The New Democratic Party's forestry platform released this morning is a major disappointment, said Ken Wu, the executive director of the Ancient Forest Alliance environmental group. "I'm just looking at this with rage here," he said in an interview. "This is a minor deviation from the unsustainable status quo."
The Clayoquot land-use decision of April 13, 1993, sparked a mass protest that put Clayoquot Sound’s ancient temperate rainforests on the international map. Over a period of six months, the region became an icon for an environmental awakening.
The proposed Old-Growth Protection Act was produced by the clinic at the request of the Ancient Forest Alliance. The group’s executive director, Ken Wu, hopes it will spur the government to action.
The Environmental Law Centre of the University of Victoria is proposing a science-based Old Growth Protection Act for British Columbia with timelines to immediately protect critically endangered old-growth forests and to quickly phase out old growth logging in highly endangered forests.
Arbor, a 43-year-old California college professor who teaches environmental conservation, travels around the world photographing herself naked with old or endangered trees. She is lending her support to the Ancient Forest Alliance’s efforts to push the B.C. government into coming up with a strategy to protect big trees and remaining patches of old-growth forest.
The latest battle to protect Vancouver Island’s forests isn’t being waged by an environmental organization—it’s being waged by business, in particular, the tourism industry. A group of tourism businesses in the Discovery Islands, near Campbell River, are charging the government with indifference to the needs of a major economic player in the region.
It’s time the B.C. government faced the fact that its Mountain Caribou Recovery Implementation Plan, announced in 2007, is doing little to improve the situation for these animals and in some areas has made matters worse.
New research led by the University of Northern British Columbia is recommending that the area surrounding the “Ancient Forest Trail,” about 130 kilometers east of Prince George, be named a World Heritage Site by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Citing the fact that these cedars have been reduced to less than four percent of the more than 130 thousand square hectare bioclimatic zone east of Prince George, the research indicates that these stands of ancient red cedars and surrounding biodiversity are “globally significant” and require the protection and status afforded other rich areas of scientific and cultural value deemed World Heritage Sites
The ceremony took place in Cathedral Grove, Canada's most famous old-growth forest that is currently under threat with a planned cutblock by Island Timberlands on the above mountainside on Mount Horne.
Conservation groups honour Scott Fraser for his efforts in saving endangered old-growth forests and related jobs. The award was presented by Ken Wu and TJ Watt of the Ancient Forest Alliance, a non-profit environmental group working to protect old-growth forests and ensure sustainable second-growth forestry. The award is jointly sponsored by the Youbou TimberLess Society, former employees of the now-defunct Youbou sawmill who continue to advocate sustainable forest policies.
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