The protest movement to save the Clayoquot Sound wilderness forest had been building since the 1980s when the clash climaxed with blockades in 1993, twenty years ago this summer. Nuu-chah-nulth indigenous leaders and ecology activists made a historic stand that changed forestry practices in British Columbia. Over nine hundred activists were arrested and most convicted of crimes, before the surviving sections of the Clayoquot wilderness were preserved.
by Charles Lillard
Some years ago a friend and I were up behind Bamfield
prospecting. One moment we were in thick timber, moving up a ridge, the next we were nose-to-nose with a clear-cut. My partner let out a long whistle, then said, “From here it looks we’re winning the war.” I didn’t need to ask what war.
Once – once upon a time so recent some of us can remember its shape – an ancient forest of terrible beauty ran for 2,000 miles along the coast from Afognak Island, Alaska, to Big Sur, California. This forest did not welcome intruders. Peoples out of Asia moved through it, leery of its darkness and clinging heat, attuned as they were to open skies and tundra. After them came a riverine people, downriver from the interior, to be welcomed by salmon and eulachon. The land did not welcome them. No matter, these river people were used to living along the shoreline – in fact, preferred it – so the land lay quiet.
It was different when the first Europeans arrived in the sixteenth century. For the next two hundred years this wilderness fought Europeans, step by step, every inch of the way. Fog and wind led ships off course; rain and tides protected the snug harbours and safe passages; mountains and forests stood, solid as a wall; and forest fires half the length of the wilderness beat the people back. Until 1778, no one broke through to lay a finger on the coast.
That was the year Captain James Cook cut timber for masts and spars at Nootka Sound. Keep the date in mind: 1778.
By 1500 BC the lowlands of China had been deforested; 2,300 years later, the ancient forests of Japan were gone. It took a thousand years for the deforestation of Mediterranean shores. At the time of the conquest of Gaul – call it present day France – the country was 80 per cent forest. The last ancient forests of Britain were cut for military purposes at the time of the Spanish Armada – 400 years ago.
Our war – and what else are we to call it – has been more successful. Stateside it was all over by 1945. Today 90 per cent of the ancient forest in the US is gone; 60 per cent here in Canada. But even these dates and facts are misleading. Cook landed here two centuries ago, but the war didn’t start then. It didn’t start until the 1830s and 1840s, when pioneers broke through into the forest. It started when the first steam equipment came into use, about 1890, but did not really get underway until the teens and twenties of the twentieth century.
War. There is no other way to describe it. In one century we leveled our portion of the ancient forest. If this sounds like a long time, think again. You and I are only some 40 human lifespans away from Christ, 66 away from Moses, 400 away from the arrival of man in the New World. Put differently: there are Douglas fir in the Clayoquot that are only two lifespans away from Christ, three from Moses. These trees are 1,500 lifespans away from the Pleistocene – 1.5 million years ago.
Here’s another perspective. Ed Bearder was a beachcomber in Alaska. One unhappy camper. He’d started logging in Northern California about the time of World War I. Through the Depression and the war years, he’d worked his way up the coast and had ended up logging in the Charlottes. After that he’d worked in Alaska. But by the time I met him, all this was behind him. He hated loggers and logging.
What caused this change of heart? I asked him once, and he said, “I was falling Sitka spruce at Windy Point – 120 feet without a knot. Sometimes 150 feet, clear, sweet wood, and it was all going to a pulp mill. Pulp mill.”
Sometime in the summer of 1966, Bearder moved to Long Island, just north of the Queen Charlottes: a rugged, weather-beaten island we’d beachcombed earlier. “The fuckers won’t log it in our lifetime” were almost his last words to me.
Now to flip backwards for a moment. When he was born, the term “Douglas fir” had only been in general use for 25 years. He was six when “Sitka spruce” first appeared in print. And when “clear-cut” was first used in Canada in 1922, he was a young man. By my reckoning, he could have been 89 when the past he hated caught up with him.
In 1990 I met a woods boss in Oregon. Days earlier he’d had a phone call from Alaska, offering him management of a logging camp for one of the Southeastern Alaska Indian bands. There were two conditions: “Don’t hire any Indians. Clear-cut the island.” What island, I asked. Long Island, he said.
Is it any wonder then that the long, narrow west coast wilderness has been called “one of the greatest battlegrounds for existence on Earth?”
From the look of it, man is the winner in this war. Just saying this brings to mind a New Yorker cartoon from the height of the Cold War. A man comes out of his bomb shelter to a world flat as a plate and steaming like fresh roadkill, and turns to the door behind him to yell, “Come on out, Martha; our side won.”
Today we can fly from Sitka to Seattle and see almost nothing of the ancient forest. Not long ago, a forester looking down on some of this wrote, “I think of the unconscionable act of crucifixion, for surely we are crucifying the Earth that sustains us, and all I can say is, ‘Mother Earth, forgive us, for we know not what we do.’”
That was then. Today we know what we’re doing. That’s why we’re here.
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Charles Lillard (1944-97) was a British Columbia poet and historian; he published twenty books of fiction, poetry, and cultural and natural history, including Shadow Weather (1996), and was nominated for a Governor General’s Award.
Lillard delivered this talk to the Clayoquot activists in 1993 in support of the blockades, and Manoa Journal printed the talk in its 2013 edition, Cascadia, edited by BC’s Trevor Carolan and Manoa editor Frank Stewart. We reprint it here with the kind permission of Rhonda Lillard.
