4 - Wednesday, April 25, 1990 -

North Shore News

THE TRAGEDY of the Carmanah Valley is that, when the
crunch came, it had no real friends among our woefully in-
adequate elected and appointed leaders in politics, labor and

industry.

If, in fact, as seems almost in-
evitable now — half of the
precious watershed is levelfed to
keep Adam Zimmerman, Jack
Munro, John Reynolds and Mike
Harcourt in their cushy jobs, it will
be because none of them
understood the emerging central
truth of our time: namely that the
old rules of short-term financial
gain at the expense of long-term
ecological needs are no longer jus-
tifiable.

We are down to the last strands
of our natural heritage and these
turkeys are still trying to carry on
business — i.e., pillage — as usual.

Gne ridiculous description (in
the Globe & Mail) of the Vander
Zalm cabinet’s decision to log half
the valley was that it was somehow
“Solomonesque.”’

Hardly. King Solomon set up a
situation where an infant would
have been chopped in half, but the
wise old Hebrew knew that its true
mother would throw herself over it
before she would let that happen.

A better description of the
Socred’s ‘‘balanced’’ decision, as
Environment Minister Reynolds
likes to call it, would be that it is
half a rape instead of a full rape. |

I’m sorry, there’s no such thing.
Half a rape is still a rape.

The sad truth of the matter is
that the Socreds felt safe in giving
the nod to the desecration of half
of the Carmanah, despite their at-
tempts to pay lip-service to the
polls showing genuine concern for
the environment, precisely because
they knew they would not be ina
corner come election time.

The reason they didn’t stand to
face any electoral punishment on
this issue was because the NDP
failed utterly to present a solid
front of opposition.

They caved in to their traditional
union masters.

The annual NDP convention
which saw Opposition Leader
Harcourt fudging and slip-sliding
around a resolution to save the
Carmanah was a triumph for the
IWA’s burly stumpmaker, Jack
Munro.

The reason the IWA got away
one more time with dictating poli-
cy to the gutless NDP was simply
that Harcourt’s backroom boys sat
down with their pocket caiculators
and figured out that if they lost the
IWA's support, they would lose
five ridings.

Without those five ridings, they
wouldn't stand a chance of becom-
ing the next government. Quickly,
they backed down from what

Gravitron by
StairMaster
THE WORKOUT
OF YOUR LIFE

many of them understood perfectly
to be their responsibility to future
generations.

So much for principle.

And so much for a choice for
green voters come election time. If
the NDP wouldn't stand up for
Carmanah, the Socreds could go
ahead and ride roughshod over the

a

The reason the IWA got
away one more time with
dictating policy to the gutless
NDP was simply that
Harcourt’s backroom boys sat
down with their pocket
calculators and figured out
that if they lost the IWA’s
support, they would lose five
ridings.”’

valley, chainsaws a-thunder.

If any of the tiny-brained
technocrats and corporate lackeys
who push through these kinds of
decisions wonder what all the fuss
is about forests these days, they
might pause in their scanning of
texts on theoretical silviculture and
take a look at the May edition of
Life Magazine, which is devoted to
“The Miracle of Trees.*’

The cover blurb says it all:

‘“‘They give us shade, beauty, the
air we breathe. If we let them, they
could even save our environment.’’

One of the articles contains an
elegant quote from naturalist John

q

Muir’s classic book, The American
Forests:

**Ic took more than 3,000 years
to make some of the trees in these
western woods ... Through all the
wonderful, eventful centuries since
Christ's time — and long before
that — God has cared for these
trees, saved them from drought,
disease, avalanches, and a thou-
sand straining, levelling tempests
and floods, but he cannot save
them from fools.”

Amen.

Another quote, this time from
Theodore Roosevelt:

“A people without children
would face a hopeless future; a
country without trees is almost as
hopeless.’*

There is also a terrific line in the
Life Magazine spread from Andy
Kerr, a conservation director for
the Oregon Natural Resources
Council, who joined in a lawsuit,
despite repeated death threats from
loggers, to try to halt the destruc-
tion of 60,000 acres of old-growth
forest.

Said Kerr: ‘Conservationists
may be hell to live with, but they
make great ancestors.”’

Another American Forest Ser-
vice officer, Jerry Franklin, states
flatly: “If you turn the forest-
products industry loose on the
jand, it will be gone in 20 years.
We shouldn’t be that dumb.”’

But we are that dumb.

It is worth noting that even
Brazil, which has earned itself a
reputation as the mad dog of
global environmentalism for its
massive assault on the Amazon
rainforest, has actually turned
around, under 2 new government,
and launched a belated and des-
perate effort to protect the coun-
try’s fast remaining forests.

If Brazil can see the light and try
to redeem itself at the last minute,
but fat-cat industrialized British
Columbia cannot, which is the true
“Third World’ country anyway?
eee ©

Councils give
‘95 Games bid
green light

THE NORTH Shore is officially in
the running to host the prestigious
1995 Western Canada Games after
local councils gave the bid pro-
posal the green light Monday
night.

and ELIZABETH COLLINGS

West Vancouver and North
Vancouver District councils unan-
imously endorsed the bid proposal,
while North Vancouver City
Council, which votes on the bid
tonight, lent tentative support to
the motion so the application
could meet its Tuesday deadline.

““With the support of Mayor
Loucks, we’re submitting the bid
today (Tuesday), but council can
withdraw the bid tomorrow if they
like,” said Gary Young, director
of recreation for North Vancouver
Recreation Commission.

According to the ‘‘rumor mill,”’
Young said at least five B.C.
communities — Vernon, Ab-
botsford, Kamloops. Nanaimo and
Prince George — are competing to
host the eight-day games, which
are expected to yield millions of
dollars in economic spin-offs.

But Young is confident of the
North Shore’s chances.

“*We have the athletic facilities
and they’re all in fairly good
shape, and I don’t think anyone
can top us in terms of tourist expe-
rience,”’ he said, pointing to the
North Shore’s proximity to
Whistler and Vancouver.

Held every four years, the games
are an amateur sporting event in-
See North
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