In British Columbia, industrial logging has removed most of the old-growth trees. Temperate rainforests are found in oceanic moist regions around the world. The ease of access has allowed mothers and students and hippies and elders and politicians and activists and-most crucially-Indigenous peoples from all across this coast to flood into the region, maintain a thriving base camp, and man the rotating blockades that have kept the saws at bay for the past 10 months. But now that the Teal-Jones Group has been licensed by British Columbia to log one-sixth of the valley, the same roads that could destroy Fairy Creek have become its greatest salvation. The surrounding valleys were long ago obliterated. It’s a three-hour drive from the capital of a province built on old-growth logging. How Fairy Creek evaded a century of industrial logging that liquidated over 97 percent of British Columbia’s big-tree old growth is a mystery. This proximity to civilization has until now been a threat. The last intact valley of ancient coastal temperate rainforest outside of a park on southern Vancouver Island, one of the very few like it left on Earth, and by far the closest to a pub. Six kilometers east of here-shockingly close-the watershed begins: a dark green U-shaped valley, walled off on three sides by steep ridges whose conifer-quilted slopes drain through a multitude of creeks into a single artery that wiggles westward down the valley bottom, headed for the sea. There’s Port Renfrew, the logging and fishing town at the south end of the West Coast Trail beside it, tucked into the estuary where the San Juan and Gordon Rivers spill into a broad bay lined with mammoth driftwood, is the Pacheedaht First Nation’s reserve, just a few dozen bungalows and trailer homes. Watch the planet swivel round to Canada’s west coast and zoom into Vancouver Island, green from a distance but gathering gray-brown splotches as the clearcuts come into range. ![]() This story was produced in collaboration with The Tyee.
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