An interest in public involvement in forest land-use planning led me to the places in contest, and I gravitated to the people who were working to save them.
Invaders of the Bridge: B.C.’s Threatened Southern Chilcotin Region, Western Living, April 1983
High stakes on a road to nowhere, Island Review, I:8, Aug 23-Sept 12, 1983.
This little magazine out of Nanaimo was a platform for my first forays in environment and land-use reporting. This one was about decision-making around the old-growth forest above Sombrio Beach, the last “stand” of old-growth “timber” left on the West Coast Road, with Sitka spruce, western hemlock and Western redcedar hundreds of years old and several metres thick. Zip zap, it was gone. Private land. Sheesh.
The Khutzeymateen. Beautiful British Columbia, 29:3, Winter 1987.
I was a director of Friends of Ecological Reserves in 1985 when we adopted the Khutzeymateen Valley, a day’s sail north of Prince Rupert, as our project. The little-known “valley of the grizzlies” needed a champion if it was to fend off the very real threat of logging. (The logging operator was a personal friend of the Minister of Forests.) We organized a visit by bear biologist Stephen Herrero and BC government wildlife biologist Ralph Archibald in 1985, and in 1986 I went into that sublime place with Wayne McCrory, Tim Fitzharris, Peter Thomas and Vicky Husband. Long story short, it became a 443 sq km provincial park, Khutzeymateen/K’tzim-a-deen Grizzly Bear Sanctuary, in 1994, co-managed by the Coast Tsimshian First Nations, the Gitsi’is Tribe and BC Parks.