Re: “Big trees get provincial protection,” Coast Reporter, July 19.
The following was addressed to Doug Donaldson, Minister of Forests, and copied to Coast Reporter.
Dear Minister:
If this were April 1st, I might dismiss your proposition, that one hectare of surrounding forest can protect an individual mature yellow cedar or other old growth tree, as an April Fools joke. I find it astounding that you could believe this to be true.
Our forest trees have evolved as members of community. The elders in question have lived for five hundred to a thousand years or more surrounded by forest. How long can they continue to thrive when all around them may be destroyed save a one-hectare “grove,” exposing them to wind, storm, and reduced water because in a clear-cut there is nothing to absorb and retain it? Plus the loss of beneficial below-ground fungi that exchange food and water with the trees and the rest of the plant kingdom that makes up a healthy forest, via their roots, to mutual benefit.
Given your forestry background, you must be aware of the blow-down that can occur at the edge of a clear-cut. How much more vulnerable is a small, isolated patch of trees. And such islands hardly compare with the setting in which our parents and grandparents were able to view the magnificent giants.
What’s more, promising to protect a mere 54 trees in all of British Columbia is blatant tokenism, seemingly intended to persuade us that you are genuinely protecting our fast-dwindling fragments of old growth forest. Meantime, while you offer to “start a broader conversation about the future of old-growth management in this province,” clear-cutting of these irreplaceable treasures continues apace.
Please, let’s have some genuine conservation, beginning now, before all that’s left of the big trees, and the rich forest of which they are a part, can be counted on one person’s fingers and toes.
Sheila Weaver, Gibsons
