Watt’s ‘before and after’ photos have drawn worldwide attention to old-growth logging in B.C.
You could laugh at the sophomoric literalism . But no piece of agitprop so adroitly captured the tenor of the times. Environmental activism was in vogue, and British Columbia’s coastal rainforest was the frontline in an escalating battle. Students, neo-hippies, conservation-minded grandmothers and green-tinged social democrats made common cause, getting arrested by the busload in bids to rescue the 1,000-year-old spruces, cedars and firs of Clayoquot Sound.
The picture is even more stark for forests of the sort we imagine when we hear the phrase “old growth”—groves of majestic giants, creaking in the wind and gaitered with moss. Only three per cent of the province is capable of growing such trees, a recent study found, and has been logged to the point that only 2.7 per cent of that forest is currently old growth.
But a changing economic environment is making that harder, not easier. Over the last year, building booms in the U.S., Canada and China have driven lumber prices to record heights. Timber companies and their employees want to make hay while the sun shines, and some of those companies are Indigenous-owned. First Nations are only starting to reap the benefits from logging that non-Indigenous interests enjoyed for well over a century.
Who wrote this bleeding piece of crap? Piers Morgan?
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