The Great Bear Rainforest. Photo: Oliver Salge/Greenpeace
The road to safeguarding the Great Bear Rainforest from industrial logging has been a long and winding one. Indeed, for Greenpeace it’s been a road-in-the-making for at least two decades.
In setting off on this road, Greenpeace, along with ForestEthics and Sierra Club BC and others, as well as many of the region’s First Nations, initially fought the seemingly powerful pulp, paper and logging companies. The industry had been given access to the majority of the rainforest by the government of British Columbia. That was the 1990s. That was the ‘War in the Woods’.
Protesting logging operations to protect the Great Bear Rainforest, late 1990s. Photo: Greenpeace
Of course the road we have been travelling through has also been the homeplace and unceded traditional territories of twenty-eight First Nations. They have had to fight to assert their rights over their territories, to claim decision-making, and insist upon greater benefits coming from the bounty of their lands and waters- benefits that were largely flowing to the shareholders of logging companies and provincial government coffers.
And so there was common cause between environmental organizations like the one I work for and many First Nations in the region to ally in order to stem the tide of ecological devastation that was coming to the region at the time.
But in truly allying ourselves, it has been a journey of discovery – certainly for myself, coming from the inner city concrete jungle of Toronto. As the home of First Nations, we as a whole, and myself in particular, have had to learn more deeply, not just about the ecology of the Great Bear Rainforest, but also about the very peoples of the rainforests themselves - their cultures and traditions, their traditional laws and governance systems, and we have had to understand the history of European colonization of their lands and waters (and of which the tremendous impacts remain in effect today).
Kitasoo XaiXais Traditional Territory. Photo: Steph Goodwin/Greenpeace
Along the way, in moving from conflict of the 1990s into a promising and yet possibly perilous new world of collaboration in the 2000s, we helped develop milestones to safeguard the region. These milestones have generally been met along the way, but always falling short of the two goals needed make the journey a successful one; enough old-growth forests and ecosystems set aside from clearcutting to sustain the ecological integrity of the region, as well as social and economic measures for First Nations governments to uplift their peoples. The goals of this journey was informed by an innovative management regime developed in the mid-2000’s, namely Ecosystem-Based Management (EBM); implementing EBM, has been a long and winding road.
The Spirit Bear inside the Great Bear Rainforest. Photo: Oliver Salge/Greenpeace
And as I have written here and elsewhere, this has also been both a personal and professional journey for the past seven of the nearly twenty years of this campaign - with many twists and turns, bumps and potholes; never a dull moment!
Recent developments have made me quite hopeful that indeed we are reaching a point in the road where everything is becoming clearer, where it appears that perhaps the journey may ultimately be a successful one. For example, in January 2014, Greenpeace and our environmental partners and the logging companies presented a set of recommendations as stakeholders, to First Nations governments and the BC Government as the decision-makers, as to how at least the goal of safeguarding (and enhancing!) ecological integrity of the rainforest could be met while supporting a sustainable forestry industry. These recommendations were then deliberated and further worked on by the provincial government and First Nations, and released for public review as legal Land Use Orders. The review period ended mid-August of this year.
We are now at a point in the road where I can almost feel how close we are to succeeding. There are some current bumps and yet another bend in the road as we deal with TimberWest, which has been the dominant logging company in the southern portion of the Great Bear Rainforest, and which has historically tried to undermine the Great Bear Rainforest Agreement milestones of 2006 and 2009.
Esperanza protesting TimberWest's poor logging practices, May 2015. Photo: Keri Coles/Greenpeace
I don’t feel like the company is with us yet along this road to success. So as we proceed, we could easily hit a fork in the road – much depends on whether we and our allies reach a mutually agreed-to solution with TimberWest. Which way for the Great Bear Rainforest? The next few weeks will tell, so stay with us.
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Eduardo Sousa is senior forest campaigner for Greenpeace Canada. He has been working these past seven years to finalize the Great Bear Rainforest Agreements, and helping protect the remaining large intact forests of Clayoquot Sound - both in unceded traditional territories of over thirty First Nations on the west coast of Canada.