Commerce, Conservation Battle for the Pristine Charlotte Isles

Bald eagles perch like sentinels on tall, gray snags to survey a domain of rain-drenched forests and tidal inlets.

North America’s largest black bears and delicate Sitka deer wander through the tomb-like woods below on a lush green carpet of rare mosses and liverworts.

Shaped like a pointed finger in the Pacific just south of the Alaskan Panhandle, Canada’s Queen Charlotte Islands in British Columbia boast an ecosystem so unusual that scientists compare their importance to the Galapagos Islands off Ecuador, where an astounded Charles Darwin discovered unknown species in the 1850s.

A 12-year campaign to have the lower part of the islands, known as South Moresby, declared a Canadian national park reserve finally succeeded in July when terms were agreed between the federal government and the province of British Columbia.

But in a classic confrontation between conservation and commerce, the decision to create a 346,000-acre wilderness park has embittered many islanders, especially a logging industry active here since the turn of the century.

100 Jobs Threatened, Loggers Say

Loggers say that turning South Moresby into a park could cost the province $30 million annually in lumber production and eliminate 100 jobs.

Guests at the Sandspit Inn, next to the islands’ airport, are greeted by a circular that declares: “This land is for all the people.”

The native people include 1,500 Haida Indians, who in a bid for native rights support the park as a vehicle for pressing a land claim to an archipelago inhabited by their ancestors for 7,000 years.

English Capt. George Dixon named the mountainous islands after his ship, the Queen Charlotte, during a visit in 1787. But the Indians, whose ranks were decimated by European-introduced smallpox and measles, refer to them as Haida Gwaii, or homeland.

“We were never vanquished and never signed any treaties,” said Haida elder Tom Green. “It’s all sacred land to us.”

On Anthony Island, at the southern tip of the proposed 75-mile-long reserve, a collection of Haida totem poles at Ninstints Village was declared by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization a World Heritage Cultural Site in 1981, the only one in North America.

To dramatize their desire to manage the islands, Haida braves paddled home last summer from Vancouver in a 50-foot oceangoing canoe carved in the traditional way from a single cedar log.

“What’s at stake is our survival as a nation, and we can’t survive in a land of stumps,” Haida President Miles Richardson said.

He says the Indians don’t oppose logging in principle--the Haida have been loggers for decades--but they seek economic controls, including regulation of offshore waters, where oil exploration is contemplated. As for wildlife, Richardson said, “I don’t even know where the Galapagos are.”

Environmentalists fought for the national park as a place where centuries-old stands of red and yellow cedar, spruce and hemlock could remain untouched.

They say that evolution, and a possible reprieve from the last Ice Age, gave the islands dozens of unique forms of plant and animal life. Those include the dusky shrew, the yellow-bellied pine marten, the hairy woodpecker and different kinds of stickleback fish in nearly every lake.

“We want to save it with the same resolve and enthusiasm as the Egyptians have saved their pyramids and the Indians have saved the Taj Mahal,” federal Environment Minister Tom McMillan said.

Loggers dispute both the exotic claims and the potential for tourism on a group of 150 islands 60 miles from the mainland, which are buffeted by gales and deluged with rain 200 days a year.

Harvey Hurd, manager of Western Forest Products Ltd., says that depicting South Moresby as a virgin habitat teeming with wildlife and endangered by the harvesting of lumber is “all a myth.”

He said that lumbermen working in the woods year after year see no difference between the Queen Charlottes and any other forested region of the British Columbia coast. Most of the few roads on the islands were built by loggers.

“We don’t log the eagles,” Hurd said.

Hurd argues that the islands’ fragile economy would collapse without a forest industry to support most of its 6,000 people. Regular ferry service to the mainland only began in 1980.

“There is a place in our society, in our world, for saving special things, special places and truly unique plants or wildlife,” Hurd told a wilderness panel that studied the problem. “But it has to coexist with what puts bread on the table.”

In normal operations, logs are loaded onto barges headed for Vancouver, and the slopes are replanted in a 70-year growth cycle.

Missing the Point

But paleobotanist Rolf Mathewes of Vancouver’s Simon Fraser University said the loggers are missing the point by citing their good record in maintaining second-growth forests.

“You get a forest that looks green, but it’s a very different environment than a 1,000-year-old forest with its unique infrastructure,” Mathewes said at the start of a summer fossil hunt to reinforce his theory that parts of the Queen Charlottes escaped the last Ice Age.

He believes that glaciers receded entirely from the islands about 16,000 years ago, while the mainland remained frozen another 4,000 years. That could possibly explain the unique Alpine plants and other wildlife encountered.

Lyell Island off the southeast coast is at the heart of the dispute, because its Windy Bay is said to contain the highest amount of biological matter per cubic yard in the world. Its naturally warm pools attract bathers to nearby Hotspring Island.

Adventuresome vacationers visit in kayaks and cabin cruisers.

Two years ago, 72 Haida were arrested for blockading a logging road on Lyell, and the publicity led to a moratorium on new cutting in the area.

At Lyell logging camp, the baseball field is overgrown and many of the prefabricated year-round homes are empty, as a discouraged work force has dwindled from 75 to 30.

“Around here the only thing becoming endangered is loggers,” said manager John McLaughlin, who has worked on Lyell since 1960.

Loggers earning $16 an hour talked of moving their families back to the mainland and an uncertain future. “There’s a lot of anger here,” said Bob Prudhomme, 31, father of two.

He dismissed the federal government’s suggestion that loggers might find jobs in a new tourist industry, capable of producing revenues of $7.5 million a year.

“The good weather only lasts about two weeks, and the hurricane season goes from September to May,” Prudhomme said. “Who’s going to come here?”

Hurd criticized a group of American expatriates--he calls them “Vietnam draft-dodgers”--who arrived in the Queen Charlottes in the early 1970s and organized an Islands Protection Committee.

Mulroney’s Support

That grew into a nationwide Save South Moresby movement, backed by the nation’s Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, who called the islands “a priceless national treasure.”

“It looks like after 12 long years we’ve finally won,” said one of the Americans, John Broadhead.

Because lumber is the prime resource of British Columbia, providing 20% of all jobs and nearly half of the manufacturing output, provincial Premier William Vander Zalm at first opposed the federal plan, saying “we need the jobs” in South Moresby. But the disputed area represents just a 10th of 1% of British Columbia’s logging.

He proposed a smaller provincial park in which cutting would continue on a reduced scale.

Later, he agreed to negotiate when Mulroney’s government offered $80 million to develop the reserve and compensate logging companies--the most ever spent on a national park.

While the jagged west coast of the islands is inaccessible, many slopes elsewhere--including parts of Lyell--have been cut clean by loggers and have a moonscape appearance. Using grappling hooks with giant claws to lift 30-foot logs, the logging teams leave behind stumps and decayed wood, which spoil the view for a decade until a new green mantle appears.

Ironically, the new shoots--especially cedar--provide browsing deer with food, and their numbers are multiplying rapidly.

The islands remain home to North America’s most dense concentration of bald eagles, a population estimated at several hundred. There are 500,000 sea birds nesting there, and the coast is a playground for sea lions, seals, whales and porpoises.

“There is no place like it anywhere in Canada,” author Cameron Young said. “Soon there will be no place like it at all.”