Last week, the Wildwood Ecoforest, located in Yellow Point just north of Ladysmith, got considerably closer to its original size. A successful campaign to raise $850,000 has allowed the Ecoforestry Institute Society (EIS) to purchase 8.5 hectares of land and reunite it with the famed demonstration ecoforest. The Wildwood Ecoforest, established by Merv Wilkinson in the 1940s, has long served as an educational counterexample to modern logging practices. Ecoforestry is a type of sustainable forestry where trees are selectively harvested in such a way that the forest’s ecological integrity is kept intact. The parcel being added to the forest features meadows, a stone escarpment and a section of rare old-growth coastal Douglas fir. It has been “kept untouched” by the previous owners of the parcel, according to the Ecoforestry Institute Society’s chair Kathy Code.