Despite BC Rush To Log Pretty Much Everything, Ranchers, Loggers & Greens Try To Save Raush Valley
Dave Salayka has been a professional forester and tree faller for most of his working life. He’s laid out cutblocks, worked in Alberta’s oilsands and is part of a crew clearing the right of way for the Trans Mountain pipeline. But the rare inland temperate rainforest in British Columbia’s Raush Valley — home to 1,000-year-old cedar trees, moose and grizzly bears — is one place Salayka doesn’t want to see logged.
Salayka, a long-time resident of Dunster, in B.C.’s central interior, is joining forces with local ranchers, business owners and conservationists to try to save the old-growth Raush Valley, 250 kilometres southeast of Prince George, from planned clear-cutting that would entail building a logging road through a provincial protected area. “It’s a pristine valley,” Salayka tells The Narwhal. “It’s wilderness. We still have every wild creature … There’s huge biodiversity. It’s completely representative of wild places, and there are very few of them left on the planet.” “It’s such a waste to take trees that are hundreds and thousands of years old and turn them into lumber.”
The glacier-fed Raush River, flanked by the northern Columbia Mountains, is the Fraser River’s largest undeveloped and unprotected tributary. Its name is an abbreviation of Rivière au Shuswap, drawn on early maps as R.au.sh, referring to the Secwépemc or Shuswap peoples who have lived in the region for millenia. The valley contains four different biogeoclimatic subzones, the rarest of which is dominated by a cedar-hemlock forest known as the inland temperate rainforest.
B.C.’s inland temperate rainforest is scattered in moist valley bottoms stretching from the Cariboo Mountains to the Rocky Mountains. Other temperate rainforests, far from the sea, are only found in two other places in the world, in Russia’s far east and southern Siberia. Thousands of years ago, coastal species like cedar and lichens hitchhiked to the interior as seeds and spores, flourishing undisturbed in the sheltered dampness of valleys that kept fire at bay. Today, some of the oldest trees in the inland temperate rainforest are as ancient as their coastal big tree cousins, which generally command a much larger share of public attention.
EDIT
https://thenarwhal.ca/raush-valley-bc-logging-forest/
= new reply since forum marked as read
I think Hadwin was nuts, but he kind of had a point.
Thomas Grant Hadwin (born October 25, 1949) was a Canadian forest engineer. In January 1997, he felled Kiidk'yaas (also known as "the Golden Spruce"
, a Sitka Spruce tree located on the Haida Gwaii archipelago and considered sacred by the Haida people. Hadwin stated that he cut the tree down as a protest against the logging industry. While facing criminal charges for the act, he disappeared en route to his trial. His fate remains unknown.
Hadwin is the subject of John Vaillant's 2004 book The Golden Spruce and Sasha Snow's 2015 documentary film Hadwin's Judgement.[1] The film includes reenactments in which Hadwin is portrayed by actor Doug Chapman.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grant_Hadwin
