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RAINFOREST BLOCKADE IN CANADIAN WILDERNESS CONTINUING THROUGH WEEKEND
Activists Locked onto Logging Equipment ---- Establish Floating Base Camp to Protect Bear Habitat
RODERICK ISLAND - 24 May 1997
A international team of thirty Greenpeace activists will continue their blockade of a clearcut logging operation in British Columbia's Great Bear Rainforest through the weekend.
On Roderick Island in a northerly section of the Great Bear Rainforests, eight activists have been locked onto large pieces of logging equipment operated by the Vancouver based logging company Western Forests Products since Wednesday. A second activist team, with the support of the Greenpeace vessel, MV Moby Dick has built a floating base camp in nearby Green Inlet where Western Forest Products is due to start logging later this summer.
A legal attempt by Western Forest Products to stop the Greenpeace action by obtaining an injunction has been postponed until Monday.
" Our activists are determined to stay as long as we can.. We're locked onto these grapple yarders are here to stop the logging that is already happening; and our Green Inlet base camp is there to make sure the Western does not move into the remaining pristine ancient rainforests," said Tzeporah Berman, Greenpeace Forest Campaigner at the site of the action.
The Great Bear Rainforest, located on British Columbia's mid- coast region, is a place of global ecological importance because it contains the world's largest intact areas of temperate rainforest, a type of ecosystem that has been logged to the brink of extinction elsewhere in the world. Satellite mapping recently carried out by the World Resources Institute shows that half the world's temperate rainforests have already been destroyed and that temperate forests are more endangered than tropical ones. (1)
The Great Bear Rainforest is also important because of its grizzly bear population, a species which is already considered vulnerable to extinction by the B.C. and Canadian governments. Scientists who recently attended the first-ever conference on the status of B.C.'s coastal grizzly bears announced they that government policies and industrial activities are threatening the viability of grizzly bear populations. (2)
1) The World Resources Institute, "The Last Frontier Forests,", Washington D.C. 1997
2) B.C. Grizzly Bear Survival Summit held at Knight Inlet, British Columbia organized by the Raincoast Conservation Foundation, Round River Conservation Studies and Bear Watch. May 9-12, 1997
FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT:
Steve Shallhorn, 604-253-7701, 416-451-9354 (cell)
Mary MacNutt: 416-597-8408; 416-505-1792