Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 25, 1993 TAG: 9307250222
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By ELLIOT DIRINGER SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
DATELINE: CLAYOQUOT SOUND, BRITISH COLUMBIA LENGTH: Long
Americans eager to save the rain forest usually set their sights south, way south, to the legendary Amazon basin. Few know that just up north, here in Canada, equally magnificent rain forest is falling even faster.
Along the misty coast of British Columbia, where the Canadian frontier greets the Pacific, lush evergreen stands harboring some of the tallest, oldest and most valuable trees on Earth are giving way to gaping clear-cuts that in places stretch literally as far as the eye can see.
Towering cedar, hemlock and spruce - their limbs draped in moss, clumps of sword fern at their feet - are being logged for wood, paper and pulp. Nearly all is for export, most of it to the United States.
These are temperate rain forests - less exotic than their steamy tropical counterparts in the Amazon, but perhaps even more endangered.
Coastal temperate rain forest grows in just a few thin bands scattered about the globe. Half the original stands, including most of California's ancient redwoods, are gone. Perhaps half of what remains is on this continent - much of it in British Columbia and destined to be logged.
"These are among the most magnificent forests in the world . . . and of great scientific value, because of the longevity of the trees. There are incredible things we can learn from these ecosystems," said rain forest expert Paul Alaback of the U.S. Forest Service. "Unfortunately, the temperate rain forest is at least as threatened as the tropical rain forest."
Just as rescuing the Amazon became a global cause, a showdown is nearing over the last of the temperate stands.
Here in Clayoquot Sound, an 865,000-acre mosaic of mountains, islands and fjords on the west coast of British Columbia's Vancouver Island, loggers, environmentalists and native tribes are vying for control of some of North America's largest stretches of pristine rain forest.
In April, hoping to settle years of rancorous debate over Clayoquot (pronounced klak-wit), the provincial government headed by Premier Michael Harcourt declared that a third of the contested land would be preserved and the rest opened to logging.
While the decision drew a sigh of relief from timber companies and their workers, it infuriated environmentalists, who are more determined than ever to keep the loggers out.
In the woods, protesters are illegally blockading logging roads, and threats of tree-spiking have loggers unnerved. But the more decisive battleground may be the court of world opinion, where Canada stands accused of hypocritically preaching good forestry to the Third World while recklessly cutting at home.
Long a leading voice for global efforts to protect the environment, Canada finds itself branded "Brazil of the North." In Europe, an important export market for British Columbia, there is growing talk of a boycott. And major environmental groups in the United States are taking up the cause.
"Canada does a very good job of selling itself as a green country," said Liz Barratt-Brown of the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington. "But there's a lot of concern that our consumption of the ancient forests of British Columbia is fueling their deforestation, and as the largest export market, we've got a right and responsibility to speak up."
The timber industry and its backers in government are incensed by any attempt to link logging in Canada to the kind of slash-and-burn practiced in Brazil. They insist that unlike the Amazon, where much of the deforestation is permanent, every acre cut today in British Columbia is replanted.
But the industry's defenders just as quickly concede - for the evidence is etched starkly on the mountainsides for all to see - that for many years the cutting was out of hand. And the government is scrambling to persuade voters at home and buyers abroad that sweeping reforms are under way: a doubling of parkland, stiffer logging rules and an end to endless clear-cuts.
Bigger than two Californias, with one-tenth the population, British Columbia was four-fifths forest when first seen by Europeans. With the founding of British Columbia in 1871, nearly the entire province was declared "crown land" held by the provincial government, which eventually decided that its best use was producing timber.
In the 1950s, to draw people and investment to the hinterlands, the government began granting private companies long-term timber licenses that virtually assured them perpetual logging rights in public forest. Timber harvests soared - first along the coast, then in the drier interior - generating jobs, profits and revenue for roads, schools and an enviable system of social services.
"As you needed more trees, you went over the hill to the next valley. It was as simple as that," said A.L. Peel, who chaired a government-sponsored Forest Resources Commission that, in 1991, called for sweeping changes in the timber system. "We were a frontier province for many years. The forests were viewed as never-ending."
But it turned out that they were not. In barely half a century, said Peel, British Columbia has cut far more than nature can readily restore. In coming years, he projected, as logging practices are reformed and parks expanded, harvest levels are destined to fall as much as 40 percent, unless more of the money made on the forests is swiftly reinvested in bringing them back.
The legacy of over-cutting, and the conflict it has created, are nowhere more vivid than on Vancouver Island.
At the province's southwest corner, a three-hour ferry ride from Seattle, the 280-mile-long island lies within a narrow band of rain forest hugging the Pacific coast from the fringes of the Bay Area to Alaska's Kodiak Island.
Only scattered fragments of the original rain forest remain in the southern portion of that zone, from California's redwoods up through Washington and Oregon. On Vancouver Island, bigger chunks still stand, but they are going fast.
Satellite photos show that half the old-growth standing on the island in 1954 was gone by 1990. And although there are no precise counts, the Ministry of Forests estimates that of the 13.3 million acres of prime rain forest remaining on the island and elsewhere along the coast, nearly 100,000 acres a year are logged.
In gross terms, that is but a fraction of the area deforested each year in the tropics. But the Amazon is immense and, for all humanity's assaults, remains largely intact. When computed as an annual rate - the amount logged vs. the amount left standing - British Columbia is losing its virgin rain forest two to three times faster than Brazil.
Flying over Vancouver Island, that is not hard to believe.
Where once there was an unbroken canopy of green, the landscape has been remade by years of "progressive" clear-cutting, a now-eschewed practice in which loggers cut a patch of forest, then enlarge the clearing year after year, until entire valleys and mountainsides are laid bare.
Swooping over the tattered terrain in a company helicopter, Dennis Fitzgerald, a PR man for timber giant MacMillan Bloedel, preferred to emphasize how areas logged just a few years ago are already "greening up" with new trees.
"At one time, [we] took pride in being able to scrape every tree off the mountainside," conceded Fitzgerald, whose company is one of two with logging rights in Clayoquot Sound. "But that's not going to be allowed anymore."
As proof, he pointed to a slope below, where instead of cutting all the way to the water's edge, loggers had left a strip of forest along the shore for boaters to see.
In its decision on Clayoquot, the provincial government promised a gentler brand of forestry, with scenic corridors preserved and clear-cuts no bigger than 40 hectares, about 100 acres. (In the United States, the Forest Service has limited clear-cuts to 40 acres since the mid-1970s and is now phasing them out.)
The government calculates that those reforms, plus a doubling of the area protected from logging, will sacrifice 400 of the area's 1,400 timber jobs and will reduce timber harvests one-third from the levels earlier allowed.
To the timber industry, that is a painful concession. But to environmentalists, it is an utter sell-out.
U.S. environmentalists, with the clout of such legislation as the Endangered Species Act behind them, can march into court and win injunctions against timber-cutting. But in Canada, the government is virtually immune to legal challenge, so environmentalists devise other strategies.
For instance, using a tactic that helped save the Carmanah Valley, farther south on the island, the Western Canada Wilderness Committee is aiming to keep loggers out of the pristine Clayoquot Valley by constructing a trail so others can hike in.
Picking up where a rutted logging road leaves off, teams of volunteers with heavy loppers are clearing underbrush and downed trees to carve a crude footpath through dense forest that MacMillan Bloedel plans to cut down.
"Our objective is to get as many people into the valley as quickly as possible, to see what will be destroyed if the logging continues," said chief trail-builder Glenn Hearns. "We want to get them emotionally involved. The spiritual sense you get walking through here is phenomenal."
A few miles away, Dick Nitsui primed a chain saw that moments later would bring a 120-foot-tall hemlock crashing to the ground, and confessed that after a lifetime's work in the woods, he does not share such reverence for the rain forest.
"It's just a tree," he said, "just something some bastard's going to build a house out of."
Nitsui and his co-workers agree that too much forest has been cut, and more should be preserved. But the environmentalists, they insist, are going much too far.
"We're trying to cut a living out for our kids, our families," said Kevin Reide, whose job is planting the saplings that over decades will turn clear-cuts back into forest. "I'm an outdoorsman. I don't want to see it all gone either. But I want to work."
Just as it has in the timber towns of the Pacific Northwest, the conflict between those who make their living cutting the forest and those who want it preserved pervades small town life in Clayoquot Sound, infecting relationships both personal and professional.
It plays out, in some respects, as a tale of two towns. At one end of the main road is Tofino, a scenic enclave of 1,100 that is a favorite with fishermen and kayakers and an environmental stronghold. At the other end is Ucluelet, a town of 1,600, where many timber workers make their home.
How they work out their differences could well have consequences far beyond Clayoquot Sound, as the rest of British Columbia struggles for a new social compact with the forests.
Toward that end, the government last year created a Commission on Resources and Environment, to search for consensus in other timber disputes and to begin drawing up a sweeping land use plan assuring "sustainability" for both the forests and the economies built around them.
Despite the deepening conflict in Clayoquot, commission head Stephen Owen is hopeful that British Columbians can strike a new balance. There is still enough forest in this sprawling province, he said, to satisfy all reasonable demands.
"Rather than an international target, I hope we can become an international showpiece," said Owen. "It's not too late. The time is upon us. We've got some very serious correction to do. But we still have time, if anywhere in the world, to do it properly here."
by CNB