The Coast That Was Never Logged
The largest intact temperate rainforest on earth, a black bear that comes out cream-coloured, and a forest whose trees have been shown to contain nitrogen carried inland from the ocean by animals. How blockades, a market campaign and twenty-six First Nations stopped the clearcutting and built something else instead.
The boat cuts the engine in an inlet somewhere north of Bella Bella and the sound that replaces it is water and ravens. Sitka spruce and western red cedar come down to a tideline hung with kelp; some of the trees standing here were mature when Europeans first reached this coast. A black bear works a river mouth for salmon, and then — the reason people come — a bear the colour of pale honey walks out of the same forest, and it is not albino and not a polar bear but a black bear carrying a recessive gene that occurs at meaningful frequency only here.
The Kermode, or spirit bear, is the emblem of the Great Bear Rainforest, and the story of how this coast avoided being logged is the most instructive conservation story in North America.
What temperate rainforest is
Tropical rainforest gets the attention; temperate coastal rainforest is rarer. It requires a narrow set of conditions — heavy year-round rainfall, moderated coastal temperatures, mountains to force the moisture up — and globally there is not very much of it. The strip running from northern California up through British Columbia to south-east Alaska is the largest remaining tract in the world.
The Great Bear covers something in the order of six million hectares of it along the central and north coast of British Columbia, in a landscape of fjords, islands and river valleys with almost no roads. The biomass per hectare here is among the highest of any forest type on earth — these trees are enormous and they live for a very long time.
The system runs on salmon. Five species return from the Pacific to spawn and die in the rivers, and bears, wolves and eagles carry the carcasses into the forest. Nitrogen from the ocean has been traced in the wood of trees hundreds of metres from any river, deposited there by animals. The forest is, in a measurable sense, built out of fish.
The wolves here swim between islands, dive for shellfish and eat a diet that is substantially marine — a coastal population genetically distinguishable from interior wolves. The bears fish. The whole ecology is amphibious in a way that no other forest is.
How it was nearly lost
Through the 1980s and 1990s British Columbia was clearcutting old-growth on the coast at industrial scale, and the campaign that stopped it was one of the most sophisticated environmental operations ever run.
It started with blockades and arrests — at Clayoquot Sound in 1993, over eight hundred people were arrested in what was then the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history. It moved to the markets: campaigners went to the European and American customers of BC forest products and persuaded them to cancel contracts, which turned an environmental argument into a commercial one that the companies could not ignore.
And then, crucially, it stopped being a fight. In the early 2000s the environmental organisations, the logging companies, the provincial government and — decisively — the First Nations whose territories these are sat down together in a negotiation that ran for years.
The blockades bought the time. The market campaign created the pressure. But the agreement that held was the one the First Nations wrote themselves into.
The Great Bear Rainforest Agreements, finalised in stages and completed in 2016, protect a large majority of the forest area from industrial logging, apply ecosystem-based management to the remainder, and — the part that matters most — establish shared decision-making with twenty-six First Nations over land use in their territories. A conservation financing package was raised from philanthropy and government to fund Indigenous-led economic development as an alternative to logging jobs.
Guardians
What grew out of it is the model now being exported. Coastal First Nations run Guardian Watchmen programmes: trained members of the communities who monitor their territories, collect scientific data, enforce their nations’ own laws, and interact with visitors and industry on the water.
It is employment in places where employment is scarce, it is the practical assertion of jurisdiction, and it produces monitoring coverage across an enormous roadless area that no provincial agency could afford. Studies of Guardian programmes have found returns on investment that most public programmes would envy, and the model has spread across Canada and to Australia.
The nations have also legislated on their own account. In 2012 the Coastal First Nations declared a ban on trophy hunting of bears in their territories under their own law, years before the province followed; and they have used their authority to refuse projects, most consequentially in the sustained opposition that contributed to the cancellation of the Northern Gateway oil pipeline, which would have brought tankers through these channels.
None of this resolves the larger question. Canada’s relationship with Indigenous peoples includes the residential school system, which operated for over a century, removed generations of children from their families, and whose full accounting — the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s report in 2015, and the searches of former school grounds since 2021 — is ongoing and unfinished. The Great Bear is one place where a different arrangement was actually built. It is not evidence that the rest has been.
The art that was banned
Anyone arriving on this coast encounters the visual tradition before anything else — the poles, the bentwood boxes, the formline design with its ovoids and U-forms that is one of the most rigorous graphic systems any culture has developed.
It nearly ended by law. Canada’s potlatch ban, in force from 1885 to 1951, prohibited the ceremonial feast that was the central institution of Northwest Coast societies — the occasion at which names were conferred, rights were witnessed, wealth was distributed and social order was maintained. It was banned precisely because officials understood it to be the mechanism holding those societies together.
Enforcement peaked with the 1921 Dan Cranmer potlatch at Village Island, after which participants were prosecuted and regalia — masks, coppers, headdresses — was confiscated and dispersed to museums and private collections. Repatriation of those pieces began in the 1970s and is still under way; the U’mista Cultural Centre at Alert Bay was built specifically to house returned items and is one of the most affecting museums in Canada.
The tradition survived underground and revived publicly from the mid-century, with carvers including Mungo Martin, Bill Reid and Robert Davidson bringing it back into full practice. Poles are being raised again, canoes carved and paddled, and the language work — Kwak̓wala, Haíɫzaqvḷa, Sm̓algya̱x and others — is running against the clock of the last fluent elders.
The Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver and U’mista at Alert Bay are the two places to see it before going north. Both are worth a full day, and both will change how the forest looks afterwards.
Going, and how
There is no road. Access is by ferry along the Inside Passage from Port Hardy to Bella Bella or Prince Rupert, by floatplane, or by boat, and the lodges — several of them First Nations owned, including Spirit Bear Lodge at Klemtu — book out far in advance for the autumn bear season.
That season is when the salmon run, roughly September and October, which is also when the coast is at its wettest. You will be rained on. The viewing is done from platforms and small boats with Guardians or community guides, under protocols that keep distance and rotate pressure between rivers.
The rest of the year the coast offers humpbacks and orcas, sea otters recovering from near-extermination by the fur trade, and the largest concentration of grizzly bears on the BC coast in the Khutzeymateen sanctuary further north — the first area in Canada protected specifically for grizzlies, co-managed with the Tsimshian.
It is expensive, it is weather-dependent, and it involves considerably more travel than the photographs suggest. It is also one of the few places left where an intact temperate rainforest ecosystem is being run by the people whose territory it is, and that is worth the ferry.
Erik writes about coasts, cold water and the communities that work them — from Lofoten cod seasons to Pacific whale camps. He owns more wool than furniture.