of old-growth logging

 Here's a new article in the Island Tides about the Central Walbran Valley's ancient forest being flagged for potential logging – see the full article here: https://www.islandtides.com/assets/reprint/forests_20150205.pdf 

Saving Giants with the Ancient Forest Alliance

Mountain Life Magazine has just done a little piece on the Ancient Forest Alliance and filmmaker Darryl Augustine (of Roadside Films – see https://www.facebook.com/roadsidefilmsbc) about his experience working on a film about us.
You can see Darryl's great new film at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hg9dcc2WPjk

Read more: https://www.mountainlifemag.ca/2015/01/saving-giants-ancient-forest-alliance/

Alfred Cecil Carder Obituary

CARDER, Alfred Cecil 1910 – 2014 We celebrate the life of our beloved father & grandfather who died peacefully on Winter Solstice, December 21, 2014 shortly before his 105th Christmas. Al was born to John & Harriet Carder in Calgary, AB on April 20, 1910 – the fourth of five children. Al was predeceased by his wife Mary (2008) and is deeply loved and missed by children: Judith, Mary-Clare, and Andrew (Jill); grandsons: Jeremy and Noah; sister-in-law, Torla and many nieces and nephews in England. Al grew up in Cloverdale, BC, earned his BSc at UBC (1935) and began his career in Beaverlodge, AB. After decorated World War II service in England and Europe, he returned to earn his MSc (McGill) and PhD (Wisconsin) continuing his research on plant responses to climatic effects – laying groundwork for climate change studies – with Canada's Dept. of Agriculture for which he received Canada's Centennial Medal. While working in Beaverlodge, Al met Mary and they wed in Mary's hometown of Petersfield, England in 1954. Together they raised a family in Beaverlodge and in 1970, after 35 years of civil service, Al retired and they moved to Cordova Bay, BC. Al was very active in his retirement – hiking daily, building the family cottage near Point-no-Point and beginning his research on giant trees resulting in two publications: Forest Giants of the World, Past and Present (1995) and Giant Trees of North America and the World (2005) with his “to scale” drawings. Al continued researching, writing and self-publishing information into his 101st year with The Blooming of the Earth: A Brief History of the Advent of Plants and Man and finally, Reflections of a Big Tree Enthusiast about his beloved giant Douglas-firs. Recently, Al received the Ancient Forest Alliance's Forest Sustainability Award honoring his decades of service to document, research, and promote the conservation of BC's old-growth trees which included proving the Red Creek Tree to be Canada's largest tree. In 2005, Al and Mary moved to The Camelot in James Bay where they enjoyed the company of good friends. After Mary's passing, it was here that Al continued living a healthy, happy, vibrant life. The family is grateful to the incredible staff at The Camelot, Saint Elizabeth, Royal Jubilee Hospital, Beacon Services & St. Charles Manor. With faith, curiosity and wonder, Al lived his life leaving a legacy of love, humour, appreciation, knowledge and philosophy. A celebration of life and thanksgiving will be held on Friday, January 23 at 2:00 p.m. in the Chapel of the New Jerusalem, Christ Church Cathedral, Quadra St., Victoria, with reception to follow. In lieu of flowers, donations in Al's name to the Ancient Forest Alliance, the Nature Conservancy of Canada, or a charity of your choice would honour his memory.

Read more: https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/timescolonist/obituary.aspx?n=alfred-cecil-carder&pid=173870047

Watershed action urgent: Fraser

“The time to act is now” was the message delivered by outgoing Shawnigan Lake director Bruce Fraser on protecting the Alberni Valley’s watershed.

Bruce delivered that message to a packed Search and Rescue Hall that included local residents, Island Timberlands representatives and city officials during a watershed forum organized by the Watershed-Forest Alliance and Alberni-Pacific Rim MLA Scott Fraser.

Bruce Fraser said that the concerns he’s heard voiced in the Alberni Valley about watershed protection are similar to the worries people are having all around the province, as well as the issues he dealt with in Shawnigan Lake.

“Shawnigan is feeling that human footprint, everything from climate change to gravel beds,” said Bruce, comparing the situation there to the Alberni Valley’s, both in terms of industry encroaching on the watershed and the provincial government’s seeming lack of initiative in terms of dealing with any problems that may arise.

“Our senior governments have basically retreated from the fields in so many cases, leaving us with a damaged environment and too little control to do anything about it,” said Bruce, adding that public support was key to getting a say in watershed planning.

However, Bruce said that Port Alberni is in a better place to take action with its watershed than was Shawnigan Lake, which is an unincorporated electoral area with no municipal council.

“We had to create local civic infrastructure [in Shawnigan Lake] to try to gain some authority to be involved in watershed planning,” he said. “Here you already have a council and you are a municipality, you don’t have to reinvent that.”

Having the civic authority in place means that “city council will have to step up to continue to put pressure on the various interests” in the area, said Bruce.

The recently passed Water Sustainability Act will be key to gaining control of the watershed.

“It has a clause in it that enables local governments to become involved in some of the responsibilities for watershed planning.”

While the details aren’t yet hammered out and regulations won’t be written until 2015, Bruce said that this is the ideal time for Port Alberni to position itself to be a part of the dialogue.

“City council should be having a dialogue with government about their role under the Water Sustainability Act and they should do so as soon as possible.”

That’s the sort of action Scott Fraser is hoping for from Port Alberni’s new city council, some of whom were in attendance at the forum.

Scott said he was frustrated by the lack of action he’s seen from the province. He cited correspondence between Minister of Forests, Lands and Natural Resources Steve Thomson and environmental experts that stated that areas currently being logged in the China Creek watershed by Island Timberlands should not be logged as something that should have spurred the province into action, rather than being ignored.

“I need support from local government, from the regional district, from the city of Port Alberni,” Scott said, adding that on his own, he doesn’t have enough clout.

“We still have a chance to have some control over what happens in our region. The local government has that responsibility and I think we’re going to see this local government take that seriously.”

Until local governments pressure the provincial government into taking action, there’s not much that can be done.

“Private land is private land, you can do pretty much what you want with it,” said Scott.

A love of big trees rewarded

Dr. Al Carder was recently awarded the 2014 Forest Sustainability Award from the Ancient Forest Alliance for his decades of service to document, research and promote the conservation of old-growth trees in British Columbia.

The 104-year-old Carder is considered the oldest forest conservationist in the province. His relationship with giant trees began in 1917, when he was seven and he helped his father measure a tall tree near their home in the lower Fraser Valley. He went on to become Canada’s first agrometeorologist after earning a doctorate in plant ecology.

In his retirement, he and his wife, Mary, set off on a “World Big Tree Hunt,” with Mary often being used as human scale next to giant trees in photographs he took of his finds. His work was published in two books: Forest Giants of the World, Past and Present (1995) and Giant Trees of North America and the World (2005).

“Al Carder was researching and raising awareness about B.C.’s biggest trees years before old-growth forests became an issue of popular concern in this province,” said Ken Wu, Ancient Forest Alliance executive director. “His work decades ago on the most iconic parts of our old-growth forests, their unbelievably huge trees, helped to lay the foundation of public awareness that fostered the rise of the subsequent ancient-forest movement.”

Carder’s children, Judith, Mary-Clare and Andrew, accepted the award on behalf of their father, who is currently ill with pneumonia.

Along with his books, Carder is perhaps best known for his work to highlight the Red Creek Fir, the world’s largest known Douglas-fir tree, located in the San Juan Valley near Port Renfrew. Since then, the town has become known as the Tall Trees Capital of Canada, with tourists from around the world coming to visit the Red Creek Fir, nearby Avatar Grove and the Walbran and Carmanah valleys.

The Ancient Forest Alliance is a B.C.-based conservation group working to protect endangered old-growth forests and to ensure a sustainable, second-growth forest industry. For more information, go to ancientforestalliance.org.

Read more: https://www.timescolonist.com/our-community-a-love-of-big-trees-rewarded-1.1653607

B.C.’s Oldest Forest Conservationist Reminds Us How Much the Wild Has Changed

Earlier this week, B.C.'s oldest forest conservationist, 104-year-old Dr. Al Carder — who is older than most of B.C.'s second-growth trees — received the 2015 Forest Sustainability Award from the Ancient Forest Alliance. The award honours his decades of service to document, research, and promote the conservation of B.C.'s old-growth trees. (As Dr. Carder is currently ill with pneumonia, his children, Judith, Mary-Clare, and Andrew, received the award on his behalf.)

Al Carder was researching and raising awareness about B.C.'s biggest trees years before old-growth forests became an issue of popular concern. Along with his books, Carder is perhaps best known for his work to protect the Red Creek Fir, the world's largest known Douglas-fir tree found in 1976 by loggers near Port Renfrew. It was measured and highlighted by Carder. Today the Red Creek Fir is within a Forest Service Recreation Area, and is also listed in B.C.'s Big Tree Registry.

I first heard of Carder when I was a teenager in the early 1990s through the late, great conservationist Randy Stoltmann, who spoke highly about Carder's work and who worked with him to document the province's largest trees. Earlier this year, I had the pleasure to meet Carder in person for the first time. Carder is hard of hearing and plagued with various ailments as you'd expect after living for over a century, so I was impressed with his continued enthusiasm for big trees.

With help from his daughter Judith, he spoke about how he remembered taking a train through the Fraser Valley near Cloverdale and Langley back in 1917. Today those suburbs of Vancouver are known for their box stores, residential neighbourhoods, and farmland. But back then the railway went through a forest “like Cathedral Grove,” lined with towering ancient Douglas-fir trees, including a felled specimen that Carder and his father measured to be over 340 feet (100 metres) tall!

It's amazing to think about what B.C.'s southern coast would have been like a century ago when Carder was born in 1910. Ancient forests, vital for sustaining endangered species, climate stability, clean water, wild salmon, tourism, and First Nations culture, would have dominated the forested landscapes, carpeting the valley bottoms up to the mountaintops and over to the adjacent valleys, unbroken for millions of hectares. This would have included vast stands of old-growth coastal Douglas-fir trees, which today have been reduced to just one per cent of their former extent.

Grizzlies would have roamed the Lower Mainland around Vancouver in those days, while more than 1,000 breeding adult spotted owls were estimated to have inhabited the region's ancient forests. Today, less than a dozen spotted owls survive in B.C.'s wilds.

The unique Vancouver Island wolverine — a 27-kilogram, wilderness-dependent mustelid that can fight off a bear and that once feasted on the Vancouver Island marmot — hasn't been seen since 1992. Many thousands of mountain caribou would have once roamed the inland rainforest of B.C.; today, only 1,500 remain. Coastal rivers and streams, once overflowing with spawning salmon, are now sad remnants of their former glory, degraded by logging debris and silt.

Not only have native ecosystems been collapsing as a result of the resource depletion policies of successive governments, but so have forestry-dependent communities. The overcutting of the biggest and best old-growth stands in the lowlands that historically built B.C.'s forest industry has resulted in diminishing returns as the trees get smaller, lower in value, and harder to reach high up on steep mountainsides.
Today, 75 per cent of the original, productive old-growth forests have been logged on B.C.'s southern coast, including over 90 per cent of the most productive old-growth forests in the valley bottoms. The ensuing second-growth tree plantations, harvested every 30 to 80 years on the coast, fail to support the old-growth dependent species, the tourism industry, the climate, and traditional First Nations cultures in the same way that our original centuries-old forests do.

In a report for the B.C. Ministry of Forests (Ready for Change, 2001), Dr. Peter Pearse described the history of high-grade overcutting: “The general pattern was to take the nearest, most accessible, and most valuable timber first, gradually expand up coastal valleys and mountainsides into more remote and lower quality timber, less valuable, and costlier to harvest. Today, loggers are approaching the end of the merchantable old-growth in many areas … Caught in the vise of rising costs and declining harvest value, the primary sector of the industry no longer earns an adequate return …”

B.C.'s coastal forest industry, once Canada's mightiest, is now a mere remnant of its past. Over the past decade, about 80 B.C. mills have closed and over 30,000 forestry jobs lost.

In his 2001 report, Pearse also stated: “Over the next decade, the second-growth component of timber harvest can be expected to increase sharply, to around 10 million cubic metres … To efficiently manufacture the second-growth component of the harvest, 11 to 14 large mills will be needed.”

Today, more than a decade later, there is only one large and a handful of smaller second-growth mills on the coast, and very little value-added wood manufacturing.

The B.C. Liberal government's myopic response to their own resource depletion policies has been to open up some protected forest reserves and to relax environmental standards in parts of the province. It's like burning up parts of your house for firewood after you've used up all your other wood sources: it won't last long, and in the end you're a lot worse off. To try to defer the consequences of unsustainable actions with more unsustainable actions is precisely what has brought this planet to the ecological brink.

The B.C. government has a responsibility to learn from — rather than to repeat — history's mistakes.

Unless the B.C. government reorients the coastal forest industry toward sustainable, value-added second-growth forestry — rather than old-growth liquidation, unsustainable rates of overcutting, and raw log exports — the crisis will only continue.

It's in the memories of our elders like Dr. Al Carder — a conservationist with a deep connection to the natural world from his earliest days — where we can recall our histories and learn the wisdom to make a better world.

Read more: https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/ken-wu/bcs-oldest-forest-conservationist_b_6239054.html

B.C.’s oldest tree hugger gets some love for protecting old-growth trees

B.C.’s oldest tree hugger has been publicly recognized for decades of work protecting the province’s old-growth trees.

Dr. Al Carder, 104, received the Forest Sustainablity Award from the Ancient Forest Alliance on Tuesday for his work documenting, researching and promoting some of Canada’s most magnificent trees.

Carder is known for his work in the late ‘70s drawing public attention to the world’s largest standing Douglas fir, the nearly 74-metre-tall Red Creek Fir in Port Renfrew. Discovered by loggers in 1976, the Red Creek Fir was first measured by Carder, who became an advocate for its protection.

He was Canada’s first agrometeoroligst, studying the effects of weather and climate on agriculture, and he worked for the federal agriculture service.

Carder has also written a number of books on the topic of big trees, including Forest Giants of the World: Past and Present.

Ken Wu, executive director of the Ancient Forest Alliance, credited Carder with helping foster the rise of an “ancient forest movement.”

Read more: https://www.theprovince.com/tree+hugger+gets+some+love+protecting+growth+trees/10419618/story.html