The Haida fought logging in Canada. Now they control its future

By Jack Graham
Context – Thomson Reuters Foundation
September 18, 2024
Category: Forestry
Region: Canada, Canada West

Guardians of ancient Canadian cedars are divided over the future of logging on their windswept island outpost. On a string of wild and rocky islands off northwestern Canada, the Haida people revere the cedars that tower overhead as a nurturing older sister. For millennia, the trees have given the Indigenous Haida timber to build beamed longhouses, blankets to weather winter, canoes to wend the waterways and shoes to shod their feet. In the archipelago’s rare, temperate rainforests – some of which are thought to pre-date the last ice age – mammoth red cedars dapple the damp undergrowth far below, land that is rich with huckleberry and ferns and carpeted in luminous moss. But since the logging industry took hold a century ago, little of this pristine landscape is left. …Armed with new powers over the forests, the Haida Nation has a dilemma of its own: to log or not to log.

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