The GBR agreement seems to legitimize misinformation and intimidation as bargaining tools
Monday’s agreement on “protection” for B.C.’s so-called Great Bear Rainforest (GBR) can be bought as a shining example of reasonable and responsible compromise between the economy and the environment; one in which government, aboriginal groups, industry and environmental NGOs hammered out a plan which was great for all involved.
There is no doubt that this vast area – covering 6.4 million hectares from the coast from the north of Vancouver Island towards the southern tip of Alaska – is spectacularly beautiful, and residential to charismatic animals like the Kermode or “Spirit” bear, a black bear that, as a result of genetic mutation, is white.
The deal itself, however, is far from black and white.
B.C. Premier Christy Clark claimed it might be a model for other resource development issues, of which pipelines are obviously the most contentious. But any agreement that takes 20 years of hammering is hardly a model, specifically for a hard-pressed economy looking to create jobs. Meanwhile the nature of the deal, how it was reached, and just what sort of precedent it sets, all demand closer examination.
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One controversial part of the agreement – to which 85 per cent of old-growth forests in the region will be off limits to logging – is it appears to legitimize misinformation and intimidation as bargaining tools.
The ENGOs front and centre within the GBR agreement include Greenpeace and ForestEthics, who’ve been extraordinarily successful in frightening Canadian forest-industry customers from “conflict wood.” The problem is that it had been the ENGOs who created the conflict. Whatever the purity of their intentions, their “success” continues to be based less around the ecological validity of the claims as on corporations terrified of bad publicity.
Nobody has ever suggested that the GBR – that is, in fact, a man-made construct delineated and named by environmental campaigners – ought to be paved over and converted into a parking area. The term “protection” signifies that nature is somehow under attack and subject to harm from forestry companies who provide jobs and wealth. But forests feel no pain. Nor have they got ethics. Only humans do, and the richer that individuals become, the more concerned they are about conservation. Such concerns can easily be exploited for political ends.
The position of radical environmentalists, who alighted on the campaigning potential from the northern B.C rainforest after the battles at Clayoquot Sound, was that the GBR remain “pristine,” that’s, untouched. They seemed to haven’t much concern for future years of aboriginal peoples in the region, except to recruit them as human shields and pictures in do-not-buy campaigns (particularly in Germany, which has been obsessive about “Cowboys and Indians”).
Dallas Smith, president from the Nanwakolas Council, which represents six from the 26 Great Bear Rainforest First Nations who’re signatories towards the deal, confirmed to me that his people initially felt utilized by environmentalists. Those do-not-buy campaigns also had adverse consequences for his people, many of whom, he says, reside in “Third-World” conditions.
Anybody concerned about the solidity from the GBR agreement might well look to the record from the Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement, CBFA, which was signed this year with a few of the same ENGOs, and which sought to sanitize a significantly larger chunk of the Canadian boreal. Because the boreal is one of the biggest forests on earth, and subject to no net deforestation, it had been hardly threatened by. Nevertheless, forestry companies were “brought towards the table” by the same kind of do-not-buy campaigns waged against companies operating in coastal B.C.
Seeing Greenpeace and ForestEthics hailed as collaborators and partners must be particularly galling for Montreal-based Resolute Forest Products, which, after filling out the CBFA in good faith, was then relentlessly attacked by Greenpeace and it is fellow ENGO pack hunters.
Ironically, Richard Brooks – who appeared alongside Christy Clark as one of the main ENGO signatories from the GBR agreement – is named in Resolute’s lawsuit against Greenpeace, alleging “defamation, malicious falsehood and intentional interference with economic relations.”
The GBR agreement is unquestionably better than the CBFA, which excluded governments and local communities, however it still shows that ENGOs, who’ve no social licence that belongs to them, have far too much power in declaring themselves licensers of others.
The question – given the bitter experience with the CBFA – is whether or not ENGOs can be trusted that you follow their side of the bargain. The existence of the provincial government and aboriginal groups can make renewed intimidation tactics harder, but we already have rumblings of discontent that any old-growth trees are being harvested whatsoever.
Ian McAllister, founder of ENGO Pacific Wild, a vital estimate the GBR campaign, was quoted this week as saying “Unfortunately this agreement enshrines the idea that ancient forest logging belongs to conducting business in the Great Bear Rainforest. Which has been a significant change in the conservation movement.”
If it truly does represent a big change, it’s a change for that better. Let’s hope, with regard to jobs and aboriginal communities, that the B.C. agreement holds. But we should remember that elsewhere in Canada, the “War within the Woods” continues, plus some of the GBR agreement’s signatories still don’t mind playing dirty.
