From: Peter_Ronald@mindlink.bc.ca (Peter Ronald)
Newsgroups: talk.environment
Subject: Vancouver Island's Ancient Forests
Date: 29 Jul 92 05:21:38 GMT
Organization: MIND LINK! - British Columbia, Canada
Distribution: world

Canada's Vancouver Island - Ancient Rainforests on the Cutting Edge

by Joe Foy, campaign coordinator, Western Canada Wilderness Committee

Western Canada Wilderness Committee is a British Columbia based
environmental nonprofit society working through research and education to
save Earth's remaining wilderness.

When Time magazine featured a global environmental hotspots map just prior
to the Earth Summit, in June of 1992, Canada's Vancouver Island was
identified as one of North America's most troubled zones.  In fact, a growing
number of articles appearing in Germany, England, United States and New
Zealand are singling out Vancouver Island, located in the southwest corner
of the province of British Columbia, as the worst example of third world-
type eco-destruction occurring in a first world nation.

Vancouver Island's attraction is the grandeur and amazing biological
diversity of its ancient temperate rainforests. Its infamy, their
horrifyingly rapid destruction through clearcut logging.

Imagine a place where ancient rainforests--solid dark green from a
satellite's lens 74 miles above the earth--carpet the mountain sides and
valley bottoms right down to the ocean. Imagine some trees 2,000 years old,
others taller than 30 story buildings, massive red cedar trees fifty feet
in circumference, draped in moss and ferns overhanging river estuaries
where wolves prowl the sand beaches and killer whales cruise just
offshore. This is the west coast of Vancouver Island, still essentially a
wild place, a place that is a living memory of what was once so common on
the planet just a century ago.      In 1954 Vancouver Island, 3 million
hectares in size, harboured 1.7 million
hectares of ancient forest. Today, only 0.8 million hectares--less than
half remains. Clearcut logging has over-run the ancient forest like a
cancer, reducing the diverse ecosystems of the wild forests into corporate
tree-fibre plantations. Imagine whole valleys stripped of their ancient
forest cover then burned to destroy logging slash and to retard growth of
brush. Imagine giant landslides bleeding down the mountainsides, choked
salmon streams and mile after mile of planted forests the size of Christmas
trees. This is what much of Vancouver Island now resembles.

Worried about the growing support for the protection of Vancouver Island's
ancient forests, the industry has actually hastened logging road
construction, in order to irrevocably commit the last remaining
unprotected wilderness areas to industry as quickly as possible. A recent
Western Canada Wilderness Committee study has revealed that the majority
of remaining large areas of Vancouver Island forested wilderness is slated
to be fragmented in the next four years....unless...you and I and all of us
take action now.   The new B.C. government, elected last October is listening.
These are the
last large remnants of a vast forest of giants that once extended unbroken
from California to Alaska. They are a world as well as a British Columbian
heritage.  There will be no second chance to save them.

Please write to:

Western Canada Wilderness Committee
20 Water Street
Vancouver, B.C. V6B 1A4

* Send a donation and ask us for more information on Vancouver Island
wilderness areas and what you can do in the battle to protect them.

Premier Mike Harcourt, Premier of British Columbia
Legislative Buildings
Victoria B.C. V8V 1X4

* He can put a halt to logging in contentious wilderness areas until they
can be studied and included into an expanded B.C.'s park and protected areas
system.


--
Peter Ronald - @TEC Information Services  *  Rainforest Summer '92
peter@mindlink.bc.ca or tec@web.apc.org   *  Come to Clayoquot Sound this year!