Dear Gordon Campbell politicians,

We fought you and defeated you over your scheme to plow a giant motorhome parking lot into Cathedral Grove. That's a fight that ended chief parking lot proponent Gillian Trumper's political career, and which indelibly stained the reputation of your government. We fought the grotesque forest-destroying 'Bear Mountain' development that you all facilitated. We put Bear Mountain on the map as the worst example of corrupt and destructive development in the province. We will take some credit for the current bankruptcy of that hideous CDF-destroying project, and for the imminent prosecution of its racist developer, your friend Len Barry.

Now, at Nanoose, we will fight you all again.

During the lengthy stint of your regime, none of you has done a damn thing to protect Canada's most endangered ecosystem, -the Coastal Douglas fir biogeoclimatic zone. Instead, you've facilitated voracious transnational logging giants like Weyerhaeuser, TimberWest and Island Timberlands to lay waste to virtually all of Vancouver Islands once magnificent primaeval fir forest. A succession of ecologically illiterate and ignorant politicians such as yourselves have overseen the destruction of a forest that once rivalled and even surpassed the stature of the California redwoods. It would have been so easy, and politically beneficial for you to do the right thing and protect the tiny DL33 patch of CDF forest, but instead you chose to serve your corporate masters.

The corporate media can now smell a fight and is now beginning to swarm around the DL33 issue. A key aspect of your media stenographers framing strategy is to repeat the bogus Gordon Campbell government claim that "...there is more than 250,000 hectares of the Coastal Douglas-fir ecosystem left in B.C., but only 9% is on Crown land..."

This suggests to the corporate media readership that the CDF eco-system, which comprises 20% of Vancouver Island, is in a stable, viable condition of health. This statement adds the even more preposterous implication that private interests had managed the CDF eco-system more conservatively than their public counterparts. If there was a quarter million hectare tract of primaeval CDF ecosystem left anywhere in BC, we'd certainly be fighting to protect that, regardless of whether it be on private or public land. The fact is that the CDF ecosystem has now been virtually destroyed on your watch.

The central issue for DL33 is that conventional industrial logging, whether private or public, has utterly ransacked and destroyed more than 97% of the primaeval CDF ecosystem. Tiny postage-stamp patches of CDF like DL 33 are therefore priceless, irreplaceable refugia-tuft habitat oases, which store the final wilderness processes and DNA of one of the worlds most magnificent, and now virtually extinct ecosystems.

It is despicable that the Gordon Campbell government is using DL 33 to drive a wedge between a conscientious community that has worked carefully though limited due process options to protect that final little tuft of what was once this earth's most magnificent and endangered ecological splendors, and the Snaw-Naw-As First Nation, whose ancestral stewardship lasted over 10,000 years and brought the CDF forests to their epitomal efflorescence.

The environmental community understands and respects First Nations suzerainty over the lands, we want the lands returned even, ~and we expect that with careful, respectful work, a mutually agreeable solution can be found which protects the forest, and which is much more beneficial to the Snaw-Naw-As Nation than the pathetic fare and controversy that the Campbell government is offering.

It is unconscionable that you have used your precious time in office to forward the interests of giant corporate interests instead of making a useful contribution to humanity and the Earth's most magnificent splendors. That you use your position in power to split and divide our communities. The people of British Columbia have rejected Gordon Campbell's corporate vision for BC. All the rest of you servile Campbellites should jump off his sinking ship, and do something useful for the planet, -something that you can be well remembered for by your grandchildren. Nobody ever goes down in history for their efforts to increase the profits of corporations.

Our fight has never been with the Snaw-Naw-As First Nation. Our fight is with you. We are ready to fight you, and beat you once again now, for DL 33

Sincerely,

Ingmar Lee

Friend of the CDF Forest

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