Subject: Ready to fight for Nanoose DL 33
by
Ingmar Lee
Dear Gordon Campbell politicians: We fought you and
defeated you over your scheme to plow a giant motorhome parking lot into
Cathedral Grove. That's a fight that ended chief parking lot proponent
Gillian Trumper's political career, and which indelibly stained the
reputation of your government.
We fought the grotesque forest-destroying
'Bear Mountain' development that you all facilitated. We put Bear
Mountain on the map as the worst example of stupid destructive
development in the province. We will take some credit for the current
bankruptcy of that hideous project, and for the imminent prosecution of
its racist developer, your friend Len Barry.
Now, at Nanoose, we will fight you all again.
During the
lengthy stint of your regime, none of you has done a damn thing to
protect Canada's most endangered ecosystem, - the Coastal Douglas fir
biogeoclimatic zone. Instead, you've facilitated voracious giant
transnational logging giants like Weyerhaeuser, TimberWest and Island
Timberlands to lay waste to virtually all of Vancouver Island's once
magnificent primaeval fir forest.
A succession of ecologically
illiterate and ignorant politicians such as yourselves have overseen the
destruction of a forest that once rivalled and even surpassed the
stature of the California redwoods.
It would have been easy for you to
do the right thing and protect the tiny DL33 patch of CDF forest.
As the corporate media now begin to swarm around the DL33
issue, a key aspect of their framing strategy is to repeat the bogus Gordon Campbell government claim that
"...there is
more than 250,000 hectares of the Coastal Douglas-fir ecosystem left in B.C.,
but only 9% is on Crown land..."
This suggests to the corporate media readership that
the CDF eco-system, which comprises 20% of Vancouver Island, is in a stable,
viable condition of health. This statement adds the even more preposterous
implication that private interests had managed the CDF eco-system more
conservatively than their public counterparts. If there was a quarter million
hectare tract of primaeval CDF ecosystem left anywhere in BC, we'd certainly be
fighting to protect that, regardless of whether it be on private or public land.
The fact is that the CDF ecosystem has now been virtually destroyed on your watch.
The central issue for DL33 is that conventional industrial logging,
whether private or public, has utterly ransacked and destroyed more than 97% of
the primaeval CDF ecosystem. Tiny postage-stamp patches of CDF like DL 33 are
therefore priceless, irreplaceable refugia-tuft habitat oases, which store the
final wilderness processes and DNA of one of the worlds most magnificent, and
now virtually extinct ecosystems.
It is despicable that the
Gordon
Campbell government is using DL 33 to drive a wedge between a
conscientious community that has
worked carefully though the due process options to protect that final
little tuft of what was once this earth's most magnificent and
endangered ecological splendors, and the
Snaw-Naw-As First Nation, whose ancestral stewardship lasted over 10,000
years
and brought the CDF forests to their epitomal efflorescence.
The
environmental community understands and respects First Nations suzerainty over
the lands, we want the lands returned even, ~and we expect that with careful,
respectful work, a mutually agreeable solution can be found which protects the
forest, and which is much more beneficial to the Snaw-Naw-As Nation than the
pathetic fare and controversy that the Campbell government is
offering.
It is unconscionable that you have used your precious
time in office to forward the interests of giant corporate interests
instead of making a useful contribution to humanity and the Earth's most
magnificent splendors. That you use your position in power to split and
divide our communities. The people of British Columbia have rejected
Gordon Campbell's corporate vision for BC. All the rest of you servile
Campbellites should jump off his sinking ship, and do something useful
for the planet, -something that you can be well remembered for by your
grandchildren. Nobody ever goes down in history for their efforts to
increase the profits of corporations.
Our fight has never been with the Snaw-Naw-As First Nation. Our
fight is with you. We are ready to fight you, and beat you once again
now, for DL 33
