1 June 2001
New Terrain for E-tourists
Greenpeace launches new website of Canada's Great Bear Rainforest

Vancouver/Amsterdam - Ecotourism is going to extremes - virtual extremes. Greenpeace has launch a new website featuring a stunning virtual tour of the largest temperate rainforest on the planet.

The site will top Apple Computers QuickTime enews, an electronic newsletter with a circulation of several million worldwide.

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The Great Bear Rainforest: A Virtual Journey is sponsored by Greenpeace, which along with other environmental NGOs, recently achieved a milestone victory by obtaining an official agreement to protect parts of this delicate ecosystem.

The tour features interactive 360-degree panoramic images, digital video, spectacular photographic images and the rich sounds of the forest, bringing to life the pages of Ian McAllister's book The Great Bear Rainforest, Canada's Forgotten Coast.

"This virtual tour literally brings a world treasure to the world," said Gavin Edwards, Greenpeace forests campaigner. "It will show why the Great Bear Rainforest is worth protecting. And hopefully it will encourage people to come and see it for themselves."

Produced by Vancouver-based GreenDreams Entertainment, this website allows people from all corners of the world the opportunity to travel to the rugged west coast of British Columbia and explore an area so remote that only a fortunate few ever set foot here. This is some of the most breathtaking wilderness in the world - and also one of the most threatened.

In April, the Government of British Columbia agreed to take steps to conserve Canada's rainforest. This agreement, supported by industry and environmental groups, includes protection of 20 large pristine rainforest valleys, a moratorium on another 68 large valleys for the next 12 to 24 months and a commitment to ecosystem-based planning for the temperate rainforest.

Although these decisions do not completely guarantee the future health of the Great Bear Rainforest, they represent the first steps in the right direction.

Environmental groups like Greenpeace worked on this deal for years and attribute some of their success to their ability to show people the places and creatures at risk. QuickTime VR (virtual reality) technology gives the user the ability to navigate through maps, landscapes and the forest floor, in fully immersive 360 degree panoramas.

GreenDreams Entertainment's The Great Bear Rainforest: A Virtual Journey is a pre-cursor of a CD/DVD entitled: In the Tracks of the Great Bear: A Virtual Journey.

Take the virtual tour of the Great Bear Rainforest to learn more about the need for protection of this magnificent forest http://www.greenpeace.org/greatbear