In the Valleys of the Noble Bey - John Zada Page 0,4

inlet with sights set on the distant shore, a firm resolve takes hold of me.

I start making plans for my return.

2

THE STRANGEST THING

It’s like you walking down a back alley and bumping into a Frankenstein monster. Everybody knows there’s no such thing, but you’ve just seen him.

—Bigfoot eyewitness in John Green’s

Sasquatch: The Apes Among Us

Several months after my adventure with Clark, I’m back in the bosom of the West, speeding in a rental car along the tree-lined shores of Vancouver Island. I’m heading for the town of Port Hardy—an air and sea hub linking to the remote wilderness communities and logging camps strung along British Columbia’s rugged coast. Tucked into my passport, on the seat beside me, is a plane ticket to Bella Bella, where I will kick off a maritime journey taking me through towns and villages with roots going as far back as the celebrated civilizations of antiquity.

The Great Bear Rainforest occupies the upper two-thirds of British Columbia’s long, sprawling coast. It is a region tangled with inlets, passes, and islands that add up to some thirty thousand miles of shoreline—a length greater than the circumference of the earth. Nodes of human habitation are few and far between. I’m taking the summer and early fall to visit as much of the area as I can without the benefit of my own boat. The general plan is to begin my trip in island-bound Bella Bella on the “outside coast” and hopscotch my way between communities to Bella Coola on the mainland, where I ended my previous trip. Floatplanes, ferryboats, and whatever other flotation devices I can hire or commandeer will serve as transport in a place whose fundamental characteristic is its mind-boggling profusion of trees and water.

As I drive along the edges of forest on Vancouver Island, I get a taste of the coastal wilderness I’ll fully experience in the Great Bear. But pull back these tree-lined facades, and you’ll be faced with the shocking reality of the island today: a preponderance of clear-cuts. Vancouver Island’s productive old-growth wilderness has been logged to the brink of extinction. Ugly bare patches cover huge swaths of the island. The Great Bear Rainforest, though having suffered some deforestation, has remained comparatively inviolate. The uniformity of its intact areas, seen from the air, is as astonishing a sight as the rapacious clear-cutting on Vancouver Island.

In the early 1990s, plans by lumber companies in British Columbia to ramp up their operations on the central and north coast triggered a response from environmentalists tantamount to a small crusade. A group of battle-hardened activists, emboldened by fresh victories against logging companies on Vancouver Island, drew up new battle lines. To galvanize global support for their fight, they coined an emotive epithet for the little-known stretch of coastline they were trying to protect: the Great Bear Rainforest. For years this mostly blank area on maps had been known as the “Mid and North Coast Timber Supply Area”—phrasing that reflected the view by outsiders that the area was just an economic commodity. The new name, inspired by the region’s high population of grizzlies, evoked a kind of mythos. And it gave activists an edge.

Years of battles ensued, culminating in a deal in 2006. Environmentalists, industry, government, and First Nations signed an agreement that, in actuality, protected one-fifth of the ecologically fragile Great Bear forest. A subsequent agreement a decade later that made headlines around the world shored up that accord. The 2016 Great Bear Rainforest agreement provided various levels of protection across 85 percent of the region. That deal, which still allows for tourism, old-growth logging, and other industrial activities, was celebrated in the media as a grand compromise: a framework for sustainable development and a model for the resolution of other land-use conflicts.* However, the two agreements did nothing to address an issue whose stakes, residents assert, dwarf those tied to logging.

Since around the time of the first Great Bear agreement, plans have been set in motion by Canadian fossil-fuel companies to build a number of pipelines and seaport terminals on the north coast. There, liquefied natural gas (LNG), extracted by fracking, and diluted bitumen—a thick, watered-down crude mined in the infamous tar sands of Alberta—would be loaded onto supertankers for the long journey across the Pacific to energy-hungry markets in East Asia. For coastal residents, pipelines and tankers are a peril, the ultimate threat. The fear is that any of those ships, transiting the rough, narrow channels of the Great Bear region and the notoriously tumultuous