The Ancient Rainforests of Canada by Simon Birch

The success of the campaign to save Canada's Great Bear Rainforest is being heralded as a model solution for conserving the world's remaining ancient forests.

The fate of the orangutan and the gorilla could well be decided by a meeting taking place this month thousands of kilometres away from the steaming rainforests of Sumatra and Cameroon. The Convention on Biological Diversity being held in the Hague will attempt to thrash out policies that will directly affect the biodiversity of the planet for the next decade and beyond. Top of the agenda will be the future of the world's ancient forests. Home to 80 per cent of the planet's terrestrial species of plants and animals, these forests are, in effect, vast biological bank vaults containing the bulk of the planet's biodiversity. With 80 per cent of our ancient forests already destroyed, the remaining 20 per cent – and the indigenous people and wildlife that live in them – face a precarious future.

"If humankind is to protect ancient forest biodiversity and traditional cultures, ancient forest loss must be stopped during the coming decade," says Greenpeace International Forests Campaigner Tim Birch.

The global campaign to prevent the total eradication of the world's ancient forests received a much needed boost last April with the news of a strategically crucial victory for Canadian environmentalists. Throughout the 1990s, the coastal rainforests of British Columbia became one of the world's most notorious environmental battle grounds, with environmentalists pitted against logging companies. Finally, the environmentalists won, and scientists' studies over the past year are now yielding fascinating insights into the habits of creatures that live there. Their work is helping to demonstrate the value of our rainforests to the decision-makers in the Hague.

Wild terrain
Stretching for 750 kilometres along British Columbia's central coast to the Alaskan border, and rendered virtually inaccessible due to its wild terrain of plunging fjords and ice-topped mountains, the Great Bear Rainforest is largely unknown to the outside world. It is so named because of its globally important populations of grizzly and black bears. However it is the unique all-white kermode bear, better known as the spirit bear, for which the Great Bear Rainforest is famed. Untouched since the last ice age some 10,000 years ago, the rainforest contains one of the world's most productive ecosystems. Some of the world's oldest and biggest trees grow here – 1,000-year-old Douglas firs and western red cedars tower more than 100 metres into the sky. It is also home to over 350 species of birds and animals.

Contrary to popular opinion, rainforests aren't solely confined to tropical regions. Wherever the necessary conditions of oceans, mountains and high rainfall occurred, coastal temperate rainforests flourished. In North America the coastal temperate rainforest once ran in one vast, unbroken sweep along the Pacific coast from Alaska to northern California. Today, over 60 per cent of the world's temperate rainforests have fallen to the axe and chainsaw, and in North America, over half of the Pacific coastal rainforest has disappeared. The Great Bear Rainforest now represents the largest in-tact expanse of ancient temperate rainforest anywhere in the world. Scientists are still uncovering the extent of its biodiversity, as well as the complex ecological relationships that exist within the rainforest. Research has found that there are up to 10,000 insect species – the vast majority of which are unknown to science – that are specific to individual rainforest valleys.

The enormous biodiversity and biomass found within the Great Bear Rainforest is now thought to be directly linked to the annual spawning of salmon. Work carried out by Dr Tom Reimchen from the University of Victoria, British Columbia, has revealed that individual black and grizzly bears each carry up to 700 salmon over the course of the spawning season into the rainforest, eating only half of any one fish. By tracking salmon-derived nitrogen isotopes, Dr Reimchen has shown that the decay-ing salmon carcasses are a major source of nutrients for vegetation, as these isotopes have been found to exist within tree tissues. This annual pulse of nutrients is now thought to be responsible for increased growth rates of two-and-a-half times for trees where salmon carcasses are present.

Unique wolves in peril
The Raincoast Society wolf research project has also yielded some striking results. Scientists have been able to isolate wolf cells from within an individual wolf's own scat to gain an insight into the wolf's ecology and genetic history. "Through the use of DNA fingerprinting technology we've been able to identify that the rainforest wolves have evolved unique genetic characteristics found nowhere else on the planet," says Raincoast conservation biologist Chris Darimont. The research is proving crucial in providing information on the habits of the rainforest wolf, an animal that has never been studied before, and will help to establish a proper conservation management programme. As with many animals within the Great Bear Rainforest, the wolf is under increasing threat from logging activities. Having stripped nearby Vancouver Island of its rainforests, British Columbia's logging industry had plans to exploit every one of the valleys within the Great Bear Rainforest in the early 1990s. In response to this imminent destruction of such a precious region, Canada's environmental movement mobilised to mount a ferocious and sustained attack on the loggers' plans. With demonstrations and mass arrests, the defence of the Great Bear Rainforest dominated Canadian headlines throughout the last decade. Eventually the British Columbian Government gave way and finally agreed to a historic peace deal between environmental campaigners and the logging industry.

Under the terms of the agreement – which involved intense negotiations with First Nations (Canada's indigenous population), logging companies and unions – 20 untouched rainforest valleys, equivalent in size to an area four times that of Greater London, will be given permanent protection, while logging will be deferred in another 68 valleys. In addition, a Spirit Bear Protection Park will be created to ensure the long-term security of the spirit bears' habitat.

Central to the successful completion of the deal was the role played by the First Nations, within whose ancestral lands the Great Bear Rainforest lies. Prior to European contact in the early 19th century, it is now thought that more than 100,000 people lived within the rainforest in scattered coastal communities, deriving all their needs from the forest and the sea.

A delicate balance
However, 200 years of European colonisation resulted in the decimation of the First Nations' population and the suppression of their culture. Despite being marginalised for so long, a number of First Nation communities skilfully brokered the deal between environmental groups such as Greenpeace, logging companies and the British Columbian Government. Faced with the harsh realities of high unemployment within their own communities, the First Nations trod a delicately pragmatic line in proposing a combination of ecologically-sensitive logging and economic development balanced with the conservation of the rainforest.

Only last summer, Klemtu Tourism, a First Nations-owned tourism venture, launched its own wildlife and cultural tour within the Great Bear Rainforest. Industries such as tourism are crucial in demonstrating that economic value can be derived from the rainforest without it being destroyed.

In spite of such positive moves, not all the wildlife within the rainforest is safe. Within just three months of taking office last summer, British Columbia's new Liberal Government repealed a ban on the sports hunting of grizzly bears. The ban was introduced by the then New Democratic Party Government in February last year following warnings from scientists and environmental groups that hunting was endangering British Columbia's grizzly population. Some 350 hunting licences have been issued on the basis that the grizzly population is around 13,000. Many scientists, though, believe this to be a huge overestimate. "This figure is totally out of proportion to the reality," says bear biologist Wayne McCrory, "There could be as few as 5,000 bears left, but no one really knows what the true figure is and that's the problem."

Global implications
Despite this ongoing controversy, environmentalists are now viewing the success of the Great Bear Rainforest campaign as having wider, global implications. "All the elements for making the Great Bear Rainforest a true conservation success story are in place," says Tim Birch from Greenpeace International. "The potential for this model to serve as a template for application in other ancient forest ecosystems is immense."However Birch adds a note of caution: "The forthcoming Convention for Biological Diversity is the last chance we'll have to preserve many of the key ancient forests around the world that are now under threat," he says. "The fate of many of these forests will now be decided in the next decade."