Environmentalists vowed Tuesday to fight a plan they say will renew logging in Clayoquot Sound, an area that has become a landmark in the quest to protect old growth forests on Canada's Pacific Coast.
VANCOUVER, British Columbia — Environmentalists vowed Tuesday to fight a plan they say will renew logging in Clayoquot Sound, an area that has become a landmark in the quest to protect old growth forests on Canada's Pacific Coast.
The plan, which has been approved by a board of British Columbia provincial government officials and native Indian representatives, breaks a promise to protect the area on western Vancouver Island, which has been designated a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, the groups said.
"We were all led to believe that Clayoquot Sound was now protected. That's what makes this so shocking," said Tzeporah Berman, a program director at a group called ForestEthics, who called on British Columbia officials to reject the plan.
The Clayoquot Sound Central Regional Board said its plan for future watershed development recognized the need to protect both the environment and local native Indian culture.
The plan will protect areas with high conservation and scenic values, and the overall logging level will be only 15 percent of that permitted at the height of cutting in the late 1980s, the board said.
Protests in Clayoquot Sound made it one of the most famous battlegrounds over clear-cut logging of giant old-growth trees in the temperate rain forest on Canada's Pacific coast.
Nearly 800 people were arrested in a series of logging road blockades in 1993.
In a 1999 agreement, former Canadian forestry giant MacMillan Bloedel Ltd., native leaders and environmental groups agreed to support selective logging in the area to be done by a newly created native-owned company.
The rugged coastal area about 250 kilometers north of Victoria, British Columbia, was dedicated as an international conservation project in 2000 in a ceremony attended by then Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien
Berman, who was one of the organizers in the 1990s protests, said the environmental groups agreed to allow the logging because it was not to be done in the area's remaining pristine valleys.
"(The new plan) allows logging and road-building in the pristine valleys," Berman said.
Source: Reuters
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