David Egan Philosophy

The names “Clayoquot” and “Carmanah” have deep resonance in British Columbia lore. These areas of Vancouver Island are home to some of the last remaining old growth coastal rainforest. The second of the three photos above is of the Cheewhat Giant, not far from Carmanah Valley, and the largest tree in Canada. But the names of Clayoquot Sound and Carmanah Valley have particular resonance because they were sites of major environmental protest in the 1980s and 1990s. Visiting these areas provided an occasion to reflect on nature, colonialism, and what it means to call a place home.

Vancouver is a city of steel-and-glass skyscrapers, a booming tech industry, and a metro area population approaching 3 million but it’s not that far removed from being a resource town. Vancouver dates its founding to 1886, a year after the Canadian Pacific Railway completed Canada’s first transcontinental railroad. Vancouver grew into a city by serving as an entrepôt from which the rich natural resources of the Pacific coast could be shipped to the cities of the east.

European traders first started travelling this coast in the late eighteenth century to hunt and trade for the pelts of sea otters, which have the thickest fur of any mammal. The free-for-all caused sea otter populations to collapse with a range of knock-on ecological consequences. Sea otters eat sea urchins and sea urchins eat the holdfasts of kelp. Kelp forests, like coral reefs, are areas of abundant biodiversity, providing nourishment and protection for a wide range of species. Without sea otters keeping the sea urchin population in check, the Pacific kelp forests were decimated, along with the many other creatures that made it their home.

With the collapse of the sea otter population, attention turned to the forests. The Royal Navy was the largest in the world, and the linchpin that held Britain’s global empire together. Until the late nineteenth century, ships were made of wood and carried sails on tall masts. Those masts required tall trees and Europe had been largely deforested.

It’s worth pausing to emphasize that British Columbia is very big. At nearly a million square kilometres, it’s twice the size of California and four and a half times the size of Great Britain. Almost all of it is covered in boreal forest and the coastal regions are home to some of the biggest trees in the world. The supply of lumber must have seemed inexhaustible.

And yet, with increasing efficiency, it was exhausted. By some accounts, more than 97% of the biggest coastal forests have been logged. The protesters in the Clayoquot Sound and Carmanah Valley were fighting to protect the last vestiges of one of the most remarkable ecosystems on the planet. The success of those protests was part of a historic shift in provincial politics as the power of the logging companies started to wane.

I spent a week in rural New England in early June and I was struck by the contrast with British Columbia. I could see why settlers had imagined themselves as founding a “new” England. The geography is a bit wilder and the weather more extreme, but you have the same rolling hills, the same lush verdure, the same feeling of damp abundance.

And the same place names. I was in Hampshire County, adjacent to Berkshire County, and had arrived there on a drive from the city of Worcester. Towns with names like Northampton, Chesterfield, and Windsor were all nearby. It felt like the colonists had decided to bring Old England with them when they crossed the ocean to found the New one.

This pronounced Englishness emphasized the settler aspect of settler colonialism. Europeans had moved to this land to settle down. I stopped for lunch in a small town with a population of a few thousand. Along its tidy main street I saw a library, a bookstore, and a theatre. The cultural hub of a town in British Columbia of equivalent size would be a diner if you’re lucky, a gas station if you’re not.

The contrast was revealing in a couple of ways. The colonial project has much shallower roots in British Columbia than in New England. Until fairly recently, the province was essentially a company town for the lumber industry. People, for the most part, didn’t move out west to settle down. They moved out to make a quick buck. For most of its history, the economy of British Columbia essentially involved stripping the bounty of the land and sea and shipping it to other parts of the world.

I feel that legacy in the province to this day. The landscape is scarred by clearcuts and the oceans bear wounds that are less visible but no less devastating. We have hardly any noteworthy architecture in Vancouver and the densest concentration of culture is in the yogurt section of the supermarket. Very little here gives the impression of having been built with future generations in mind.

With one notable exception. The indigenous nations that have been living on this coast for thousands of years clearly had come to stay and cultivated a deep intergenerational connection to the land. The formline art of the northwest coast nations is, to my mind, one of humankind’s great artistic traditions. Their house poles and memorial poles not only bear witness to a deep relationship with the coastal forests but also renew and testify to a clan’s or family’s relationship with its past.

This isn’t the point in the essay where I get sentimental about the vanished past of a noble race. Indigenous nations have been pummeled by disease, suppression of their languages and cultures, and forced assimilation, but they’re still here, and the past decades have seen a cultural renaissance. It would take considerable effort not to notice the indigenous presence here, from the faces on the streets to the place names (Clayoquot, Carmanah, and Chilcotin aren’t the names of English towns) to large construction projects currently underway in Vancouver under indigenous leadership.

By contrast, in New England it takes considerable effort to call to mind that people lived on this land long before the colonial project began. The very landscape has been transformed to resemble the English countryside, minus the hedgerows. The land has the feel of a settled culture that’s made a multi-generational investment in calling the place home. But precisely because the settler culture is more settled in New England, its pre-colonial history is less visible.

Getting to the Carmanah and Walbran valleys requires hours of driving along rough, unpaved roads. These roads were laid out by logging companies and they cut across Vancouver Island like a network of blood vessels: main arteries split off into smaller service roads and ultimately bumpy single-track capillaries that extend to nearly every corner of the island. I haven’t checked but probably very few trees outside of protected parkland are more than a kilometre from a road built to carry them off. A logging truck can carry up to 40 cubic metres in a single load—enough to build a single-family home.

I can only reach the old growth forests because logging companies have laid down roads that give me access to them. Those roads only exist because the logging companies profit from cutting down the trees I’ve come to see. Driving these roads to get to the old growth forests feels like travelling along a military supply line in order to reach the front. Large swaths of the island interior are grassy hillsides pockmarked with stumps.

I take no joy in the clearcuts I pass on the way to the ancient forests. But there’s something to be said for how visible the depredations of the land are. Unlike in New England, you can’t not see the costs of the colonial project here. That history is too raw and recent. The past isn’t dead here, as William Faulkner said of the American South: it’s not even past. And if that past is present—the Walbran Valley that I visited is on unprotected land where an uneasy truce between loggers and environmentalists has put a stay on further logging until 2028—that confronts those of us in the present with questions of how we will inherit that history, and what responsibility we will take for it.

Home isn’t just a place but also a time. As I prepare to leave British Columbia once more, I’m keenly aware of how much I love the seas, forests, and mountains that I grew up around. But this land that I love, and the access I have to it, is very much indexed to the particular historical moment in which I find myself. Home-as-a-place is a location you inhabit. But home-as-a-time is a forum in which you take action and in which your actions take on meaning. 

1. The body makes about 2 million blood cells every second. (source)
2. The Earth is at its greatest distance from the sun (its aphelion) in July and closest to the sun (its perihelion) in January. Because the orbital path of the Earth around the sun isn’t very eccentric (it’s slightly elliptical but very close to being a circle), this doesn’t make a big difference. But it does mean that summers in the southern hemisphere are a little hotter than in the northern hemisphere, and winters a little colder. (source)
3. From the 1930s onward, T. S. Eliot devoted most of his literary efforts to writing verse drama. In the end, he won three Tony Awards: one in 1950 for The Cocktail Party and two posthumous Tony Awards in 1983—because his light verse had been adapted into the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Cats. (two sources)
4. A pair of rats can produce up to 15,000 descendants in a single year. (source)
5. There were more hospital beds and doctors per person for prisoners in the Soviet Gulag than for regular Soviet citizens. Granted, 40% of the doctors in the Gulag were themselves also prisoners. (source)
6. The reticular activating system (RAS) in the brainstem is involved in awakening a person from sleep. The RAS receives input from eyes, ears, and receptors for pain, touch, and pressure, but not from the sense of smell. In other words, you can be woken by a loud noise or someone shaking you but not by a strong smell. That’s why people in house fires where there’s no smoke alarm can die of smoke inhalation without even waking up. (source)
7. The range of colours in hummingbird plumage exceeds the diversity of colours found in all other bird species combined. (source)
8. In 2024, the world will install nearly twice as much solar power capacity every day as was installed in all of 2004. (source)