Dear Ran Forest Campaigner; I am currently in the midst of a 1 1\2 month speaking tour around Europe, -with daily and nightly lectures at schools and university's across Germany and Denmark, on the topic of the 'BC Clearcutting Massacre.' I'm describing the desperate situation in Canada's Pacific primaeval forests and am explaining the connection between BC forest destruction and Germany's enormous paper consumption. Germany buys 17% of its source material for paper products from Canada. At 256 kilos of paper, per year, per person X 80,000,000 people, Germany is a huge contributor to Canadian forest destruction.
In particular, my talks focus on the, IMHO, shoddy deal over the so-called 'Great Bear Rainforest' and how BC's largest bureacratic environmental organizations, namely, Greenpeace, Sierra Club, ForestEthics and RAN have collaborated with government and industry with the resultant protection at just 30% of the intact forest there, -twice the size of Belgium. My environmentalism espouses the high-bar maxim that 'No More Commercial Extraction from Primaeval Forests', a concept which has found great resonance amongst my audience here in Europe.
Although I'm comfortable and confident with my statistics and attitude towards the Great Bear Rainforest deal, I don't understand RAN's current position in this fiasco. RAN appears to have removed itself from the GBR deal because I can only find the other three groups listed in every recent news-release about it. I know that RAN has admitted that the RSP negotiators had been required to drop their Vancouver Island campaigns in order to remain at the back-room GBR negotiations, -something that has been denied by all the other groups.
I am hoping that RAN has backed out of the deal and has now developed a primaeval forest protectionist stance. May I ask if this is the case? I have been writing to Michael Brune, but he appears not to answer his email.
If in fact RAN has backed out of the GBR deal, then I congratulate you all!
Please get back to me about where RAN is at vis-a-vis the dreadful GBR collaborationist compromise!
