An 1885 view of a primaeval forest with gigantic
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British Columbia The Ongoing Destruction
Ingmar Lee’s European Tour
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An 1885 view of a primaeval forest with gigantic
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British Columbia The Ongoing Destruction
Ingmar Lee’s European Tour
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“In Wildness is the preservation of the World”
Henry David Thoreau, 1851
| 19 - 22 November, 2003
Opening: Stefan Wenzel, Member of the Lower Saxony Parliament,
Green Party
Workshop: Saving the wild forests of British Columbia
Presentation: Professional foresters and giant logging
corporations in British Columbia
Field trip: The Ecomuseum Rheinhardswald: an historic
German forest with 600-year-old oak trees
24 - 30 November, 2003 Presentation: How forestry fails to protect nature
in British Columbia
Presentation: The pillaging of East Creek on Vancouver
Island
Presentation: Native landscapes in British Columbia
and culturally modified aboriginal sites
Presentation: An activist’s view of forestry in British
Columbia
Workshop: “Urgewald;” the case of Betty Krawczyk, a
75-year-old forest activist currently imprisoned in
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1- 6 December, 2003
Presentation: How the powerful German environmental
movement can help protect British Columbia’s forests
Presentation: Degradation: the Canadian temperate rainforest
as a unique ecosytem threatened by the forest industry
Presentation: What can German consumers do for BC forests?
Presentation: Weyerhaeuser and the clearcutting of
1,000-year-old forests in the Walbran Valley on Vancouver Island
8 - 12 December, 2003 Presentation: The non-sustainability of the British
Columbia forest industry
Presentation: Over 80% exterminated: why are Vancouver
Island’s last-of-their-kind primaeval forests important?
Presentation: The Canadian temperate rainforest: a
unique ecosytem threatened by the forest industry
Visit: Milieucentrum Amsterdam
Programme organized by:
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Ingmar Lee’s European Tour
| Ingmar Lee, a Canadian forest
activist from Vancouver Island, British Columbia (BC), is visiting several
European countries to premier his new film “Beyond the Cutting Edge, A
Trip to the Primaeval Forests of East Creek.” It takes viewers on a voyage
to the most remote and wildest corner of the Island where coastal First
Nations communities prospered for millenia before British colonization.
In this awe-inspiring place lies the still pristine East Creek watershed,
one of BC’s most imminently threatened treasure-houses of biodiversity.
Already over 80% of the wild forests and rivers of Vancouver Island are
gone due to the relentless industrial onslaught by generations of Europeans
and Euro-Americans. Today Weyerhaeuser and other multi-national corporations
are completing the final clearcutting of BC’s ancient rainforests. Increasingly
desperate pleas are being made by conservationists, and activists are turning
to more vigorous forms of protest, some illegal, such as blockading logging
roads. As a lifelong professional BC forestry worker, Ingmar Lee has planted
more than a million trees in all the diverse biotopes of the province.
He speaks from a wide range of “hands-on” experience and “grass-roots”
activism, bringing to Europe an insightful Canadian perspective on the
urgent international problem of old-growth deforestation.
This is the first stage of a two-step campaign being organized by German and Canadian environmental groups to rally popular opposition to the new “Working Forest Initiative” of the BC government, better known as “The Corporate Forest.” Even now in Germany, BC is called “The Brazil of the North” due to the success of industrial lobby in turning the spectacular wild lands and waters of the province into mined and polluted wastes - into chemical-laced tree plantations |
and fish farms. Many of the industry-claimed
sites are either on publicly-owned land or on land never ceded by the original
inhabitants, the First Nations peoples. Endangered wilderness regions include
the Great Bear Rainforest, the Upper Walbran Valley, the Stoltman Wilderness,
the South Chilcotin and many others. Even the famous Clayoquot Sound Biosphere
is again under threat from logging. Among the atrocities committed this
year was the destruction of a unique 1,000-year-old cedar forest, located
not far from Victoria - the capital city of BC. Rather than preserve this
ancient forest for the growing market in ecotourism, the giant trees were
clearcut for fast and easy profit.
Vancouver (BC) was recently selected to host the 2010 Winter Olympics. Ironically, one of the front-runners in the Olympic mascot competition is the close-to-extinction Vancouver Island marmot, a victim to industrial logging. In just over half a century, the aggressive and short-sighted exploitation of BC’s natural resources has resulted in a massive loss of the old-growth flora and fauna. Once gone, the great primaeval forests can never be replaced or restored. They are the priceless wild heritage of human beings everywhere in the world. People want to live on an earth where there is a place for wild nature, for cathedral-like forests of ancient trees, for wild salmon to spawn in free-flowing and untainted rivers, and for the great grizzly bear to roam freely and undisturbed in its wilderness habitat. We hope that international attention on the clearcutting of ancient trees in BC may serve to stop the barbaric destruction of Canada’s natural heritage.
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