News Coverage

Roberts Creek, BC – Local environmental groups are calling on the BC government to establish an Ecological Reserve on approximately 15 hectares of endangered old-growth forest located on public (Crown) land at the headwaters of Roberts Creek on BC’s Lower Sunshine Coast. The mid elevation forest, located about 7 kilometres northeast of the community Roberts Creek, is proposed to be logged by BC Timber Sales (BCTS).

The forest is the closest old-growth yellow-cedar forest to Sunshine Coast Highway 101, between Gibsons and Sechelt (a 40 minute ferry ride from Vancouver) making it also a high potential eco-tourism destination.

See a spectacular photo gallery of the forest here: Roberts Creek Headwaters
(*Note: media are free to reprint photos. Credit to TJ Watt when possible. Please contact us if you need higher-res images)

“The proposed cutblocks are located between two designated Wildlife Habitat Areas that were created to protect threatened marbled murrelets – logging would split this habitat in half,” stated Ross Muirhead of Elphinstone Logging Focus (ELF), a Sunshine Coast forest protection group. “BCTS Planners must acknowledge that connectivity of existing WHAs is an important land-use objective and to that end do the right thing and protect it either as a WHA extension or better still as an Ecological Reserve.”

The forest, named the “Roberts Creek Headwaters Ancient Forest” is on Squamish First Nation’s traditional territory and is threatened by BCTS’ proposed cutblock DK045. The cutblock was first put up for sale in 2010 but was halted at the last minute by the request of the Archaeological Branch of BC in July, 2012 after receiving photos from ELF members of what appeared to be culturally modified trees (CMT) within the block. Professional archaeologists, Jim Stafford and John Maxwell, contracted by ELF, visited the site in 2013 and confirmed the existence of 17 CMTs located within the block. Subsequently, the Archaeological Branch in Victoria mapped out 7 protected Archaeological Sites. BCTS then applied for a ‘site alteration permit’ to cut down the CMTs, which was granted by the Branch.

Another unique characteristic of this forest is an exceptional stand of Pacific Yew trees growing near the bases of yellow-cedars. Over 350 Yews were counted by ELF within the block. Gary Fletcher, of the Friends of Ecological Reserves, visited the site and nominated the “Roberts Creek Headwaters Ancient Forest” to the government as an Ecological Reserve to highlight this outstanding example of the old-growth dependent Pacific Yew.

Currently, the sale of the block has been delayed yet again to March, 2014 as BCTS awaits the results of an ecological and cultural survey by Ministry of Forest researchers.

“With the case that ELF has built, BCTS should withdraw its logging proposal for Block DK045 and grant it protected status once and for all,” states Ancient Forest Alliance campaigner and photographer TJ Watt, who recently documented the area. “This forest is regionally-important to the Sunshine Coast. There is little of this productive forest left at this elevation. The BC government must set aside both this forest and stop all logging of rare, endangered old-growth forests across the Province.”

Old-growth forests are vital for supporting endangered species, unique biodiversity, tourism, recreation, the climate, clean water, wild salmon, and First Nations cultures.

To see new before and after maps of BC’s old-growth forests click here: www.ancientforestalliance.org/old-growth-maps.php

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.

The issue next time could be pipeline development or, once again, logging.

Where or when remains unpredictable, as was the Clayoquot rally. That summer thousands of people flocked to camp out in the Black Hole, just outside Tofino on Vancouver Island, and to stand in ranks across logging roads despite threats of arrest by the RCMP.

Hundreds were dragged away. But the Australian band Midnight Oil rocked through the night and the next day people got up and defied the law again.

The event threw the NDP government into shock – and led to a negotiated compromise. Clear-cut logging, then a practice favoured by industry and government, would be ended and a scientific panel would guide logging in the area.

It was a dramatic victory – but it didn’t end the environmental problems in B.C. Clayoquot Sound is still being logged and a mine is proposed in the area. B.C.’s Interior forests are currently being logged at a rate many say is unsustainable. Old-growth trees, some more than 1,000 years old, are routinely cut down. The Port of Metro Vancouver is pushing for increased coal shipments – and two separate oil pipeline projects are being proposed in B.C., despite widespread public concern.

“People have asked me many times, is there going to be another Clayoquot? Is this the next Clayoquot? Is that the next Clayoquot?” said Valerie Langer, a key organizer of the 1993 protest who was then with Friends of Clayoquot Sound.

“But I don’t think you manufacture things like Clayoquot ’93,” she said. “That was a factor of a broad provincewide tension about forestry, a good place to focus that [concern] – and a group that was ready to fly with it.”

However, all those factors could easily come together again in B.C., said Ms. Langer, who is now with the environmental group, ForestEthics Solutions.

“I do feel that kind of happening with the tar sands/pipeline campaign,” she said, referring to the movement to stop Enbridge Inc. from building its proposed project across B.C.

Ms. Langer said the Clayoquot protest seemed to come out of nowhere, but the mood that drove it had actually been building for years, as the government allowed industry to clear cut the forests of B.C., despite growing public objections.

She senses that same “kind of desperate feeling” simmering in the public now over the prospect of a pipeline snaking across the province to feed a parade of oil tankers plying the waters of the Great Bear Rainforest.

“I don’t think the federal and provincial governments have really cottoned on to that [public unrest] yet,” said Ms. Langer. “But this is something that builds and then there is a moment – and you never know exactly where and exactly when that will be – when it explodes.”

Vicky Husband, who was head of the Sierra Club in B.C. in 1993, said one of the reasons the Clayoquot protest got so big so fast was because people could easily drive to the area to see for themselves what environmentalists were complaining about.

The highway from Port Alberni to Tofino cut right through an active logging area, including the Black Hole, where the old-growth forest had been stripped, and then the landscape burned.

“Clayoquot Sound and Tofino were at the end of the only paved road to the open Pacific. And that’s critical. People could get there. They could see the horror show of what was going on with the logging,” she said.

Ms. Husband said she’s alarmed at the level of logging now taking place in B.C., and at government plans to privatize public forest lands. She’s horrified by the prospect of oil pipelines crossing B.C.

Do you think, she was asked, that we need another big environmental protest in B.C?

“Yes, I do,” she said, “because I don’t think we have a government that understands.”

Read more: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/mass-arrests-during-war-in-the-woods-20-years-ago-prompted-lasting-change/article13703844/

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. (Globe & Mail, July 23/11).

Watt, along with the co-founder of the Ancient Forest Alliance, Ken Wu, had been searching for just such an iconic stand of trees, one that would dramatize and catalyze enough awareness of old-growth forests to prevent further logging of the tiny remnant that still exists on southern Vancouver Island. Avatar Grove, as this stand was named, just might accomplish such an ambitious feat. Indeed, the Port Renfrew Chamber of Commerce, the BC Ministry of Forests and the company that had the right to log Avatar Grove, Teal Cedar Products Ltd, all concurred that the stand was so sensational that it should be protected.

But it nearly wasn’t. Watt and Wu found a cluster of 20 huge stumps nearby that had been logged the year before. These 900 yearold cedars may have been even more spectacular than the standing trees that were saved. “This would have surpassed Avatar Grove in grandeur – had we found it in time,” said Wu. And shortly after Watt found Avatar Grove, timber cruisers surveyed it for logging, hanging the ominous ribbons of plastic tape that marked a cutting boundary. After 1,000 years of growing, Avatar Grove came within a hair’s breadth of the chainsaw’s bite.

Given the awesome character of Avatar Grove, who cut down the neighbouring trees? What were the fallers thinking as the teeth of their chainsaws bit into millennium-old wood? What thoughts were passing through the minds of the timber cruisers who flagged Avatar Grove for a similar fate? Are “pieces of silver” so numbing of perception and so corrupting of judgment that people simply do not notice or recognize the miraculous when it is manifest? In another time under different circumstances the only appropriate answer to these questions would have been, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Because the trees in Avatar Grove awaken in us the sense of sacred that we do not usually possess, the work of environmentalists such as T.J. Watt and Ken Wu should qualify them as modern-day saints – a status they would probably reject. With their seeing and their conviction, with their dedication and passion, they open the eyes of the blind, bringing illuminating light into a place of dull darkness. They reveal the evident, proclaim the unmistakable, connect us to a wondrous obvious of which we were previously ignorant. What else explains why some trees are felled and others are saved? Whether or not a crucifixion occurs merely depends on the difference between recognizing or not recognizing, between awareness and unawareness.

Show people and they will see. The tourists who now flock to gaze at the massive trees of Avatar Grove are not so much tourists as pilgrims coming to enter the awe of something bigger and older than themselves, something that communes with the slow passage of eon and transcends the limits of self. These pilgrims are doing the same when they flock to such revered places as Banff, Jasper, the wild trails of Strathcona, or to any seashore, lake, mountain, river, valley or forest. Something primal and timeless lures them out of themselves and connects them to a mystery that is greater than anything they can possess, control or understand.

Saints awaken us to such awareness. They make pilgrims of us all. They show us the extraordinary so we will find it in the ordinary. If we are perceptive enough, we can learn to find the miraculous in any tree, any fish, any frog or any blade of grass. The ordinary is no less amazing than the extraordinary. If we are attentive enough, if we are open and receptive enough, every part of nature becomes a wonder that will reduce the greatest of our explanations to an awestruck silence.

No one can understand the utter magic pervading any of the living things that surround us. They are profound because they give context, companionship and meaning to our very existence – the outside of us that enters the inside of us through the miracle of awareness. Then a special stand of trees may infuse us with a moment by-moment sense of magic.

But a pilgrimage does not have to be a physical journey to Avatar Grove. Every time we watch a nature documentary we are paying vicarious homage to the life forces that permeate our planet. Such programs amaze us with the living vigour of reefs, tundra, grasslands, plains, jungles, and all the plants and creatures than enliven them with incredible and diverse vitality – a living planet that we are despoiling and diminishing with an astonishingly blind enthusiasm.

As the Canadian media guru, Marshall McLuhan, so wisely noted, we move through the present looking through a rear-view mirror at what is behind us – we don’t see what is, we only see what is past, where we have been and what we are losing. This principle applies with profound irony when we consider our current fascination with all the myriad wonders of nature that we revere through documentaries and pilgrimages. Just as we are celebrating and learning of nature’s incredible complexity and intricacy, our industrial exploitation is destroying them with alarming zeal.

This is why Avatar Grove is so important, why Watt and Wu were so invigorated by hope. This small stand of glorious trees is a signal, an icon, a symbol, a sign of what remains that we must not lose. It is a warning announcing that innumerable treasures are slipping into an irretrievable past. But Avatar Grove is also a promise and an awakening, if we can understand its deeper meaning. By honouring the extraordinary, perhaps we can learn to protect the ordinary.

Re-printed in the Island Courier:  https://www.courierislander.com/news/avatar-grove-the-extraordinary-and-the-ordinary-1.133466