The Birth of the Great Bear Rainforest: Conservation Science and Environmental Politics on British Columbia's Central and North Coast

THE BIRTH OF THE GREAT BEAR RAINFOREST: CONSERVATION SCIENCE AND ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS ON BRITISH COLUMBIA'S CENTRAL AND NORTH COAST by JESSICA ANNE DEMPSEY B.Sc, The University of Victoria, 2002 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Geography) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA July 2006 © Jessica Anne Dempsey, 2006 11 Abstract This thesis examines the birth of the Great Bear Rainforest, a large tract of temperate rainforest located on British Columbia's central and north coasts. While the Great Bear Rainforest emerges through many intersecting forces, in this study I focus on the contributions of conservation science asking: how did conservation biology and related sciences help constitute a particular of place, a particular kind of forest, and a particular approach to biodiversity politics? In pursuit of these questions, I analyzed several scientific studies of this place completed in the 1990s and conducted interviews with people involved in the environmental politics of the Great Bear Rainforest. My research conclusions show that conservation science played an influential role in shaping the Great Bear Rainforest as a rare, endangered temperate rainforest in desperate need of protection, an identity that counters the entrenched industrial-state geographies found in British Columbia's forests. With the help of science studies theorists like Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway, I argue that these conservation studies are based upon purification epistemologies, where nature - in this case, the temperate rainforest - is separated out as an entity to be explained on its own and ultimately 'saved' through science. Further, I posit that the scientific practices surrounding the Great Bear Rainforest are steeped in what I call protected area fetishism, in that they tend to mistake protected areas as a fixed, objective 'thing-in-itself necessary for biodiversity conservation. The overemphasis on protected areas enacted by conservation science obfuscates past and present relations contributing to the on-going reduction of biodiversity loss on the coast of British Columbia and elsewhere. Table of Contents Abstract ii Table of Contents iii List of Figures iv Acknowledgements v Dedication vi Chapter 1. Introduction 1 Chapter 2. Scientific Seeds of the Great Bear Rainforest 33 Chapter 3. The Birth of the GBR 93 Chapter 4. Designing a Future for the Great Bear Rainforest 108 Chapter 5. The Politics of Nature 142 Works Cited 172 iv List of Figures Figure 1. Map of the Great Bear Rainforest 3 Figure 2. Tree Farm Licence and Timber Supply Areas Location Map 39 Figure 3. Original Global Distribution of Coastal Temperate Rainforests 57 Figure 4. Undeveloped Primary Watersheds Larger than 5,000 ha in the Coastal Temperate Rainforests of British Columbia 71 Figure 5. Map of CAD study area 121 Figure 6. CAD for the Central Coast of British Columbia 125 Figure 7. Map of April 4th, 2001 Agreements 149 Acknowledgements This thesis project is the result of intensive interlocution with many people, academic and otherwise. My supervisor Trevor Barnes enthusiastically reviewed many drafts, always with patience and candour. Gerry Pratt appraised the final draft under tight schedule, contributing helpful suggestions and encouraging words for the future. Junnie Cheung helped me negotiate through the administrative bureaucracy of the university. This project would be vastly different (not in a good way) without my almost daily phone conversations with my good friend and cohort Kevin Gould. In these calls we would discuss the latest threads and problems in our arguments and writing, helping each other make sense of our ideas and logic. Members of my writing group (Kevin, Caro, Sarah, Jo, Gina) engaged with a section of this thesis (chapter 4) providing critical and supportive comments and suggestions. Outside of UBC, I would like to thank Michael M'Gonigle who provided many opportunities for developing the ideas contained within, through discussions, writing, and by launching my now on-going work around the Convention on Biological Diversity. I would also like to extend my deepest appreciation of a former teacher, Pamela Moss, who inspired me to attend graduate school and to cultivate a critical geography mind. This thesis would not have been possible without the on-going friendship and intellectual companionship of James Rowe and Dr. Richard Buckner, who have contributed substantial theoretical and technical assistance over the past 8 years. Saving me from my total inept abilities on the graphic design front, my friends and stupendous artists Lori Joy Smith and Paul Lopes helped perfect the images contained within. Lori also provided critical childcare in the last few months, without which I might still be writing the Introduction. I would also like to thank those who gave of their time for interviews and generously gave copyright permission. I have the utmost respect and admiration for the environmental movement in British Columbia who have managed, against all odds, to make a real dent in the rapacious exploitation of BC's forests. And most importantly, Ryan Lucy provided the love, generousity and stability that allowed me to finish this thesis, despite its seemingly never-ending prognosis. For my bugs, little and big 1 Chapter 1. Introduction Nature for us is made, as both fiction and fact. If organisms are natural objects, it is crucial to remember that organisms are not born; they are made in world changing technoscientific practices by particular collective actors in particular times and places Donna Haraway 1992, 297 The ancient temperate rainforest of North America evolved on the British Columbia landscape some 10,000 to 12,000 years ago when a wall of glacial ice scraped the landscape clean and gouged out a labyrinth of deep-water fjords. From this chaos emerged a new ecological order, a unique combination of plants and animals that migrated in from much older ecosystems. There are species of lichen growing in today's rainforest that date back 70 million years Sierra Club of British Columbia 1999, 4 I can vaguely recall the first time I heard the name the "Great Bear Rainforest". It was about 1997. I was an undergraduate at the University of Victoria, becoming versed in the forest ecology and environmental politics of British Columbia. It was during a group presentation in an environmental studies course, with the information largely culled from the Sierra Club of British Columbia. The presentation introduced a budding campaign to protect the large swath of forest as some of the last temperate rainforest left in the world. The map of the Great Bear Rainforest (GBR) seemed to cover almost the entire British Columbian coast (Figure 1). The Great Bear Rainforest soon went from our classroom onto the world stage. In only a couple years, this once unheard of forest gained celebrity status. It attended international forestry conferences and did tours of both Europe and the United States. In 1999, the Great Bear Rainforest was named the year's most important environmental campaign by Time Magazine, winning out "over population growth, Florida's everglades, global warming [global warming!] and Panda Bear Conservation" (Raincoast Conservation Society 1999). The same year GBR environmentalists targeted Home Depot. Protests took place out front of this massive do-it-yourself chain all over North America, and tens of thousands of postcards went to the headquarters, asking Home Depot to stop selling wood from BC's Great Bear Rainforest. Eventually, some large forest product consumers stopped buying its wood. As Bill Dumont, chief forester at Western Forest Products remarked in response to these market campaigns over the GBR: "Customers don't want to buy their two-by-fours or their pulp with a protester attached to it. If we don't end it, they will buy their products elsewhere" (quoted in Riddell 2000). In 2003, it was announced that the GBR and one of its more famous inhabitants - the white Spirit Bear - are to star in a new Hollywood-produced animated movie, with a score by Keith Richardson from the Backstreet Boys. This is a forest whose day has come! Figure 1. Map of the Great Bear Rainforest (Rainforest Solutions Project undated) © Sierra Club of British Columbia, by permission. 4 Despite environmentalist claims that the Great Bear Rainforest is 10,000 years old, the Great Bear Rainforest did not always exist as an international space of concern, and much work went into making it so. The emergence of the Great Bear Rainforest is complicated, one that cannot be explained only through the standard heterosexual family metaphor. There is no clear father or mother in the GBR, but rather many actors - human and non-human - woven together and broken apart. It has a history marked with rain, salmon and bears, among many other species, including Homo sapiens who have lived in these forests for millennia. Over 5,0000mm (15 feet) of rain can fall on this place each year, creating a rich climate for large trees like cedar and hemlock to grow, and abundant mosses and foliage. However, the Great Bear Rainforest is not only a story of bears, rain and trees, although these are central. The history of the GBR also wraps around local and international environmentalists, maps, First Nations, strange couplings between new-age hippies and CEOs, conservation biology, corporate marketing, foundations, meetings, secret negotiations, grants and stunning photo albums. As the Haraway quote above attests, this place of nature, shrouded in the mist and mystery of ancient forest status, did not emerge from no-where - it was not solely created from the actions of nature (although the glacial gouging process described above by the Sierra Club is no 'social construction'), or the scheming of activists, although they too are intimately involved. In Haraway's (1997b) terms, the Great Bear Rainforest is a new material-semiotic body1; not a pre-existing nor immanent body, but 1 To elucidate, Haraway (1997b) writes, "I wish to translate the ideological dimensions of 'facticty' and 'the organic' into a cumbersome entity called a 'material-semiotic actor'.

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