How a once-tranquil
B.C. isle became a green battleground
Stories by Greg Middleton
Staff Reporter
The Province Sunday, February
22, 1998
Environmentalists have opened a new front in the war in
the woods. "The goal is to force the government to bring in laws to
control logging on private land," said David Boyd, executive director
of the Sierra Legal Defence Fund, who is coordinating the battle.
Environmentalists fear many of the islands along B.C.'s
coast, where forest lands are in private hands, will be stripped of trees
because there are no rules governing logging privately owned land.
The main target is former Prince George logger Mike Jenks,
who is logging some of the most high profile real estate, including an
island used by the Queen and Prince Phillip as a retreat on visits to Canada.
The Sierra Legal Defence Fund, an offshoot of the U.S.-based
parks lobby group, has bought radio ads vilifying Jenks for "stripping"
the trees off the island and the government for allowing it.
Twin Islands-actually islands joined by a man-made causeway
-is 270 hectares (674 acres) at the north end of Georgia Strait overlooking
Desolation Sound.
"The Gulf Islands and the islands that dot the coast
all the way up Vancouver Island are the jewels in B.C.'s crown," said
Boyd. "And Twin Islands are the Crown jewels in that necklace."
The larger of the two islands- 190 hectares-is about the
size of Vancouver's West End. The smaller one is half that.
Jenks has already half logged the larger island. He's
been thumbing his nose at those opposed to his logging for the past year,
doing it in the environmentalists' back yard-on islands like Gabriola and
Denman where old hippies and New Age healers out-number loggers and fishermen.
To activists like Boyd and many residents of the islands
where Jenks is logging, he is evil incarnate.
"Mike Jenks is going to cut down all the trees,"
Boyd said. "I've seen his logging for myself. He has a bad reputation
for buying up big pieces of Beautiful B.C. and making it ugly.
Jenks says he has 60 people working for him on the coast
and in the interior in his logging operations .
The trees he cuts on the coast keep another 75 people
working at a Nanaimo veneer mill run by partner Barry Simpson.
The sheets of wood then go to Richmond, where another
350 people work at a plant turning them wood into high-strength laminated
beams.
"These trees mean hundreds of jobs," Jenks said.
But many of the 1,000 residents of Cortes Island, near
Twin Islands, are stunned by the speed with which he began logging. They
had no idea the island had been sold until the deal was done.
"We are still in shock," said painter and former
teacher Martha Abelson, who looks across at Twin Islands from her Cortes
Island property.
She's worked hard for a decade, often having to leave
the island to make money to support her quiet lifestyle on four hectares
of forested waterfront land.
They are still hoping to raise the money to buy the smaller,
80 hectare north island to keep Jenks from logging there.
Many islanders, including wood worker and sculptor Volker
Steigermann and his wife Iris, who look over at Twin Islands from their
small homestead, have tried in vain to stop the logging.
"He is an environmental terrorist," said Steigermann.
"He's clear cutting the island. Sure he's leaving a few trees, but
they're only the trees that have no value for him and they will blow down
in the next storm."
Steigermann wants all commercial logging on the islands
stopped .
About 60 people from neighboring islands put up a floating
blockade to stop the loggers landing on the island on the first day. And
they've picketed the first barges full of logs leaving the island with
a small flotilla of slogan-festooned boats. They did convince a local motel
water taxi not to take his men to and from the island.
But Jenks wasn't deterred quickly finding alternate housing
and transport.
"I've been buying property and logging it for years,"
Jenks said. "I find property with enough timber to make it worthwhile.
I buy it, I log it and develop the land. It's what I do. They're not going
to stop me."
He's currently logging 680 hectares that he and his partners
bought on Gabriola Island in December 1996 and started logging almost immediately.
Jenks insists that he's doing nothing illegal and is, in fact, making the
property more attractive by thinning out the trees to create a park-like
setting.
"Most of what they're saying is lies," counters
Jenks. "I am not clear-cutting and it's not old growth forest. He
says many of his opponents are hypocrites that cut trees for firewood and
log their own land to build their houses-and then insist that he not log.
Jenks says the environmentalists created the opportunities
he's exploiting on the islands with their demands and protests.
"They tormented the big logging companies with protests
and blockades until they got out," Jenks said.
Painter, journalist and Gabriola Island resident Paul
Grignon, who was an opponent of development plans on that island by land
owner Weldwood Timber, says he has to agree with Jenks.
Weldwood offered to donate almost 800 hectares as park
or community forest in the centre of the island in exchange for being allowed
to develop a subdivision along the waterfront.
After local residents refused to support the idea, rejecting
it as "blacktop urbanization," Jenks and his partners moved in,
picked up the 940 hectare property and is logging it all.
"We blew it," Grignon said. "They were
going to hand us most of the land on a platter and we bickered ourselves
out of everything. We richly deserve what we got."
Jenks bought another 1,680 hectares on Denman Island for
a reported $17 million in July last year. Again, landowner Hancock Timber
decided to sell out after logging protests by local residents.
"It's a strip down the middle of the island from
tip to tip. It's a third of the island," said Denman Island resident
and vocal logging opponent Swann Gardner.
"This is an environmental disaster."
Island residents were trying to get together to make an
offer on the land for a community forest, but Jenks moved in first-and
faster-while island residents were still trying to agree on how to manage
the land.
"He's ripping the heart out of our island,"
Gardner said. Anti-logging residents of the islands have joined forces
in a loose coalition with the help of the Sierra Legal Defence Funds.
They are trying to put names to Jenks' partners and track
who is buying his logs so they can picket their operations.
Harleen Holms, a part-time teacher and environmental activist
on Denman Island has been tracing companies Jenks owns and she and friends
have even been following logging trucks as they take logs off the island.
One wall of the her Denman Island home is devoted to a
giant flow chart tracking the operations.
Island residents are planning escalating protests.
The government has been promising to come up with new
rules for logging on private land, but with lumber prices down and the
forest industry in a slump, the government seems more inclined to try to
streamline current logging regulations.
A lodge fit for queen
Twin Islands is known for the cedar lodge in the trees
where the two land masses join. Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip visited
the islands in 1981 and 1994.
"It's an incredible house," said John Harrison,
45, a Vancouverite whose grandfather built the lodge in the 1930s. "Going
there was like going back in time."
George Andrews bought Twin Islands as a family getaway.
Andrews rounded up a dozen Lund loggers and together they designed and
built the log mansion.
The property was bought in the 1950s by Maximilian von
Baden who is descended from Austrian royalty.
Von Baden began selected logging before Jenks offered
him $4 million for the islands.
"My business is my business....no
one else's
Mike Jenks is a small town
guy with big ideas.
He collects baseball caps, the kind heavy equipment companies
give to customers. He wears T-shirts and denims. There are a half-dozen
pickups and sport utility trucks outside his new home on Gabriola Island,
including a top-of-the-line Jeep Cherokee.
Jenks spent most of his youth in Prince George, where
his dad was a watchman in a sawmill.
Jenks dropped out of school as a teen to work in an oil
refinery in Manitoba, then came back west and worked on the Queen Charlottes
and in northern B.C.
He saved money and borrowed some more to buy a skidder-
used for hauling logs out of the bush-when he was 20.
Now 42, he reads the autobiographies of business tycoons.
"Motivational stuff," he says.
Plans for a recent subdivision he developed lie on the
floor of his office loft with computer generated spreadsheets outlining
the projected profits on a logging operation. Jenks has an Internet web
page to buy trees. He'll talk about how he's learn ng to garden, how he
used boulders dug out of the ground where the house now sits to build the
rockery his wife and daughters are weeding. But, after two weeks of negotiating
this interview, he's leery of talking business.
"I don't really like to talk about myself or my business,"
Jenks said. "I don't think I am the story and I think my business
is my business and no one else's." He claims that radio spots depicting
him as stripping B.C.'s most beautiful island of trees and the claims of
island residents that he's some kind of monster raping the environment
don't hurt him.
But he puts down the cup of tea his wife has brought to
jump in with an attack on "the tree-huggers."
"Those are lies, the ads are full of untruths and
distortions. It's all emotion on their part. I am not clear-cutting. I
do a good job of logging."
On the way out to look at one of his sites, Jenks admits
that buying high-profile property on small islands and logging them has
made him an easy target.
"People have phoned me up and told me I'm going to
get cancer and die because of what I'm doing."
He's wary of having his photo taken, saying he's not photogenic.
But friends say he's worried that his image could be used in anti-logging
propaganda.
And he wants to explain that he's not clear-cutting.
"I don't have to leave these trees," he said,
pointing out small stands of young cedar and fir his loggers have left
and are working around. "I'm leaving some of the trees because it
looks good. You'll be able to build a house here; maybe have a horse."
He hopes that when his logging on the island is finished, he can sell lots
to people looking for retirement or vacation homes.
And he hopes to sell the lodge to someone who will run
it as a motivational centre for business leaders .
Volker Steigermann is one of the most vocal opponents
of Mike Jenks and industrial logging. "It shows no respect for the
for est or the trees," says the German trained woodworker who logs
and mills his own wood on Cortes Island, next to where Jenks is hauling
logs away to a mill in Nanaimo. "Where I come from from wood is so
precious you treat it with respect, picking out each piece when you build something," Steigermann said.
He said that on the small islands along the coast, he would like to see
small selective logging operations that would take only a few trees, allowing
the forest to provide top quality lumber with minimal disturbance.
HOW LOGGERS' COSTS CAN GROW
Logging
private land is cheaper than logging Crown Land that's under the provincial
Forest Practices Act.
The
act requires a comprehensive logging plan - something that can take months
and add about $5 a cubic metre to the cost of wood harvested.
There are restrictions on how much of the land can be logged at one time.
The size of an allowable cut block varies from site to site.
On private land, reforestation isn't required.
Unless property is in the Forest Land Reserve, the logger doesn't pay stumpage.
The cost of logging with plans, reforestation and stumpage would eat up
half to two-thirds of the $50 to $200 Mike Jenks is getting per tree.