Our #WorthFightingFor event is on March 29th. Joy Foy, National Campaign Director with community cause Wilderness Committee shares below what he think is worth fighting for.

On a recent vacation in Cambodia, my wife and I had the mind-blowing experience of wandering the time-worn stone hallways and galleries of Angkor Wat. It’s the largest grouping of religious monuments on the planet. We got a similar tingling of the spine and back of neck hair-raising in southern Mexico while clambering up the Mayan Nohoch Mul Pyramid near Coba. Part of the wonder of these places is their incredible age. Angkor Wat is about nine centuries old and Nohoch Mul is somewhere around 12 centuries.  

These two sites are protected and are seen not just as treasures of their respective nations — but they are also rightfully seen as part of the heritage of all humanity.

Whenever such an ancient treasure is destroyed or damaged on purpose, people the world over understand it makes us all the poorer. Such was the case when the 400-year-old Stari Most Bridge in the town of Mostar in Bosnia-Herzegovina was deliberately destroyed during the war in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.  After the war ended, charges were laid and those responsible brought into the international court system to answer for what they had done.

So I have to wonder. What about the ongoing destruction of ancient treasures here in our home province of British Columbia? What about the industrial-scale logging of BC’s dwindling old-growth forests, which contain trees that were old-timers back when Angkor Wat, Nohoch Mul and Stari Most were mere construction sites.

In my office here at the Wilderness Committee, we have a huge round of a yellow cedar tree that was cut down on the Sunshine Coast in the 1980s. Based on tree-ring evidence this old-growth tree was over 18 centuries old when it was chainsawed to the ground, leaving a clear-cut of massive stumps.  The sad thing is that BC allows, even encourages this kind of desecration of our shared cultural, spiritual and ecological heritage to continue today. It’s got to the point that in many places the old giant trees are long gone, while in others the old-growth forests are literally down to their last stand.

It’s high time that BC meets it’s global responsibility to conserve and protect Earth’s ancient treasures by banning the logging of remaining old-growth forests.

We hope you join us on March 29th for the event. Tickets are available here.