CANADA: Ending a decade-long environmental battle once dubbed the "War of the Woods", British Columbia yesterday announced the creation of a 4.4-million-acre park, twice the size of Yellowstone, along a vast coastal swathe where grizzly bears and wolves now prowl under thousand-year-old cedar trees.
Strict new controls will protect against exploitation of an additional 10 million acres. The entire territory, called the Great Bear Rainforest, is the result of an unusual alliance of loggers, environmentalists, native groups and the provincial government.
"This is aimed at trying to find a balance, where people can understand and really enjoy our wilderness and we protect our wildlife, while recognising that people are part of the ecosystem," Gordon Campbell, premier of British Columbia, said. "We all win. I think this model will be emulated in different parts of the world."
The agreement ends a bitter dispute over the lush coastland and islands that stretch across more than 250 miles and include most of British Columbia's central and north coast, from the northern coast of Vancouver Island to the Alaskan border.
Warmed by the ocean and fed by rain, this area of evergreen forest is the ancestral home of nearly a dozen native tribes, and most of it is accessible only by boat or seaplane.
Salmon return to spawn in rivers and streams, providing food for eagles and bears that include grizzlies, black bears and a rare white bear called the Kermode. About 30,000 people are scattered in small towns or reserves in the area, more than half of them natives.
The land was already owned by the provincial government and was intended for logging. For years environmental groups fought to stop the clear-cutting practices that they say ravaged Vancouver Island and the southern portion of the British Columbia coast.
In the late 1990s they pressed big companies to boycott wood and paper made from the forest, a tactic that led to a truce and the start of negotiations.
"They were very successful in influencing the customers," Patrick Armstrong, a negotiator for the forest product industry, said.
More than five years later the talks that started out as highly contentious have resulted in compromise on all sides, according to Merran Smith, a Vancouver representative of the environmentalist group ForestEthics, who has been involved in the controversy since the start.
Outside the park 10 million acres will be managed by committees that will set limits on logging, mining and the commercial efforts of native groups who still have claims to land. Negotiators expect additional agreements will bring the total protected area to 21 million acres.
The native groups, called First Nations in Canada, have agreed to forest-friendly development such as eco-tourism, with the help of a planned $105 million fund.
Logging and all other economic activity will be allowed only if experts determine that the resource is sustainable, officials say.