News Coverage

"The people of Kwakiutl have been left with no choice but to protest and stop Canada and BC from allowing Companies to cut and remove cedar trees from our Land," said Chief Coreen Child of Kwakiutl First Nation. Cedar is vital to the Kwakiutl people, contributing to every facet of life--from ceremony to sanctuary. "As our respected ones taught us, the trees are the 'standing people'. They have the same energy as a bear, a salmon, a mountain, or a human being. The trees in the forest are like family," said Tom Child, Lands Manager and Band Member of Kwakiutl First Nation.

The oldest trees in a forest aren't just passively clinging to the carbon they've drawn from the atmosphere and stored as leaves and wood - they're capturing CO2 at a pace that increases with each passing year.

With the blessing of the Kwakiutl Hereditary Chief, the Kwakiutl Indian Band held a peaceful protest last Thursday, January 9, at an Island Timberlands logging operations in Port Hardy. Band members carried signs proclaiming the area as Kwakiutl traditional territory and gathered at the entrance of the site.

Many foresters have long assumed that trees gradually lose their vigour as they mature, but a new analysis suggests that the larger a tree gets, the more kilos of carbon it puts on each year. "The trees that are adding the most mass are the biggest ones, and that holds pretty much everywhere on Earth that we looked," says Nathan Stephenson, an ecologist at the US Geological Survey in Three Rivers, California, and the first author of the study, which appears today in Nature. "Trees have the equivalent of an adolescent growth spurt, but it just keeps going."

Oldest Tree:
"If you were expecting Canada's longest-lived tree to be a towering monolith, you're in for a disappointment. B.C.'s oldest tree is a 1,835-year-old yellow cedar stump in the Caren Range of the Sunshine Coast.

Oldest Tree Protector:
"Victoria resident Al Carder, 103, has been working to identify and protect the province's tallest trees for close to 97 years. His devotion to big trees grew from a child's sense of self-preservation in Cloverdale in 1917, when his father suggested he accompany him to measure a nearby Douglas fir felled by loggers...Carder is an inspiration to young environmentalists. Ken Wu, executive director of the Ancient Forest Alliance, points out that Carder has outlasted B.C.'s 80-year-old second-growth forests, which replaced its felled old-growth giants."

Shaw TV's Sucheta Singh takes us just north of Port Renfrew to Avatar Grove. A magical place full of old growth forest the size of skyscrapers.

"They also wondered if TimberWest had tailored a definition of old growth that allowed them to search out and cut the last remaining stands of old forest by calling them second growth. 'How did TimberWest pull that off?' asked Valerie Langer of Forest Ethics Solutions. 'By using a bizarre, technically unheard of, definition they made up.' ...[the local residents] found a recent cut-block full of tall, straight, giant trees dominated by Douglas fir over 500 years old and equally impressive stands of western red cedar. Unfortunately, they claim, the trees were already felled and lying on the ground."

“We’re concerned this has become a long-term problem,” said Jens Wieting from environmental advocacy group the Sierra Club. Ideally, a healthy forest will absorb more carbon in the soil and trees than it releases, for example through burning, decomposition and logging. This is sometimes called a carbon sink. Due to a number of factors — including pine beetle infestation, slash fires, wood waste and clear cutting — B.C.’s forests have not done this since 2003, and are emitting carbon dioxide at alarming rates, the group said.

Most living things reach a certain age and then stop growing, but trees accelerate their growth as they get older and bigger, a global study has found. "This finding contradicts the usual assumption that tree growth eventually declines as trees get older and bigger," said Nate Stephenson, the study's lead author and a forest ecologist with the US Geological Survey (USGS). "It also means that big, old trees are better at absorbing carbon from the atmosphere than has been commonly assumed."