War of the Woods

Forests define the Pacific Coast in many ways. Culturally they are part of the traditions of the First Nations; economically they have sustained an industry that has created settlements and wealth throughout the area. In the last twenty years, the forests have become the subject of increasing conflict, as economic interests clash with changing social and political values. The war in the woods has escalated, hardening battle lines and polarizing forest politics. In this thoughtful collection of essays edited by Debra J. Salazar and Donald K. Alper, forest policy in the U.S. Pacific Northwest and British Columbia is examined in a binational context. While US and Canadian forest policy and forest management approaches differ, the two countries face similar challenges and conflicts. Contributors discuss the evolution of forest exploitation, the response of timber companies to U.S. federal environmental regulations, sovereignty for First Nations communities, and the reshaping of the political economy of forests by global forces on both sides of the border. Groups usually ignored in the forest policy debate — such as First Nations peoples, workers in the emerging non-forest economy, and citizen activists –are also given voice in this fascinating compilation.

The contributors to Sustaining the Forests of the Pacific Coast offer new perspectives that recognize the complexity of the issues and the diversity of interests in forest politics. A valuable contribution to the ongoing debate over forest policy on both sides of the Canada/U.S. border, these essays analyze the challenges facing forest policy makers and open the discussion up to those whose voices have not been heard before.

Did MacMillan Bloedel really end the “war in the woods?” After years of intense battling, Greenpeace brought out the champagne for MB’s June 1998 announcement of a new direction in forestry. In January 1999, Tomorrow Magazine, a global environmental business publication produced in Sweden, named MB “Company of the Year.” MacMillan Bloedel Vice President Linda Coady, a key player in the company’s remarkable turnaround, says that behind the scenes, the conflict continues. And surprisingly, she says it’s appropriate and even beneficial to sustain debate over BC’s forests – although on a different plane, where competition and cooperation are seen as two sides of the same coin, and where ideological polarization is replaced by the kind of relationships that can deal with complexity.

This article reports and takes up Aboriginal perspectives on co-management that highlight the intrinsic linkages between the environmental and socio-political dimensions of natural resources. In doing so, it explores the capacity of co-management to address Aboriginal claims for self-determination and increased control over traditional territories within liberal-democratic state systems. Analysis of the Interim Measures Agreement between the Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations and British Columbia demonstrates how co-management involving Aboriginal peoples in a negotiated framework of substantive power-sharing provides a venue for augmented levels of confidence in indigenous-state decision-making processes. Additionally, it advances Aboriginal participants’ rights claims against the state. Negotiating such “empowered” co-management represents a positive shift in relations between indigenous peoples and governments within settler states in the absence of constitutional change.

Network and regime approaches to policy studies are both organized around the idea of a policy-specific subsystem. The problem with this sectoral focus is that it overlooks a potentially important source of policy: the intersection of one sector with another. This article analyses one example of policy change through sector intersection: the case of Clayoquot Sound on the western side of Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Prior to the late 1980s B.C. forest policy was conducted through a traditional regime emphasizing the mutually compatible interests of industry and government. Aboriginal policy, such as it was, was made in a relatively distinct policy regime. As a result of a critical combination of conditions in the early 1990s, these two policy regimes intersected, producing dramatic policy changes. This article analyses the separate regimes for forest and aboriginal policy in British Columbia and how the two regimes have been transformed in recent years and become increasingly entangled. The focus is then turned to Clayoquot Sound, a Crucible of change, where these developments have been taken to their greatest extreme. The article concludes by examining the implications of these developments beyond Clayoquot Sound and for theories of public policy.

Twenty-odd years after activists set up a peace camp blocking a logging road into an extensive area of temperate rainforest in Clayoquot Sound, that summer of protest still holds a prominent place in Canadian environmental discourse. Yet although the camp was said to be based on feminist or eco/feminist principles, insufficient attention has been paid to its impact on feminism and the debates that were raging at that time. Moore sets out to remedy this through a careful, qualitative study of the peace camp. She demonstrates that the sheer vitality of eco/feminist politics at the camp confounded dominant narratives of contemporary feminism and re-imagined eco/feminist politics for new times.

This document presents findings and recommendations of the Scientific Panel for Sustainable Forest Practices in Clayoquot Sound based on its review of forest practices standards in effect in Clayoquot Sound as of September 30, 1994. Panel findings note the extent to which current standards for forest planning and information collection, physical processes of timber extraction, and provisions for incorporating scenic, recreational, and tourism values meet precepts for sustainable ecosystem management. Ecosystem management must acknowledge the physical structures, processes, and biological constituents of the ecosystem. This document describes those features for the Clayoquot Sound region and makes recommendations appropriate to their nature. Panel recommendations seek to create forest practices standards for Clayoquot Sound that are the best in the world.

Examines the different clusters of frames, the forest harvest and forest conservation which surround the debate over forest practices in Clayoquot Sound, British Columbia. Components of framing process; Two competing methods of conceptualizing forests; Relation between the frames and their adherents’ organizational structure and strategies; Casualties between environmentalists and logging companies.

In 1993 over 850 people were arrested for engaging in civil disobedience to prevent the clear-cut logging of pristine ancient temperate rainforests in Clayoquot Sound, Canada. This was the largest incident of this type in Canadian history, and has arguably been Canada’s most visible mobilization over a specific environmental issue. This study examines the factors that explain the ongoing participation of individuals in the environmental movement (more broadly, beyond participation in civil disobedience) to protect Clayoquot Sound during the period following the 1993 protest. We focus on the roles of interpersonal social networks and movement identification, and compare their statistical effects with the effects of values and attitudes on the level of participation of individuals in the movement. We compare survey data from members of Friends of Clayoquot Sound (FOCS), a key environmental organization in this protest, with data collected from several surveys of the general public, and also from members of a local countermovement group (a proforest industry group that mobilized against the environmental movement). Although values and attitudes statistically differentiate members of FOCS from the other groups, these variables do not statistically explain ongoing differential participation in the movement amongst FOCS members. Rather, individual level of participation in this environmental movement is best explained by ego-network centrality (the pattern of ties each respondent has to contacts in the movement), as measured by the number of ties FOCS members have to others in a range of environmental organizations, and by their level of identification with the movement. Implications of this research for more recent mobilizations, such as against oil pipelines, are discussed, as are avenues for future research.

The politics of conflict between environmental activists and provincial government and industry management of forests and wilderness areas is described for 1965-96. It is suggested that in spite of the efforts of the environmental conservation movement and while British Columbia is sparsely populated, well resourced and economically prosperous compared with many parts of the world, and well able to afford to conserve its natural resources, the rate of utilization of old growth forests remains unsustainable.

The case examines the difficult strategic decision before MacMillan Bloedel, the largest forest company in British Columbia at the time. The company had been battered by economic downturns in key markets, long-standing protests and criticism from environmentalists for its logging methods of old-growth forests, accidents and safety problems in its operations, and loss of confidence by its investors. With the prospect of losing key European customers to its increasingly tarnished image, the company goes about examining its options to get out of this quagmire and regain respect and profitability in the marketplace. The CEO strikes a high-level, internal task force and grants this ‘Forest Project’ 90 days to comprehensively review all options. Now the often conflicting recommendations are in. Should MacMillan Bloedel opt for major, but risky, innovations? Or should it stay with the perhaps equally risky status quo?

This study examines unfolding organizational learning processes at MacMillan Bloedel, a company which, after years of resisting stakeholder pressures for change, disengaged from the field’s dominant paradigm and developed a new solution. We elaborate the Crossan, Lane and White multi-level framework of organizational learning processes, finding support for the four feedforward learning processes they identified (intuiting, interpreting, integrating and institutionalizing), and adding two action-based learning processes: ‘attending’ and ‘experimenting’. We introduce the concept of a ‘legitimacy trap’ to describe an organization’s over-reliance on institutionalized knowledge when external challenges arise. The trapped organization rejects external challenges of its legitimacy when it perceives the sources of those challenges to be illegitimate. Feed forward learning is blocked as the organization escalates its commitment to its institutionalized interpretations and actions. Taking a grounded theory approach, we discuss how individuals attend to new stimuli and engage in intuiting about them, how groups interpret, experiment with and integrate new solutions, and how the firm validates and institutionalizes the successful solution. Facilitators and impediments of each of these learning processes are identified. Our additions to the model recognize the importance of context in organizational learning processes, and suggest how power may impact organizational learning.