TALE OF A TREE
When one thinks of skyscraping icons of contemporary Canada, the Peace Tower or the CN Tower spring to mind, but these man-made structures face competition from a thousand-year-old Douglas fir on Vancouver Island called “Big Lonely Doug.”
At 20 storeys high, it is the second tallest fir tree in the country, but it has come to represent something more than its status as a statistical superlative. As Harley Rustad notes in his book, “Big Lonely Doug: The Story of One of Canada’s Last Great Trees,” the struggle to save our country’s ancient trees has sparked “an internal confrontation within many Canadians between what kind of country Canada had always been — rich through its resources — and what it was working to become: environmentally progressive.” And Big Lonely Doug has come to represent that struggle.
That line comes early in Rustad’s very timely narrative, and it refers to struggles back in the 1990s between the forest industry and environmental activists fighting to preserve old-growth forests in Vancouver Island’s Carmanah Valley and Clayoquot Sound. But those early “victories” were sadly pyrrhic, as a telling stat from B.C.’s Sierra Club makes clear. Oldgrowth stands cover less than 7 per cent of what originally stood. As the club observes, old trees are now “as rare as white rhinos.”
The drive to save B.C.’s old-growth forests has taken on renewed urgency as new science demonstrates their vital role in fighting climate change because they sequester more carbon than newer trees. “Replanted second-growth forests cannot match the ecological value of an unmanaged forest,” writes Rustad.
But the challenge in the early 2000s became how best to mobilize public opinion about the impending threat. And in “Big Lonely Doug,” Rustad introduces an intriguing cast of characters who accomplished just that. They run the gamut from an environmental activist named Ken Wu, to photographer TJ Watt, to logger Dennis Cronin, the guy who actually saved “Doug” from the axe. To execute their Herculean task, they employed an oldfashioned tool: PR.
For Wu, activists desperately needed a symbol to rally around and Cronin provided it the day he wrapped the green LEAVE TREE ribbon around the base of Big Doug so that the fallers would leave it be.
Why? Because of its enormity. As the logger subsequently recalled, “He stuck out like a sore thumb.” Less than a year later, all the other trees in clear-cut 7190 were gone except for “Big Doug.”
Flash forward to a cool day in February 2012 when photographer TJ Watt approached the devastated clear-cut and discovered something extraordinary. “The scene looked like the aftermath of a nuclear devastation,” writes Rustad, “but the centre was not a crater but a single tree.”
The activists had found the image that symbolized their cause: “Hope amid devastation, life enduring against the odds.” It may just do the trick. In October 2014, seven months after “Doug” was unveiled, the B.C. government’s safeguarding Big Tree Registry went online. Doug may be lonely no more.
Robert Collison is a Toronto writer and editor.