I am fed up. I don’t make much money, I have two young kids and I just felt obliged for Mother Nature to spend nearly $500 to support the Fairy Creek blockades with supplies, food, and a donation. I just drove up with my family to deliver these supplies and I was happy to see an awesome presence of brave forest protectors standing up to governments and corporations that are intent on destroying our planet with brute force and lots of taxpayer dollars. We witnessed so many police helicopters and drones flying overhead that it did at times feel like we were in a war zone.
Let this sink in: The Fairy Creek old-growth logging blockades are now the largest act of Canadian civil disobedience ever. In the October 2020 provincial election, the B.C. government promised to protect the most at-risk old-growth forests and initiate a paradigm shift that puts eco-system health as the overarching priority in forestry decisions. Now in September 2021, old-growth logging in B.C. has increased by 43 per cent and new permits continue to be issued in large tree old-growth forests, where peer-reviewed science shows us less than three per cent of these iconic forests remain in B.C.
The B.C. government clearly does not intend to protect our natural amazing forests. We must now seriously question if we are living in a democratic and free society when the government does not fulfill its election promises and dismisses the nearly 1,000 people who have been arrested for holding the government to account on the promises they made.
The saddest part is that the B.C. government is carrying out this assault on nature because they say it is reconciliation to help indigenous populations. How can we really fall for this, especially when the government holds highly unfair and colonial-style revenue-sharing agreements with different First Nations across B.C.
In the words of Bob Marley, “You can fool some people sometimes but you can’t fool all the people all the time. So now we see the light, we gonna stand up for our rights!”
Dave Cuddy
Metchosin
