If a Tree Falls

Posted on March 16th, 2009 by Arno Kopecky | 3 Comments

A favorite quote among activists is Margaret Mead’s old encouragement: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

It’s a good rallying cry for the hopelessly outnumbered, which seemed a fair description of the two dozen people who gathered outside premier Gordon Campbell’s Vancouver constituency office last Saturday. The rally was scheduled to begin at noon; at ten after, organizer Ken Wu, the young and affable conservation biologist who is now director of the Western Canada Wilderness Committee (WC²), said “let’s give it a few more minutes. Our supporters operate on dooby time.” A car honked – “is that for us?” wondered Wu, gesturing to the placards encouraging drivers-by to honk if you love old growth, “or just the usual Vancouver traffic?”

The weather was appropriately miserable: exactly the kind of west coast sleet once absorbed by the rainforest that grew here before a city sprang up in its place. A forty foot banner was unfurled and spread at chest level in front of the entrance to Campbell’s office: Hands off the old growth. A damp petition calling for a moratorium on the logging of BC’s few remaining stands of ancient forest was urged on pedestrians. The goal, according to Wu, was to generate 100,000 signatures (the petition is available online), of which just over 30,000 had been gathered by the time of this writing. Maybe large groups of people can change the world, too.

The brief ceremony got going at 12:30: for starters, a number of cheeky gimmicks, such as the New Zealand kiwis that were proffered to Campbell in absentia as a reminder that some countries have gone ahead with the suggested moratorium; then a short series of speeches were delivered by Wu and others. Most notable among the speakers was Arnold Bercov, the vice president of the pulp and paper worker’s union and the kind of person you’d expect to be picketing the picketers. But Bercov, a squat, hardboiled man who looks like an extra from the Sopranos and has worked in the forestry industry for four decades, feels that Campbell’s big business-friendly government has cost his union far more jobs than any environmental activists – and indeed, saving the decimated forestry industry is central to WC² message.

Bercov’s speech was short and mostly drowned out by the growing chorus of honking traffic – all strategies have their blowback – but in conversation afterwards, he spoke of the many ways by which the Liberals have hamstrung his industry. Where forestry companies were once compelled to send the timber they cut to local mills, for instance, they are now free to export raw logs to countries that don’t harbor unions, where they can be milled for a fraction of the cost.

Bercov acknowledged that he and WC² don’t always agree; while the environmental lobby demands a complete moratorium on old growth logging, Bercov feels that it’s possible to pull a few trees out of these ancient stands without destroying them. “But is that sustainable over the long term?” he asked, trailing off in a rhetorical acknowledgment of doubt. “The bottom line is, we’re gonna cut trees down – so are we gonna do it the right way or the wrong way?”

Given that we’ve already cut about three quarters of the west coast’s (and therefore, the country’s) old growth forest, and that this forest takes thousands of years to return to its prior state, and that a literally countless number of species will go extinct in the interim, and that old growth forest absorbs an order of magnitude more carbon dioxide than its nearest successor, and that what little we do have left represents the largest chunk of temperate rain forest left on the planet, and that if we go ahead and cut it down anyway we simply postpone the job losses decried by anti-environmentalists – given all these factors, it’s difficult to argue for a “right way” to log old growth forest. There is plenty of second and third growth forest to be cut, and plenty of value added jobs that could be injected with the proper legislation. Yet BC’s minister of forests insists it’s fine to keep logging ancient forests, accusing Wu of merely “looking for publicity.”

Wu’s never tried to hide it. But I asked him, will the presence of thirty protesters outside the premier’s office – and on a day when no one’s inside – actually get any attention? “We could have organized a huge rally and got three thousand people out,” Wu replied. “We did that in October. But the point this time was to create a spectacle.” He noted that CTV and CBC had each sent a reporter to cover the event, and seemed happy with this result.

The presence of a reporter, however, doesn’t guarantee a report. While that October rally did indeed generate national coverage, Saturday’s more modest effort has yet to air on even local networks.

“The way this stuff works,” Wu went on, “you just have to keep pushing and pushing, and you don’t know when you’ll see the effect. You can go for a long time without seeing the slightest change, without knowing if you’re making any difference at all, and then suddenly you hit that critical mass and everything goes at once.”