Island Enviro. Activist Lee to Tour Europe

by Ingmar Lee

Hi All; I am headed back to Europe on November 12th for my second tour, to speak about logging in British Columbia. In 2003, I delivered 20 lectures at universities, schools and at a variety of environmental organizations across Germany, Denmark and Sweden.

 

I spoke to the issue of the voracious industrial logging destruction of Vancouver Island forests. In 2003 I focused primarily on efforts to protect one of the final intact watersheds in the remotest corner of the island at East Creek, at the foot of the north Brooks peninsula. Since then the East Creek watershed, has been destroyed by logging.

Only 12% of Vancouver Island is protected in parks, of which 6% is above the tree line, -rock and ice. Virtually everything wild outside those bounds has been exterminated; converted to a monotony of tree farms. In contrast to the relative indifference that Canadians seem to have for their forests, I've found that many Europeans, -Europe buys a lot of BC forest products-, care deeply about what goes on in these woods. Now I've been invited to return to Europe to give them an update.

 

I will talk and show slides of Vancouver Island's tree farms, which have been logged in ever-tightening rotations down to 30-year-old stands, after which they are too small to be exported to American sawmills. This is not the long-term, perpetual logging chimera that the "sustained yield" ideology upon which our status-quo industrial forest management scheme is based promised us. That ideology envisioned 80-100 year rotations and for 35 years we have been planting forests with that in mind, spacing the seedlings according to density parameters designed to produce the best lumber at the culmination of the rotation. But now, having cut the timber profile down to pecker-pole size which cannot even produce a 2x4, corporate logging on the island has turned to real-estate sales to provide their quarterly dividends.

Having destroyed their ancient forests, Americans geared down to smaller saws and a veritable tsunami of little logs began to flow into their mills from Canada. It took the American logging giant, Weyerhaeuser, 7 years to axe its Vancouver Island holdings, exporting a million cubic metres of raw logs a year to the USA. Weyerhaeuser then sold out to land speculators, cut and run from the island and are laying waste elsewhere in Canada's forests. Now, the insatiable eye of industrial logging and its political sycophants has turned north, -to the so-called "Great Bear Rainforest (GBR)."

This magnificent tract is about the size of Belgium and stretches, nearly intact, across much of the central and north coast of BC. In 2004, after 7 years of discussion, negotiators emerged with a plan that "protects" less than 30% of this final  ancient rainforest, -this in spite of their own science-panels determination that up to 70% required protection. Not that science has offered much help to the worlds forests. In BC, logging corporations buy the science which proves that black is white. UBC-educated "forest professionals" as they call themselves, virtually all of whom are employed by logging corporations, ensure that status-quo logging depredations are justifiable by science. Select donations to political sycophants over the decades have ensured that forest-destruction, BC style, is conducted perfectly according to the law.

I have been asked to suggest some possible solutions to Europeans as to how they can help protect what's left of our primaeval forest. Frankly, I will tell them that in British Columbia, there are no due process options. Petitions and letters are wearing out Gordon Campbell's paper shredders. The up-coming ancient forest rally, predicted to be the largest ever, will surround an empty legislature. On a planet facing ecological catastrophe, on a planet which has lost nearly all of its evolutionary biodiversity epitome as manifested in its ancient primaeval forests, as conscientious environmental activists, we cannot accept the limitations and constraints of due process within our profoundly undemocratic, farcical and corrupt political and legal systems. None of the established structures by which we organize ourselves are working fast enough, if they are even working at all.

Historically, a lot of forest protection has been accomplished by those who were willing to throw a wrench into the machinations of those forces of destruction. As a veteran treesitter, I will argue from my experience, that to protect forests in BC, having exhausted due process options, one must inevitably venture into the quasi-legal netherworld of non-violent civil-disobedient direct confrontational action. Such action is possible, accessible and directly empowering to a broad spectrum of the community and such action is productive and can have lasting results. The bureaucratic due-process environmental organizations cannot be seen to support it, but I will talk about how and why non-violent civil-disobedience works.

I've spent the past 6 months sailing around the GBR on my partner Krista's Coastal Sandhill crane research project. This area, with its as-yet virtually intact ancient forests is the new ground zero for those who would protect forests. Having traveled around the world 9 times, my experience tells me that this is it, right here, for wilderness on this planet. NOW is the only time to go out there and protect it. Our large ENGO's are all here too, embedded and collaborating with the Gordon Campbell government and the logging corporations to develop a feel-good greenwash chimera for how they want to log this forest. They call it "Eco-System-Based Management (EBM)." There is no possible justification for any further commercial destruction of this final tract. Having long ago lost their wilderness, Europeans are interested in, and care about the fate of the Earth's most magnificent forests, and they've been fed a lot of lies so I'm going over there to tell them what's going on.
My sponsors have covered my airfare, but I need to raise at least $600 for a Eurail pass so I can get around to my various speaking venues. I will appreciate any financial support!

If you can help with the following items, it will be much appreciated:

-the loan of a Mac laptop to run my power-point, slides and video
-the loan of a good-quality "beamer" to project from the lap-top

Please send a cheque to:Ingmar Lee
Box 60
Denny Island, BC
V0T 1B0Cheers,  Ingmar
HYPERLINK "http://www.naturschatz.org/kanada/vortrag.htm" \t "_blank" Lecture Series Announcement
HYPERLINK "http://www.cathedralgrove.se/text/09-Related-Stories-1.htm" \l "WaldAktion_BC" \t "_blank"
WaldAktion
HYPERLINK "http://www.ingmarlee.com" \t "_blank" Ingmar's website
HYPERLINK "http://www.financialpost.com/story.html?id=793fccff-3b72-4682-8986-f38ea5e1edb5" \t "_blank"
Financial Post article on the GBR