Ken Wu smiles like a man who kept on wearing his clothes long enough for them to come into fashion again.
Not only that, but some of the guys who sneered the first time around are now wearing them, too.
Wu, the Victoria campaign director for the Western Canada Wilderness Committee, says it has been 15 years since we have seen such a surge of support for the campaign to preserve Vancouver Island's remaining old-growth forest and ban log exports.
And this time, the environmentalists have been joined by people whose sympathies were on the other side of the blockades back in 1993, when the War In The Woods saw 850 protesters arrested over logging in Clayoquot Sound. Pulp mill workers dotted the crowd a couple of weeks ago at a rally at the legislature. Think, if you will, of Rocky III, the title character teaming up with erstwhile opponent Apollo Creed to take on Mr. T/Western Forest Products/Gordon Campbell.
Well, maybe that's going a bit far. "We agree in some areas, but don't agree in others," says Brian Butler, vice-president of the Duncan-based local of the Steelworkers union, which represents loggers and sawmill workers. The treehuggers and treesawyers agree log exports suck, but they differ over old-growth logging, the union being leery of the details of the WCWC's plan to phase out the practice over seven years.
And if greens and loggers are no longer fighting, maybe it's less about love than war-weariness, the number of soldiers on both sides having diminished, the combatants both aging and tired. The average worker in today's shrunken forest industry is over 50 years old, Butler says.
Still, the current green-union relationship is remarkably cordial compared to the old days. ("I tell my guys if they see a spotted owl to shoot it," forest union warhorse Jack Munro famously declared in 1990.)
Of course, whether the environmentalists and the loggers are hugging or slugging is irrelevant if it doesn't affect what's actually going on in the woods.
Only a quarter of Vancouver Island's productive old-growth forest remains, Wu says. What's left is largely high up hard-to-get-to slopes, not down in the valley bottoms. "They've already cleaned out the biggest, best stuff." The south Island has been particularly denuded. As it is, Wu figures the provincial government is willing to see old-growth red cedar go the way of the Atlantic cod fishery.
Butler agrees the province has done an abysmal job of managing the forests -- or, rather, not managing them. "Since the Liberals took over in 2001, there's been about a 1,000-per-cent increase in log exports." The forest industry has been left to police itself (think of Keith Richards as night watchman in the pharmacy). "There's no real monitoring. Nobody's fining anybody." The old integrated industry, in which Vancouver Island trees were sawn into lumber in local mills, with neighbouring pulp mills dining on the leftover wood waste, are gone. Now it's sometimes a strip-and-flip business, the logs shipped offshore, the land flogged as real estate.
Given all that, Butler is surprised that environmentalists have been so docile in recent years. "The way forest practices have been gutted, 10 times as bad as it was under the NDP, you would think there would be 10 times the amount of activism."
Maybe that will change if Wu's assessment holds true. Thanks to Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth, the environment is on the radar screen again.
Facebook has proven a remarkable tool for organizers like Wu: "It's e-mail on steroids," he says. Based on history, which shows public interest in the environment graphing like a roller coaster, Wu figures the movement has a good five- to seven-year run ahead of it.
So he's trying to seize the moment, to drum up support for a ban of log exports and an end to the harvesting of old growth. "I'm determined that this is going to become a provincial election issue."
Wu argues that the transition to second-growth logging is well underway, so we might as well complete it, retooling the sawmills as necessary while there is still old growth left to protect.
That's important to both environmental sustainability and the broader economy, he says. "Tourists are not coming to see tree plantations or clearcuts."
It's a sermon he has been preaching for years, but today it feels like people are actually listening.The Times Colonist
