9. Maximum Yield in the Balance

In the case of Meares Island, the focus wasn’t always the land, strictly speaking, but the trees on the land. The Crown in right of the Province of British Columbia owns timber designated and reserved for forestry development. That is the long and the short of it.

With respect to the third distinct matter disclosed in land title deeds, we find that on March 15, 1905, the Province of British Columbia issued Timber Lease 4 to Sutton Lumber & Trading Company, doing so under the Land Act, 1905. By chance I found a copy of the transaction in Walter Guppy’s Clayoquot Sound history, and I note with interest that it is called an Indenture.²⁷⁴ It’s for the lease of timber on 18,614 acres (7,532 hectares) with most of the lots on Meares Island and the adjacent mainland. This covered the following lots within the Clayoquot Land District (please bear with me here): Lots 627 to 641 inclusive, 645, 646 and 647, also 649, 925 and 926; of these, 632 to 638 inclusive, as well as 649, 925 and 926 are located on Meares Island. This lease to Sutton Lumber & Trading Company, renewed March 1, 1912, gave the company authority to cut trees and carry away the spars, timber or lumber of the same, and to put up such mills and establishments as were required. The lease included an important provision, perhaps unnoticed by interested parties at the time, that contained a strict reference to Indian rights in lands and reserves, and here I use the language of that day. The Company could do its business wherever necessary within its lots, “EXCEPT and always reserved thereout all Indian grounds, plots, gardens, Crown and other Reserves.”²⁷⁵ Here we see clear recognition by lessor and lessees that Indian rights, both in the leased territory and outside the leased territory, were to be observed. This lease was to lapse on March 15, 1930, but no matter, for in January 1980, the same block of land was acquired by the powerful and energetic timber giant MacMillan Bloedel as part of Timber Lease T0140. This included a portion, indeed much of, Meares Island.

In the years since European discoveries and trade began on the west coast of Vancouver Island, the pristine locales had become few and far between. Most of Vancouver Island had been, or was in process of being, transformed from a wilderness into a varied complex of humanized landscapes.²⁷⁶

Make no mistake, forests constituted the single most valuable indigenous resource in the province. At mid-century in British Columbia, the net value of production was $170,000,000, and some 15,000 persons were employed in forestry operations. Many communities had come into existence owing to forestry development. International and interior trade and commerce, transportation by sea and shore, manufacturing and services all reflected the profitable exploitation of the basic forest resource. “Recognition of these facts has resulted in government dedication to a policy and program of sustained yield.” That is the view of the British Columbia Atlas of Resources (1956).²⁷⁷

Here it seemed was a limitless bounty, and foresters argued that the major tree species—Douglas fir, western red cedar, western hemlock, spruce, balsam, lodgepole pine, yellow cedar, cottonwood and other deciduous—were sustainable for forestry regeneration on 90,500,000 acres, or 150,000 square miles suited for tree growing. Looked at differently, this was about three times the size of England or a little less than the states of Oregon and Washington combined.²⁷⁸ No wonder the forestry companies thought in big terms, the forestry department encouraged production under certain rules and regulations, and unions and non-union workers, including so many who were helping to harvest the trees and bring them to mill or boom ground, could think in rather prodigal terms, with not so much as a side glance at the rape of the timber stands, the scalping of mountains and hills, the despoiling of creeks and streams, the diverting of water channels, and the building of hydroelectric turbine installations to bring “juice” to the frontier.

As scholar Michael Edgell of the University of Victoria’s Department of Geography put it, on the eve of the Meares Island fight, “The landscapes and economy of Vancouver Island are dominated by forests and the forest industry.”²⁷⁹ In the early twentieth century, timber companies began laying the foundations of the industry in the Georgia Strait region, and they started to make inroads, mostly in the accessible valleys and slopes of coastal eastern Vancouver Island. The industry overall held a firm grip on the British Columbia economy as a source of wealth, investment and employment.

As always, getting access to forests and prime timber depended on transportation—of supplies, manpower and equipment coming in and hauling, shipping or trucking out. The big industrial diesel motor engines made this possible. In 1959 the winding road to Ucluelet and Tofino was opened, used mainly by logging trucks—car traffic preferred Sunday, the logger’s day off, for a safer passage. Adventurous tourists were delighted, and those who catered to them similarly. But the shadows were now gathering around Meares Island and its forests: this was what I will call “the crossing of the Rubicon” in regards to Tofino’s history, and Meares Island’s too. The iron fist was closer to arriving in the heart of the wilderness.

On a parallel note, John Steinbeck noted that the Gulf of California and the Gulf ports had always been unfriendly to colonization, but once good roads and high-tension wires make their appearance, the invasion begins. “Localness” is destroyed by the concrete highway, and political forms come once the radio is hooked up. So it was at La Paz, and so at Tofino. “Once the Gulf people are available to contact, they too will come to consider clean feet more important than clean minds.” Roads and high-voltage operating day and night “will draw the people into the civilizing web, whether it be in Asiatic Russia, in rural England, or in Mexico. That zeitgeist operates everywhere, and there is no escape from it.”²⁸⁰

As the logging frontier shifted to Vancouver Island’s west coast and to the northern portions of the Island, “the move from accessible, high quality stands into less accessible, low quality stands . . . imposed strains on extractive, transportation and processing techniques, and raised the cost of obtaining a less valuable raw product.”²⁸¹ The old-growth forests now lay nakedly open before the lumber barons, MacBlo and BC Forest Products (BCFP). Clear-cutting was the intent. These two firms, and smaller ones that often worked in conjunction with, or on contract for, MacBlo and BCFP, now had a chance to get at the untouched old-growth trees. These were usually found in valleys or in defiles. Others existed in otherwise inaccessible places where helicopters might be used. The bulldozer made possible the ingress of the logging truck long after the railway lines and small locomotives and flatbed had arrived. Coastwise shipping presented unique problems, seasonally overcome. Aerial surveying and photography made it possible to seek out the last remaining timber treasure troves.

Small companies made inroads in select places, a couple of them on Meares. In the 1950s, “a logging outfit based in Tofino, Knott Brothers Logging, with the agreement of the Tla-o-qui-aht . . . logged the southern face of Lone Cone, directly opposite Tofino.” One local resident observed, “It was a terrible scar, they just shaved the side of that mountain, you could see it from everywhere . . . But it’s all grown over now.”²⁸² Another small outfit logged Windy Bay, on the east side of Meares, in Fortune Channel. From a distance offshore, untouched timber seemed to cover the coast in the 1960s, but that was passing quickly with the years and decades.

Already by the 1940s, some were beginning to ask how the yield could be maintained. A Royal Commission in the 1940s led to politicians, bureaucrats and the forest industry working up schemes of sustained-yield units and how to regulate them; this was when the calculation and allocation of allowable cut was introduced. Tree farm licences (TFLs), that is cooperative management ventures between the industry and the BC Forest Service, were introduced to expand and control areas of timber supply on public lands. MacBlo’s tree farm licences were particularly in the Alberni-Great Central and Sproat Lake areas. That company had previously acquired some of the lands granted to the E & N Railway (later held by Canadian Pacific), and also controlled private holdings and temporary tenures on the Island.²⁸³ According to authority Dr. Edgell, portions of these private holdings were combined with Crown land into two of the Company’s TFLs, Alberni and Tofino, which were composed of a number of separated blocks. By the mid-1970s, MacBlo accounted for about forty-five percent of productive land and harvest on Vancouver Island.²⁸⁴ The regional supply-processing for pulp, paper, plywood and lumber was at MacMillan Bloedel’s complex at Port Alberni, which rejuvenated that town as a forest industrial centre, no longer dependent only on ailing lumber and cedar shingle mills. Road networks and marine services aided the process.

Through the 1950s and 1960s, all species of timber were still being sought out for voracious extraction. Optimism was replaced in the 1970s by guarded pessimism. “The industry,” Edgell remarked in 1979, on the eve of the Meares Island crisis, “[had] grown from a boisterous teenager to a worried and harassed adult.”²⁸⁵

In preparing this book I looked long and hard for testimonials from loggers and logging families about Meares Island’s future. I found little if anything of significance. I should not have been surprised. Even any Indigenous persons who were in the industry at the time would have been members of the International Woodworkers of America, the powerful union whose main mission was to maintain pressure on the corporate sector and the BC government for best practices and maximum yields. The corporate sector, in turn, fights its battles for possession behind the scenes.

What I did find, and it is something of generic interest, is a memoir by Ian S. Mahood entitled The Land of Maquinna, privately printed in 1971. Mahood was in the forestry business (a forester first and a logger second, he proclaims), and he writes that, except for fisheries, the West Coast made little contribution to the economy of British Columbia until the 1950s, when farming trees as a crop began in earnest. Then the area emerged from an isolated frontier to become a contributor to BC’s well-being “and thereby serve not fifty thousand [the local population] but more than two million people. There are villages again, where loggers, fishermen, miners and factory workers have homes and school their children.” Mahood exhibits deep concern for stewardship, and I must quote his telling, hard-hitting lines: “Do [visitors] understand that the society of Maquinna was simple, although violent; primitive, but still splendid? Does the visitor realize that modern society is incredibly more complex, much less violent, vastly more comfortable and, in its own way, more splendid? The Nootkas lived off the sea, keeping as far away from the resources of the land environment as possible. We use the resources of the total environment, and we have a responsibility to maintain it to the full.”²⁸⁶ Here, unmasked, is the forester’s and the logger’s best credo: Mahood is surely a representative, and an articulate one at that, of the progressive commercial view, one that, at the date of writing, has become rather muted, if voiced at all, in the discourse about the future. Certainly no television or radio network is going to give it any time. Mahood’s operative word for the forests is “harvesting,” surely indicative of the cutting and replanting mentality so common in forestry practices these days.

At Clayoquot, a clash of ecological interpretations was about to occur. The industrial logging described by Mahood was foreign to Indigenous protocols of respect for the forests or use of the same. For First Nation caretakers of the old Aboriginal world, the turbulence created by logging trucks and high-pitched screaming chainsaws signalled the breaking of a new and terrible dawn. Indigenous peoples naturally objected to such a prospect, and this was an underlying cause of the emerging alliance that led to the founding of the Nuu-Chah-Nulth Tribal Council.

Residents of Tofino were equally alarmed, for they knew that a scar-faced mountain would rob the town and the island of its magic. Besides, clear-cutting would affect Tofino’s water source. Tofino residents were also conflicted, because many (Indigenous and non-Indigenous) worked in forestry.

Out of these local storms came informal global alliances of certain Indigenous peoples and some members of environmental groups. If I comprehend Andrew Struthers’ The Green Shadow correctly, and take that book as a memoir of experience, Tofino as a community found itself in an existentialist flap over the future of Clayoquot Sound, the matter of Meares Island being a preliminary to the main event, so to speak.²⁸⁷ It could only be imagined at this time what might happen if MacBlo was not stopped. In response, protests by environmental entities, some old and seasoned, others new and recently established, against the near and present danger, became part of the political scene in British Columbia.

Similarly, MacBlo’s interest in Meares Island quickly took on an importance much larger than the actual size of the island. The outcome of this case might have a serious impact on other areas—and on other companies.

In the matter of Meares, MacBlo and the BC Ministry of Forests were powerful agencies with history and experience on their side. The government, culpable in the circumstances, ignored the protests, and in November 1983 gave the company permission to log 90 percent of its lease on Meares. The remaining 10 percent was deferred for twenty years.²⁸⁸ So began the intended assault on the forests of Meares Island.

Meares Island became the focus of a political and economic (or commercial) firestorm pitting residents, environmentalists and the tourist industry against loggers. Both sides depended on the woods for a livelihood and had families and communities to support. In their 2014 history of Tofino and Clayoquot Sound, Margaret Horsfield and Ian Kennedy tell the story of these conflicting interests,²⁸⁹ both of which were claiming possession of Meares Island. The days of Wickaninnish were long gone—or were they? The Indigenous voice was to play the critical part in what transpired, and we return to it presently. For the moment, we turn briefly to the other factors that drew people to join in the chorus for the common cause.

In Tofino it was well known that sooner or later Meares would be logged, for already at nearby Ucluelet the clear-cutting had been extensive—and a visual eyesore to residents and visitors. However, Pacific Rim National Park was now seeing tens of thousands of visitors annually, so protecting tourism was a consideration, as was protecting the local water supply. Another consideration was fighting big business, and still another was combating government indifference.

I personally remember a visit to Long Beach in ever so long ago 1977, when regulations were just being put in place to prohibit vehicular traffic on the beach. Parks Canada was seeking new measures to protect an important part of the biosphere of the west coast of Canada. This was one example of the environmental concerns that became a major aspect of the Meares Island case. The Sierra Club, founded 1892, and Greenpeace, founded 1972, joined the fight against the logging companies. The Friends of Clayoquot Sound, which grew out of discussions in Tofino in the late 1970s, became the local and indeed provincial organization of resistance.

The Meares Island Planning Committee, established by the government in 1980, was the first entity that began to look at the future of the island. Possession of the present for the preservation of the future was its remit. As Horsfield and Kennedy write, “Consultations began among concerned citizens, local environmentalists, First Nations, forestry union representatives, the provincial government, and MacBlo to see what could be done . . . Over the next three years, the committee tried to reach consensus, suggesting a number of options to preserve Meares Island.”²⁹⁰ The process was protracted. MacBlo finally walked from the table, frustrated by the slowness of procedures, and suggested that it log 53 percent of the land over thirty-five years.

As Jack Woodward and I travelled by float plane from Vancouver to Ahousat to report to the NTC and the Chiefs and Elders on our findings, below me I could see the heartbreaking vistas of a clear-cut Vancouver Island—vast bald brown spaces, some with sharp-line boundaries that defied topography and geographical logic. Down at sea level there had been many encroachments on the forests of Clayoquot Sound and nearby. Below me, too, lay the small communities, among them Grice Bay, Calm Bay, Ahousat, Ucluelet. A sadness overwhelmed me.