Letter to the Globe

 Dear Sir,

The world is burning up and here on Vancouver Island a significant proportion of our climate activists are obsessing about a relatively-insignificant valley in the hills above Port Renfrew whose chief attributes appear to be that it is close to Victoria, hasn't been logged, and has been given a beguiling name.
They want the organizations that own the timber rights to leave it to them.
That's not going to happen.
As an alternative, I give you the example of West Kootenay's Darkwoods, a larger, much more significant property bought and managed by the Nature Conservancy of Canada.
So here's my suggestion to the preservationists: negotiate a sale of the timber rights with the logging company and the bands on whose territorial claim this is, raise the money, and pass the management to one of the Conservancies. I'm confident the Province would not only agree but help, and judging from election talk, so would any future federal government.
The only losers in this scenario are, as usual, the loggers, who are experiencing the slow death, on Vancouver Island, of a foundational industry. 

published in the Globe, September 9, 2021