Side Events and Field Trips

ENCOUNTERS IN THE FOREST:

A COURAGEOUS BAND OF ECO-GUERRILLAS BLOCKADE TIMBER ROAD
By Lucas Chiappe/Project Lemu Patagonia, Argentina -- May 2003

Translated by Katharine Allen

Early in the morning we boarded the vehicles made available to us by a group of young Canadian colleagues: 2 vans and 3 all-terrain vehicles, into which 30 people from diverse nations crammed together with one common objective, the conservation of the 7 regions in the world where what's left of the Temperate Rainforests still exists (only 3% of the Earth's forests).

A dense drizzle fell on the highways that open up marvelous Vancouver Island, but the group's spirit was decidedly festive. People who had come from far-away places (Australia-Chile-Alaska-Patagonia) took advantage of the ride to get to know each other, share stories and anecdotes of their respective struggles, to exchange addresses and emotions, be thrilled over small but invaluable victories won and to console each other over the ecological disasters being repeated with accelerating frequency in both hemispheres.

Three hours later and after having spent the last half hour driving through an intense network of logging roads opened up by timber company bulldozers, we came upon a thick wall of rocks, hand-built with precision on a public bridge, interrupting all car and truck traffic.

We were just a few meters from what North Americans call an "eco-blockade" and whose significance is easily understood in our country of piqueteros (unemployed protesters or picketers): A conscious, thought-out and intentional decision made to impede the passage of heavy machinery, thereby stopping the logging of one of the dozens of watersheds in the fragile and complex mosaic that make up this fantastic forested territory in British Columbia.

We got out of the vehicles with shouts of happiness and friendly laughter and on the other side of the bridge, heads of a handful of valiant women started appearing, looking at us in surprise....

...and in a few seconds we recognized each other with emotional hugs of solidarity...

On this grey spring afternoon it was drizzling, but the sun seemed to shine on our heads, words spilled out in rivers of multiple exchanges and sincere gestures, until a large circle of people holding hands took shape. Maria Teresa Panchillo, our Mapuche colleague who had come from her home in Temuco, Chile so that her just complaints could be heard, decided to take the reins of this encounter of like spirits. In a resonant voice, she gave us the gift of a welcoming ceremony, stringing together a chain of words in her native language, which where translated on the spot into several languages.

Next it was our "hostesses'" turn, who asked the celebrated "Grandmother of Canadian Forests" (Betty Krawczyk, a young 74 years old) to welcome us and in a few words explain this determined and courageous struggle occurring in the Ancient Forests of the Upper Walbran Valley..."Ours is a risky and uneven fight which, for me personally led to a 4-year jail sentence in 1996" she told us. The sentence was "suspended" by the very same Canadian Justice System [that imposed it] to put out the "fire" started by Betty and her allies after 4 months of intense activism carried out from a Vancouver jail.

The negative publicity generated against the Government and timber companies helped to mobilize the international press, who picked up this emblematic case and soon Betty and her friends became, for many countries, another paradigm of the unequal fight between David and Goliath to save the forests. (I remember including this incredible story and example in the magazine I edit for Project Lemu years ago: Hoja por Hoja No. 4).

"Today," summarized Betty, "the fight continues here. I have been in this place for several weeks waiting for them to arrest me again...but only the henchman of the logging companies have showed up. They come to threaten us with extreme vulgarity and to try and frighten us by pretending to be violent...But the police, under pressure from the central Government, now don't want to arrest me after their previous experience and so the situation is tense and for the moment stopped in time...Because of this, after having no contact with any of our colleagues over the past 2 weeks, we greet you with our hearts swelled with hope, knowing that this contact will let us knit together a new web of alliances that will cover the American continent from the north to the south...Welcome, brothers and sisters in the struggle.. Welcome warriors of hope..."

Thanks to the respectful silence that followed the end of her talk, for a few minutes we could enjoy the pleasant sound of the river running beneath our feet on the "barricaded" bridge, identify the call of the strange ravens that fill the denseness of the forests, and admire from within the wisps of fog the precise flight of a pair of eagles over the campsite...synchronicities that kept happening throughout that afternoon of encounters between magician, peers and mirrors..