Editor:
This letter was sent to MP Patrick Weiler and shared with Coast Reporter.
Dear Mr. Weiler,
Your idea of stopping log exports from old growth by 2030 has been getting a lot of press lately. It’s a fine idea but one that gives the exporters another seven years to cut and export old growth logs until there is nothing left.
So let’s look at something positive you and your Federal folk need to work on.
This idea is to set aside, by National decree, for all time, the old growth that has already been designated on maps as worthy of protection by the B.C. Forest Service, the forested banks and waterways of lekw’emin (Jervis Inlet Watershed including Hotham Sound, Sechelt Inlet, Salmon Inlet, Agamemnon Channel and Nelson Island), as a stunning new National Park, with the blessing of the shíshálh and Squamish First Nations.
The local environmental group Friends of Caren has proposed this idea since 2010, when shíshálh elders agreed this was a good idea, providing the sacred ancestral areas in it were protected for all time as well.
Marbled murrelets, mountain goats and humpback whales, which come into the inlets every year, along with all species need protection from resource extraction interests, and we as a nation need the whole area set aside as a big marine protected area with National Park status. Mr. Weiler, please get on to this while urging old growth log exports protection for forests over which the Federal Government has little control.
Sincere thanks,
Paul Harris Jones
Garden Bay
