The road to hell is paved with good intentions and the noblest of goals can have the most tragic of consequences. It happens when we, as humans, look at situations with blinders on. Like a racehorse that can only see the finish line, we too can stumble, fall and break our leg en route if we fail to see all that is around us. Even environmental stewardship, an important cause for any sportsman, can also fall victim to a narrow field of vision. What I’m about to say here might raise a few eyebrows, and maybe even a few backs. But free and open discourse too is just part of the big picture.
Few people, especially West Coasters, will ever forget the Clayoquot Sound Protests of 1993; the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history. The goal was to halt the logging of the region’s old growth forest. It is humankind’s propensity to preserving the past that leads us to protect old growth trees over second-growth forests. It’s the same mentality that will halt the wrecking balls from destroying an unused, decrepit old building in an urban wasteland.
However — what those who would chain themselves to a 900-year-old evergreen do not often consider is that even the mighty fir tree will eventually die. And if we log only second growth forests, what will be left when the old growth timber falls to the ground? Second-growth, the meeker next generation ready to inherit the Earth, will already have been cut down. Oops.
There is another dark side to this as well. Fire. The idea, to many, of watching a forest literally go up in smoke can be too much to bear. So we interfere with this fire cycle with fire suppression — all the while letting old growth trees fall to the forest floor unharvested. Given the inevitability of forest fires, this build up of fuel (in the form of unburned timber) is akin to turning on a stove’s propane and letting it fill the entire kitchen before you light the match.
We are learning here, with controlled burns becoming more commonplace. But the practice of leaving old growth forests to rot, thinning out the replacement trees and unnaturally and unnecessarily suppressing fires has proven time and time again to be a disaster in the making.
One of my personal favourite examples good intentions gone berserk took place not far from my hometown, on Central Vancouver Island, about six years ago. Any Island'er knows the plight of the maligned Vancouver Island Marmot — only a few dozen of these critters exist in the wild, and conservation efforts are proving tedious and relatively ineffective. In 2002 and 2003, Conservation Officers found the culprits behind some of the population’s decline — and set out to exterminate the convicted offenders with extreme prejudice.
Of course, once word got out that six golden eagles had been shot to save a population of marmots unwilling to save itself, the general public was confused at best.
“There’s some dubious science being used to justify the culling of predators in the name of protecting the Vancouver Island marmot,” said Chris Genevalley of the Raincoast Conservation Society after the event. And believe me, if there’s one the Raincoast Conservation Society knows, it’s dubious science.
Thanks to Raincoast’s recent efforts to severely restrict grizzly hunting on BC’s central coast, grizzly populations are increasing to the point of regular human-bear conflict. “The bears have taken over,” one Hagensborg resident told the press in 2007. Livestock losses are mounting, landfills are being overrun and recreational users of the area and fearing for their lives.
And of course, the result of bear-human conflict is usually the “offending” bruin coming face-to-face with the business end of a conservation officer’s firearm; a most wasteful, undignified death when compared to sport hunting — and one ironic to those whose goal was to save every last bear.
These environmentalists di not see the big picture when it was time to “save” these central coast grizzlies. They, like so many before them, saw only the finish line.