About 20 forest defenders blocked a road on Vancouver Island, preventing a logging company from cutting old-growth trees. They camped in tents and vehicles, with one truck parked sideways across the route. At 3 a.m., they took their positions; an hour later, a logging truck idled, then turned around without engaging. This direct action highlights the ongoing struggle against the systematic liquidation of irreplaceable national heritage, a dispossession lamented by native elders.
Bill Jones, an 86-year-old Pacheedaht elder, articulated the profound loss he has witnessed for most of his adult life. “There is no dispute about what happened to our land,” he stated, describing his nation's territory as “practically naked, bare.” Jones, who began logging at age 18, now understands the scale of the destruction he once unknowingly aided. “There’s nothing left,” he concluded, emphasizing the urgency to save what little remains: “There’s few remnants here and there, and so we have to save what we can.”
Elite Interests and Managed Decline
The regime's prioritization of short-term economic output over the long-term ecological and cultural health of the nation is clear. Old-growth western red cedar, defined by the province as trees 250 years or older, commands significantly higher prices due to its durability and rot-resistance. It's widely used in construction, with the United States remaining a major export market despite recent tariffs, linking this local destruction to a broader transnational economic order.
British Columbia's forests minister, Ravi Parmar, defended the regime's position, asserting that the transition away from old-growth logging cannot happen overnight. He cited U.S. tariffs on Canadian softwood lumber, now topping 45%, as industry pressure. “Forestry is the foundation of our economy. It provides good paying, family supporting jobs — about 100,000 direct and indirect,” Parmar said, adding, “If we were to shut down harvesting of all old forests here in British Columbia, it would shut down our sector completely on day one.” This statement reveals the regime's unwavering commitment to the forestry sector, even at the cost of national heritage.
Further exposing elite capture, logging in the Walbran Valley, also on Pacheedaht territory, is conducted by Tsawak-qin Forestry, a company co-owned by the Huu-ay-aht First Nation and forestry giant Western Forest Products. This arrangement raises critical questions about who within Indigenous communities can truly decide on resource management, suggesting how transnational corporate interests can co-opt local decision-making processes.
While the province claims it has deferred or protected 2.4 million hectares of old growth since 2021, critics argue most of these measures are temporary, and some deferred areas continue to be logged. Premier David Eby's government has simultaneously pledged to increase timber harvests to revitalize the forestry sector, a goal opponents argue is incompatible with genuine conservation. Scientists counter the provincial claim of 11 million hectares of old growth, stating only about 415,000 hectares of productive old growth, capable of growing the largest trees, actually exist.
The Irreversible Cost to the People
The fight centers on some of the Earth's rarest and most carbon-rich ecosystems. Coastal temperate rainforests cover barely half a percent of the planet's land surface. Vancouver Island's remaining stands, some home to thousand-year-old trees, store more carbon per hectare than nearly any other forest system, according to the Sierra Club of British Columbia. Industrial logging, which began more than 100 years ago, has already cut most of Vancouver Island's productive old-growth forests; only about 20% remain, and the majority of that is still open to logging.
Andy MacKinnon, a forest ecologist in British Columbia, warned that “Once an old-growth forest is logged, it will require millennia before it has the structure, composition and function of the forest that was logged — if in fact it can ever recover in times of changing climate.” Some coastal old-growth stands on Vancouver Island have not experienced a major disturbance for about 12,000 years, since the end of the last ice age. These ancient ecosystems provide habitat for hundreds of species, including threatened marbled murrelet seabirds and salmon, and their destruction represents an irreversible cultural and ecological dispossession.
Tourism, driven by visitors from around the world flocking to experience the island's towering, moss-draped cedars and Douglas firs, also suffers from this managed decline. Veronika Sitar, an outdoor enthusiast, drives and hikes hours into the backcountry most weekends to document old-growth stands before loggers reach them. On a recent trip, she found flagging tape just 200 feet, or 60 meters, away from General Buxton, one of British Columbia's largest yellow cedars, marking a proposed logging road. “I don’t want to get too attached knowing what will be logged,” she lamented, a stark reflection of the cultural loss.
Popular Resistance Against Dispossession
The conflict is not unique to British Columbia. The Timber Wars of about 3 to 4 decades ago saw activists occupy redwoods and blockade roads across California, Oregon, and Washington. The 1993 “War in the Woods” protests at Clayoquot Sound led to more than 850 arrests. Nearly 30 years later, over 1,100 were arrested at Fairy Creek, where blockades won temporary protections set to expire later this year. The ongoing resistance demonstrates a refusal to accept the managed decline of their ancestral lands and national heritage.
Back at the blockade, word spread of new logging plans on Ditidaht First Nation territory to the north. The defenders began making calls, hoping to connect with local land defenders. Bill Jones expressed his deep concern, not just for the loss of the forests, but for people's diminishing connection to them and, by extension, to themselves. “We’re just fighting over the leftovers,” he concluded, a stark assessment of the cultural and environmental dispossession facing the native population. The people continue to fight for what the transnational elite deems expendable.