Emerald Isle Sailing Charters — Sailing Adventure in the San Juan Islands, BC's Gulf Islands, and British Columbia's Great Bear Rainforest

February 10, 2006

The Great Bear Rainforest

Ecologists are reporting the ominous deterioration associated with “Island Ecology” in systems as diverse as Yellowstone, Banff and the Serengeti. These same ecologists are now questioning whether any of the world’s great parks is large enough to avoid steady ecosystem decline. As we enter the millennium, will every last elephant and grizzly bear be dependent on some degree of artificial life support?

These sobering questions are precisely why British Columbia’s northern mainland coast deserves to be at the top of every conservation agenda. This forest region possesses the rarest of all environmental qualities: critical mass. At 8 million acres (3.2 million hectares) the whole Great Bear Rainforest is 9 times the size of the Olympic National Park, 5 times the size of Banff National Park and twice the size of the Serengeti although the actual extent of productive forest amid all this wild landscape is a more modest 560,000 acres (224,000 hectares). It presents humankind with an opportunity, one which has already been lost elsewhere - to protect enough of one major ecosystem to guarantee the survival of all its components. Canada has the chance to create a world-class natural attraction, store biodiversity and hedge against global climate change.

We know from experience in Oregon and Washington that the big logging companies will cut timber to the point of economic collapse. The BC provincial government’s decision to encourage the hasty liquidation of these forests for cash through the most destructive practices of industrial logging is a global tragedy.

— by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

From the foreword of
The Great Bear Rainforest

E-mail: charters@emeraldislesailing.com