Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
growth). Because of its abundance of trees, the export of wood has long
been a key component of the BC economy (though less so these days). The
provincial government has, for decades, granted logging licences to forest
products companies. These companies, such as Weyerhaeuser, harvest trees
on a grand scale, but also seek to replenish timber stocks over time (under
the watchful eye of provincial government regulators). This is so-called
'sustained yield forestry', and has, with some important practical modi-
fications, proceeded on an industrial scale since the 1945 Sloan Report ,ifnot
before.
It's important to note that BC has, for many years, made much of its
'natural beauty', not simply the commercial potential of its forest resources.
The provincial tourist board popularised the tag line 'Super natural British
Columbia' some time ago, while vehicle licence plates advertise another:
'Beautiful British Columbia'. These boasts are not idle. The province
is chock-full of high mountains, glaciers, lakes, valleys, rivers, streams,
beaches, ocean inlets and scarcely populated islands. Seals and whales
migrate along its rugged and winding coastline. This is why the province's
largely urban population has used its nature parks, camping sites and trails
intensively for many years. It's also why millions of tourists visit BC for
sightseeing tours or the tactile pleasures of ski holidays and adventure
travel.
By the early 1990s, in the south of BC, the last tracts of original tem-
perate rainforest were being targeted for logging. As the decade drew to a
close, two areas in particular had become the focus of impassioned disputes
between environmentalists (intent on saving old growth trees) and logging
firms (intent on turning raw timber into exportable commodities). The first
was Clayoquot Sound (pronounced Clak-qot) on the western 'wild side' of
Vancouver Island. In the summer of 1993, environmental activists sought to
physically block vehicles carrying loggers along makeshift roads deep into
the forest. By the autumn, more than 800 people had been arrested, mak-
ing the blockade one of Canada's largest ever acts of civil disobedience.
The Clayoquot protests became a major national news item in Canada, and
to some extent internationally, and laid the basis for an organised cam-
paign to change public and government perceptions of Clayoquot's forests
in BC. This campaign, which gathered strength from 1994, fed into the
politicisation (from 1997) of a second area slated for logging, 'The Great
Bear Rainforest'. The evocative name, coined by environmentalists (with
Greenpeace in the vanguard), covers a large area stretching from Vancouver
Island across on to the coastal mainland of BC. As with Clayoquot Sound,
it contains very old cedar trees and sitka spruce, and is home to black bears,
grizzly bears, countless birds and insect species, and several salmon species
(which spawn in rivers and streams). By the turn of the millennium, both
forest regions had almost become household names in Canada, whereas a
decade earlier they were simply two remote, scarcely populated parts of the
country little known to non-locals (see Map 4.2 ).
 
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