BC's old-growth forests are world renowned for their beauty and grandeur, where moss-draped trees can grow as wide as living rooms and as tall as downtown skyscrapers. However, a century of unsustainable overcutting has largely eliminated the biggest and best trees in the biologically-diverse valley bottoms and lower elevations that historically built BC's forest industry.
In the summer of 2012 survey tape for logging was discovered in the Upper Castle Grove. However, after a large-scale public awareness and mobilization campaign led by the Ancient Forest Alliance, the BC government announced in November that the company, Teal-Jones, had rescinded its plans to log the grove. Now, follow-up legal protection is needed for this incredible forest.
Conservationists are pressing government to preserve some old growth forest near Harrison Hot Springs that is habitat to many eagles. View the news clip on Global News: The eagles have landed - News Hour - Videos | Global BC
Echo Lake is a spectacular, unprotected, lowland ancient forest near Agassiz, BC on the east side of the Lower Fraser Valley. It is in the unceded territory of the Sts'ailes First Nations band (formerly the Chehalis Indian Band). The area is home to perhaps the largest concentration of bald eagles on Earth, where thousands of eagles come each fall to eat spawning salmon in the Harrison and Chehalis Rivers and hundreds roost in the old-growth trees at night around Echo Lake.
The McLaughlin Ridge is a 500 hectare tract of ancient Douglas-fir forest near Port Alberni that biologists have classified as both critical habitat for wintering deer and nesting endangered Queen Charlotte goshawks. Conservationists would like the BC government to protect the old-growth forest on private land on McLaughlin Ridge by purchasing it from Island Timberlands.
The Shaw Daily television program heads out to visit the popular Avatar Grove with the AFA and takes a look at how business owners in Port Renfrew are starting to embrace eco-tourism as a new economic driver.
The Ancient Forest Alliance along with the Port Renfrew Chamber of Commerce launched the new Tourist Information Centre today which will serve to funnel thousands of visitors into the town's surrounding old-growth forests, raise awareness of the need to protect them, and help create a vibrant eco-tourism based economy.
The story focuses on the Carmanah Walbran Provincial Park and highlights the need to increase parks funding and maintenence in these spectacular places as well as the need to expand protected areas to include the remaining endangered old-growth forests on Vancouver Island and southern BC and shift instead to logging second-growth forests sustainably.
Shooting with the Canon 5D MK II, the Canon 7D, and using a pocket dolly to roll smooth shots, Darryl has captured some of the most stunning, Planet Earth-like video of these incredible yet threatened forests.
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