Grandmother Cedar

[Photo of Ken Wu, Ancient Rainforest Alliance,

standing beside a thousand year old cedar stump in Avatar Grove,

near Port Renfrew, Vancouver Island, a few hours from me.

Photo by T.J. Watt, as published in the Victoria Times Colonist March 4, 2011.]

Grandmother Cedar,

instead of cutting you

to be pulped into toilet paper,

for wiping the

disconnected assholes

of the world,

we should be

worshipping

you.

My apologies to anyone who is offended by my bluntness. But I am offended - and outraged - that our government STILL allows the multinationals to clearcut these last remaining rapidly-vanishing thousand-year-old giants.

Jack Knox, a columnist at the Victoria Times Colonist, published this photo yesterday, with his column about a Mideast-based news network which recently featured a story on our logging "practices" (or the utter lack of them). Local environmentalists are excited that some 220 million homes around the world will hear about the clearcutting. Raised awareness might hopefully help turn the tide, and return  some sanity  to both legislators and logging companies, before they desertify the entire planet and turn us into bacon crisps.

"International audiences will be astounded to see that British Columbia still has 1,000-year-old trees with tree trunks as wide as living rooms and that tower as tall as downtown skyscrapers - and horrified to know that our government still sanctions cutting them down on a large scale," said Ken Wu, executive director of the Victoria-based Ancient Forest Alliance, which is campaigning to end old-growth logging in areas where such trees are scarce.


"Wu and Metchosin's T.J. Watt guided the Toronto-based Al Jazeera crew around the Port Renfrew area, taking in clearcuts and the stand of massive trees they have dubbed Avatar Grove." (Victoria Times Colonist, March 4, 2011, by Jack Knox)

Will human beings of the future still be able to see thousand-year-old cedars? Or even hundred-year-old trees? 

Tune in next century.