A Bridge to Nowhere: British Columbia's Capitalist Nature And
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A Bridge to Nowhere: British Columbia’s Capitalist Nature and the Carmanah Walbran War in the Woods (1988-1994) by James Davey B.A., McGill University, 2012 A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS in the Department of History © James Davey, 2019 University of Victoria All rights reserved. This thesis may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by photocopy or other means, without the permission of the author. Supervisory Committee A Bridge to Nowhere: British Columbia’s Capitalist Nature and the Carmanah Walbran War in the Woods (1988-1994) by James Davey B.A., McGill University, 2012 Supervisory Committee Dr. Richard Rajala, Department of History Co-Supervisor Dr. Karena Shaw, School of Environmental Studies Co-Supervisor ii Abstract From 1988 to 1994, the Carmanah and Walbran valleys on southern Vancouver Island emerged from obscurity to inspire international newspaper headlines, ecotage, and election platforms, and figure in British Columbia’s Commission on Resources and the Environment (CORE), the genesis of the current provincial land-use status quo. With Canada’s tallest tree, first marbled murrelet nest, and proximity to Victoria, the area’s old-growth forests became the site of a touchstone conflict in BC’s War in the Woods (ca. 1980-1995), one which resulted in Carmanah and the Upper Walbran and Lower Walbran becoming designated as Carmanah Walbran Provincial Park in 1995. The Central Walbran remains open to logging, which as recently as 2016 has incited backwoods blockades not dissimilar to those from July and August 1991, the climax of my narrative. This thesis explores how and why the Walbran land-use resolution disappointed Victoria-based environmentalists, Cowichan Lake forest workers, the Nuu-chah-nulth, and the nation-state of Qwa-Ba-Diwa, and why the fate of the watershed remains subject to debate. Analyzing the roots of BC’s wood “exploitation axis” helps contextualize why Carmanah Walbran campaigns in Cowichan Lake and Victoria failed to produce satisfactory outcomes despite significant compromises from provincial governments after much deliberation. In short, dissidence failed to engender land-use consensus because forest capitalism and its co-constitutive partner, colonialism, have since the nineteenth century crafted policy based on a conception of the world rooted in forestry-based development, a durable ontological construct against which other imaginaries of nature have had to compete. The Tree Farm Licence system brought the International Woodworkers of America into a Gomperist bargain with companies and the state after World War II, and contributed to decades of overharvesting, overoptimistic regrowth projections, and corporatization which culminated in falldown and forest community crisis before iii environmentalists began to shape the public discourse regarding nature in the late 1980s. A fundamental inability to produce a satisfactory vision of sustainable forestry and a narrow state narrow response—wilderness parks—to broad, diverse environmentalist demands allowed nature to remain envisioned as a store of raw material for industrial forestry. This thesis additionally seeks to problematize environmentalists’ “wilderness” narratives to elaborate how green knowledge production can act as discursive violence. Our “natures” are more than workplaces, sites for recreation, or pristine ecosystems. They are environments within which to find and make meaning. Or perhaps more accurately, nature is a symbol with which to construct narratives; narratives which, in Carmanah Walbran, often left little room for work in the woods. Environmentalists’ depictions of unpeopled nature advanced their wilderness-preservation cause at the expense of marginalizing Nuu-chah-nulth land claims, loggers’ paycheques, and ecocentric worldviews based on holistic conceptions of interconnectedness and/or radical dissent against the forest industrial complex. In short, the Carmanah Walbran War in the Woods added 16,365 hectares of new parkland, contributed (along with log exports) to the 2001 closure of the Youbou mill, the last at Cowichan Lake, and ensured that an isolated gravel road still ends at a bridge to nowhere. iv Table of Contents Supervisory Committee .................................................................................................................. ii Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... iii Table of Contents ............................................................................................................................ v List of Figures ................................................................................................................................ vi List of Abbreviations .................................................................................................................... vii Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................ ix Dedication ....................................................................................................................................... x Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter One: Settling Colonial Forestry at Lake Cowichan. ....................................................... 32 Chapter Two: Wise Use, the Value of Wilderness, and Framing the Carmanah Giant ................ 67 Chapter Three: Sustainable Development, Public Input, and the CFS in the Walbran .............. 104 Chapter Four: Hot Summers in the Walbran Valley and a Failure to Find Consensus .............. 142 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 185 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 204 v List of Figures Figure 1: A Road to the Central Walbran ....................................................................................... 8 Figure 2: Nuu-chah-nulth place names for “Carmanah Walbran” ................................................ 25 Figure 3: The Cowichan Valley .................................................................................................... 41 Figure 4: BCFP logging roads: Renfrew - Cowichan - Nitinat .................................................... 51 Figure 5: Block 1 of TFL 46 ......................................................................................................... 52 Figure 6: The Nitinat Fight ........................................................................................................... 75 Figure 7: “Nuu-chah-nulth Declaration and Claim” ..................................................................... 80 Figure 8: Frank Harman (MacBlo), Nick Bos (IWA), and the “Three Sisters” ........................... 88 Figure 9: TFL 44-East ................................................................................................................... 89 Figure 10: Revised draft TFL 44 Management Plan, September 1988 ........................................ 95 Figure 11: Sharing What’s Left .................................................................................................... 96 Figure 12: Re-revised draft TFL 44 Management Plan, January 1989 ....................................... 102 Figure 13: Big Trees not Big Stumps ......................................................................................... 103 Figure 14: Forest Resources Commission: Business As Usual .................................................. 115 Figure 15: Carmanah Walbran Trails ......................................................................................... 118 Figure 16: The Walbran, with 1992 deferrals ............................................................................. 147 Figure 17: Tree Sitting ................................................................................................................ 151 Figure 18: “Whaddya wanna be when you grow up?” ............................................................... 162 Figure 19: Carmanah Walbran Provincial Park Zoning Map ..................................................... 186 Figure 20: The Central Walbran “Bite,” SMZ 21 ....................................................................... 203 vi List of Abbreviations AAC: Allowable annual cut BC: British Columbia BCFP: British Columbia Forest Products Ltd. BCFS: British Columbia Forest Service BCWF: British Columbia Wildlife Federation CCF: Co-operative Commonwealth Federation CFMAC: Carmanah Forest Management Advisory Committee CFS: Carmanah Forestry Society COFI: Council of Forest Industries CORE: Commission on Resources and Environment CPR: Canadian Pacific Railway CPU: Canadian Paperworkers Union CVRD: Cowichan Valley Regional District DIA: Department of Indian Affairs E&N: Esquimalt and Nanaimo Railway Grant ENGO: Environmental Non-Governmental Organization EYA: Environmental Youth Alliance FC: Fletcher Challenge Ltd. FCCL: Fletcher Challenge Canada Ltd. FOCS: Friends of Clayoquot Sound FOCW: Friends of Carmanah Walbran FRDA: Federal Resource Development Agency FRC: Forest Resources Commission FRRA: Forest Range and Resource Analysis ICA: Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act