“We need the NDP to commit to a science-based plan to fully protect BC’s endangered old-growth forests on Crown lands, to ensure sustainable second-growth forestry, and to commit to a B.C. park acquisition fund to purchase and protect endangered ecosystems on private lands.”
“We’re watching the demise of something comparable to the decline of the buffalo on the prairies.”
New Democrat Leader Adrian Dix has released a multimillion dollar election plan that he believes will help grow and improve B.C.'s forest industry, but critics say the proposal makes promises that will be hard to keep.
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 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 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 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.
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