B.C.'s old-growth forests have support of the Na'vi

On March 27th, the Ancient Forest Alliance invited me to speak at their rally for ancient forests and forestry jobs. Among the protesters were several activists with face paint resembling the fictional Na'vi humanoids from Pandora, the planet in the movie ‘Avatar’. Here is what I said.

Na’vi and Humans,

Welcome to Planet Earth. Be assured, earth is as beautiful as Pandora. I know it is hard to imagine here in downtown Vancouver, but not far from here, you can still find spectacular rainforest with giant cedar and spruce, Grizzly Bears, Black bears and spirit bears, wolves, marten and otter. This forest is magically linked to the ocean. At times, Orcas get out of the water to rub themselves on the beach, Salmon return from the ocean to spawn, then die and feed the trees with nutrients from the sea. Eagles and murrelets, birds that nest in ancient trees, swim and dive deep into the sea to catch fish.

Photo: John Prentice

This type of forest is called coastal temperate rainforest and it is very, very rare on our planet. In fact, there was never more than a fifth of one percent of the landmass of Earth covered by this forest. Today most of it has been logged. For example, along the west coast of North America once stretched a 3,000 kilometers line of rainforest between mountains and coast. Today, hardly any old forest remains south of the border. Here in BC we have the largest remaining intact temperate rainforest on the planet, the Great Bear Rainforest. Fortunately, 50 percent of that rainforest is now off-limits to logging, but a lot of work remains to achieve the goal of preserving 70 percent of the natural level of old forest by 2014.

In the south of our province the situation is dire. A Sierra Club BC report released in December found that two million hectares of rainforest on Vancouver Island and the South Coast are now in a ‘red zone’ of high risk of species extinction, because more than 70 percent of the old forest has been logged. For some types of rainforest, like the Douglas fir ecosystem only one percent old-growth remains. On Vancouver Island alone we lost at least one million hectares of old growth forest with giant trees, including a loss of at least 100 million tonnes of carbon – equivalent to more than five times the annual official emissions of BC.

Protection of old-growth rainforest is becoming a paramount issue of our time because of three reasons.

Reason one – climate change is a planetary emergency. The latest science shows that rich nations have to reduce their emissions to close to zero within ten years to allow for a globally fair approach to stay below 2 degrees of warming.  Destructive logging practices, like clear-cutting of coastal old growth, contribute massively to BC’s emissions and bold regulation and incentives would allow for significant immediate emissions reductions.

Reason two – BC has global responsibility. World maps that show carbon density highlight the BC coast as one of the regions with the highest carbon storage per hectare on Earth. In some places our rainforest stores around 1000 tonnes of carbon per hectare.

Since we expect that poorer countries around the equator to make efforts to protect the remaining tropical rainforests of the planet, the rich nations have to show leadership to do their part protecting the remaining old-growth forests of the world.

Reason three – we live in a time of mass species extinction. Due to habitat loss and climate change, the current rate of species extinction is approximately 1,000 times greater than the natural rate of species extinction.  In B.C. more than 40 percent of all species are of conservation concern. Many of them depend on old-growth rainforest and protecting intact rainforest will be critical to reduce the rate of extinction for these species.

In order to show leader leadership and address climate change, species protection and our global responsibility, BC needs an action plan for forest conservation, in particular for old growth temperate rainforest, with targets and timelines to 2020. If we don’t act now, it might be too late.