Merve Wilkinson's directions to his home are direct: Leave the Trans-Canada Highway at old Cedar Road, drive uphill before turning right at the Chuckwagon Market, go past Yellow Point Lodge, then hang a left onto Crane Road. "You'll see a green gate," he advises. "It's always open."
Good thing, too. His land, known as Wildwood, plays host to thousands of visitors every year, from schoolchildren to noted scientists, eager to learn from the man known as "the Moses of eco-forestry."
Environmentalist David Suzuki has been here, as has Jane Goodall, the chimpanzee authority, and wildlife painter Robert Bateman. Mr. Wilkinson has been told that Hollywood stars have walked his trails, but he does not know which ones. They come to attend a woodland classroom on 28 hectares surrounding the southern arm of Quennell Lake on Vancouver Island.
About half the trees at Wildwood are towering Douglas fir; most of the remainder are western red cedar. The roll call includes alder, arbutus, bitter cherry, cascara, grand fir, western hemlock and Pacific dogwood (the province's official floral emblem).
"I have trees which are over 1,500 years old," said Mr. Wilkinson, who, at 92, is a mere sapling among such venerable timber.
"They're healthy; they're doing very well, thank you."
As is he. His conversation is steady, his memory sharp, his anecdotes precise. He cut down his first tree on this land 60 years ago. He has selectively logged the land ever since, always careful not to cut more than the growth rate. Today, there are more trees than there were when he first hoisted an axe.
"It gave me a third of my income for 20 per cent of my working time, which is good arithmetic," he said.
His model for a sustainable forestry has lured foresters from Japan and Jordan, Libya and Lebanon, India and Indonesia.
Today, Mr. Wilkinson and his work will be celebrated at the University of Victoria, where he will receive an honorary doctor of laws degree. The school's environmental students take regular field trips to Wildwood to learn from him.
William Armstrong Mervyn Wilkinson was born the son of a nurse and an engineer for the powerhouse at the coal mine. His parents named the boy, born on Sept. 22, 1913, after their friend, Mervyn Lupton. Four years later, Mr. Lupton, a 23-year-old sergeant with the 7th Canadian Infantry Battalion (British Columbia Regiment), was killed in France at the start of the battle for Vimy Ridge.
The Wilkinsons lived in South Wellington, a mining town on the Esquimalt & Nanaimo Railway. Merve's father earned $4 a day, doing extra duty as a locomotive engineer.
After the Great War, the family moved to land along Quennell Lake, which served as playground and roadway. Neighbours were visited by rowboat and the children played games like checkers when not cavorting in the forest. "We were always scrambling around in trees," he recalls. "We tried to see how high we could climb. Just a bunch of monkeys."
He attended classes in a one-room schoolhouse that closed its doors when a family with five children moved away. Merve, who had just completed Grade 3, continued his education by correspondence course, posting his work to instructors in Victoria.
His mother played piano, his father clarinet and violin. At age 12, when his voice changed, Merve took singing lessons, his bass baritone strong enough to win a local amateur competition. Despite the encouragement of his voice teacher, he decided against a career on stage.
As a young man in the Depression, he was lucky to find work at a pulp mill in Powell River. He hated the job, finding mill management to be corrupt and a working life indoors to be "not my thing."
In 1938, he bought 55 hectares on Quennell Lake for $2,500. The land included marshes, dry ridges and steep slopes. He thought he would farm the level sections.
He signed up for agricultural studies in an extension course from the University of British Columbia, which introduced him to Scandinavian techniques of selective logging. He would put those lessons to work in 1945.
Though opposed to war, which he calls a scourge, Mr. Wilkinson is not a pacifist, and spent the Second World War as a signalman with the 31st Company of the Pacific Coast Militia Rangers. The volunteer home guard was formed to thwart a feared Japanese invasion of British Columbia.
In the years since the war, Mr. Wilkinson estimates he has harvested about 2.1 million board feet of lumber without disrupting the ecology of the woodlot. He leaves about a tenth of his cut as woody debris on the forest floor. Snags are left as a refuge for wildlife.
He has grown old on this land, burying two wives and divorcing another. He has a son from his first marriage, which ended when his wife died of brain cancer; two adopted daughters from his second marriage, which ended in divorce; and, a decade of memories from his marriage to Anne Pask-Wilkinson, one of the original Raging Grannies protest group. She died at Wildwood last June, at 85.
While he has lifetime tenancy at Wildwood, the property is being purchased by the Land Conservancy. The charitable land trust has so far raised about $640,000 of an acquisition price of $1.01-million. The group wants to maintain the land as a demonstration site and learning facility.
In recent years, Mr. Wilkinson has won awards and honours, including being named to the Order of British Columbia and the Order of Canada in 2001.
Eight years before that, a Globe and Mail reporter found Mr. Wilkinson taking part in the illegal blockade of a logging road at Clayoquot Sound. "Whenever you have clear-cut forestry," he told her, "your civilization eventually goes down the drain." A judge later ordered him to perform 100 hours of community service.
He has become a guru of the environmental movement. A biography by Goody Niosi was titled Magnificently Unrepentant, and he is.
"We're running out of trees. That's the tragedy of it," Mr. Wilkinson said. "Greed and stupidity."
In some ways, stewardship has been his birthright. After all, he carries the name of a soldier struck down in youth, an obligation not easily ignored.The Globe and Mail
