Category Archives: Great Bear Rainforest Part 2: Ancient Realm

View Great Bear Rainforest in a larger map. Click areas to see their labels. The light green shaded area shows the Great Bear Rainforest. The red line shows the proposed pipelines’ routes to and from Kitimat and Bruderheim. The blue, yellow, and green lines show proposed tanker routes. All designations are approximate. Dark green areas along the Pacific Northwest Coast depict the Pacific temperate rainforest region.

In my series about the Great Bear Rainforest, I started out with an oil sands overview, because the rainforest is in dire threat at the moment from the proposed twin pipelines that would cross its salmon-bearing rivers and streams and bring potential oil spills to its delicate coastline. It’s not too late to act, to join in the movement with First Nations and others, and to speak up for the protection of the forest against the newly proposed Northern Gateway Pipeline project by Enbridge. (An independent review process is underway now, referenced in the oil sands article linked above.)

With that out of the way, let’s look more closely at this ancient realm, truly part of one of the most beautiful, last, great, and important coastal and temperate rainforests left in the world. The Great Bear Rainforest is just one region in the temperate, coastal rainforest chain that extends from northern California to Alaska in what is known as the Pacific temperate rainforest region. The term “Great Bear Rainforest” was coined by environmental groups.

The Great Bear’s physical space is a strip of land in British Columbia between the northern end of Vancouver Island and southeastern Alaska. In the map above, I also included the Haida Gwaii, home to the Clayoquot Sound environmental campaign in the 90s, which eventually gave rise to the naming of the Great Bear Rainforest. I will discuss more on the Clayoquot Sound, First Nations groups, and environmental campaigns later in this series.

The rainforest is about 2 million hectares. Coastal rainforests are diminishing in our world but were always rare, covering less than 1/5 of 1% of the earth’s land surface. Other areas containing coastal temperate rainforests are found in the rest of the Pacific northwest coast, New Zealand, Tasmania, Chile, Argentina, and in even smaller coastal zones within Japan, northwest Europe, and the Black Sea. Of the few of these rainforests left in the world, over 60% have been destroyed due to logging and development. British Columbia contains one of the largest contiguous tracts left.

The rainforest, so named for the “Great Bears” that roam it, is home to grizzly, black, and Spirit bears. I will devote an entire article later in the series discussing the Spirit bear. Suffice to say for now it is a subspecies of the black bear, but has a lighter coat that can be described as white or cream. Its color is due to a recessive allele. The Spirit bear (also sometimes called the Kermode bear) has a place in mythology in the native people of the raincoast forest

The BC rainforest is truly the most amazing area in the world that I’ve ever seen. Living nearby is a reminder that there is little need to travel far, because heaven is right here. Marked by lots of rainfall, misty horizons, glacier-fed rivers and inland lakes, moss-laden forest floors, mature trees, fjords, and great biodiversity, the forest could be described as sacred. The area boasts some of the oldest and most mature trees on the planet, including Sitka spruce, Douglas fir, red cedar, and western hemlock. The fir and spruce can reach up to 300 feet tall. The western red cedar can grow 19 feet in diameter. Myriad species interact in this region–which combines freshwater, terrestrial, estuarine, and marine geography–including salmon, marine-diet wolves, black and grizzly bears, eagles, orcas, sitka deer, marbled murrelets, foxes, and, well, there are too many to list.

According to Wade Davis, author of Rainforest: Ancient Realm of the Pacific Northwest, in this forest, “a square meter of soil may support 2,000 earthworms, 40,000 insects, 120,000 mites, 12 million nematodes, and millions upon millions of protozoa and bacteria, all alive, moving through the earth, feeding, digesting, reproducing, and dying.” It’s important to remember that none of these species lives in isolation. Each system relies on those around it, below it, and above it.

The rainforest’s indigenous people, also called First Nations, consist of the Haida, Tsilhqot’in, Dakelh, Wet’suwet’en, Nisga’a, Gitxsan, Nuxalk, Heiltsuk, Kwakwaka’wakw, Tsimshian (including the Gitga’at, Kitasoo/Xai’xais, and others), Haisla, and Oweekeno. According to the Forest Action Network:

One of the earliest Northwest Coast villages identified by archaeologists is Namu, a 10,000-year-old site in Heiltsuk and Nuxalk Territory in the heart of the Great Bear Rainforest. The abundance of the region’s land and sea supported the emergence of highly sophisticated, organized cultures and an intricate trade network. These people lived without the aid of agriculture–one of the very few complex societies in the world to have done so–and developed a striking, intricate style of art admired worldwide. Industrial clearcut logging has threatened some of the core values of many of these First Nations.

Before 10,000 years ago, the Pleistocene Epoch and its last glacial periods shaped what was to become and carved the origins of the temperate rainforest in British Columbia. When the glaciers retreated, they left behind rocky terrain fairly devoid of life. Eventually, lichens grew and decayed, forming the first soil. Wind that blew dust, and water, helped to create the first plants and moss, which in turn led to more diverse soil types. This gradual ecological succession, called primary succession, led to more soils and plant types, including grasses. Small birds, animals, and insects arrived as did eventually more complex plants, including trees. With larger trees, some older plants like lichen and grasses could not compete, nor could survive in shaded areas. During each further stage of succession, some plants adapted, some died out, and some dominated the temperate rainforest. If left to natural evolution, these final forests as we know them today, also known as climax forests, are very stable for thousands of years and represent the finality of this region’s biome type.

Though forests may survive naturally for thousands of years, devastation can occur. Fires, for instance, can impact the composition of a forest. With temperate evergreen forests, many species of conifers are fire-resistant and may outlast other trees, even invasive deciduous trees. Fires can also aid in the forest’s regeneration by speeding up decomposition of conifer needles. Generally, the temperate rainforests are too moist for natural fires, though droughts can occur.

It seems like a climax forest would live forever. Even future glaciers, volcanoes, and other natural events cannot prevent the land from eventually returning to a forest again. However, when forests are clearcut and top-soil is destroyed for development, it can take thousands of years for the soil to become rich enough again to support a new climax forest. Soil evolution is the longest process in the primary succession of forest development, which is why it’s important to protect our forests, especially our old growth and mature trees.

Looking further back from the Pleistocene-Holocene era along the geologic time scale, where would we first come across the types of trees seen today in the temperate rainforests before our last glacial age? Though short, primitive vascular rhyniophytes were around during the Silurian between 418-443 million years ago, the first trees appeared during the upper Devonian time period (about 370 million years ago) and were called Archaeopteris, a fern-like tree that resembled, in shape, a Christmas tree. During the Carboniferous period were the first large primitive trees, or Lycopodiophyta, which also were some of the oldest vascular plants. Vascular plants then operated the way trees we know today do: they have lignified tissues that move water, minerals, and photosynthetic products throughout the plant. The Archaeopteris was known as a progymnosperm and gave way to the gymnosperms we know today that include conifers, cycads, Ginkgo, and Gentales.