“The Great Bear Rainforest is a global treasure, and all British Columbians have a stake in protecting it”, said Premier Christy Clark.
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“The Great Bear Rainforest is now a landscape of hope”, said Jens Wieting, a Forest and Climate Campaigner for the Sierra Club of B.C. “It is a landscape where economic activity will again begin to align with nature’s limits”.
Once the battleground between environmentalists and loggers in B.C.’s war in the woods, 85 per cent of the 6.4 million hectare temperate rainforest – stretching the province’s north and central coasts and spanning the territories of 26 First Nations – will now be strictly off-limits to logging.
The agreement also ends the commercial grizzly bear hunt and protects habitat for the marbled murrelet, northern goshawk and mountain goat.
Twenty-six B.C. First Nations claim traditional territory in the rainforest, reflecting the vested interest as they partnered with the B.C. government in an unprecedented “government-to-government” relationship.
May 21, 2015: TimberWest accused of “logging like crazy” months before new logging agreement to protect 70 per cent of the rainforest’s old growth from logging comes into effect. “First Nations oversight of their lands and opportunities for their communities has been strengthened. Our leaders understand our well-being is connected to the well-being of our lands and waters”.
“We kind of all grew up and understood we needed to work together to find solutions”, Rick Jeffery, the president of the Coast Forest Products Association, said Monday after the agreement was released.
“This is a unique solution for a unique area of the province, but it points to how you can achieve that certainty through a collaborative process”.
Bitter opponents faced with the realities of economics and endless protests shook hands Monday on a truce 20 years in the making to protect much of British Columbia’s magnificent Great Bear Rainforest.
“We know now where we can operate and what the running rules are”, Jeffrey said.
The decision revealed that all parties have defined 15 per cent of the forested as “managed forest”, 43 per cent is designated as “natural forest” and 42 per cent for protected areas.
2006: The area was officially named the Great Bear Rainforest by then-premier Gordon Campbell in 2006.
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More than that, the forest industry has achieved an important partnership with the indigenous communities in the region that provides a degree of confidence about land use that exists in few other parts of British Columbia. It also abolishes hunting in the region for the spirit bear, also known as the kermode bear.
