Image: TJ Watt
The Guardian
By Leyland Cecco
Stark images of an ancient tree cut down in western Canada expose flaws in the government’s plan to protect old-growth forests, activists have said, arguing that vulnerable ecosystems have been put at risk as logging companies race to harvest timber.
The last great tree: a majestic relic of Canada's vanishing rainforest
As part of an effort to catalogue possible old growth forests, photographer TJ Watt and Ian Thomas of the environmental advocacy group Ancient Forest Alliance travelled to a grove of western red cedars on British Columbia’s Vancouver Island. But when they arrived to the forest in Quatsino Sound, they found hundreds of trees that has recently been logged.
“It’s absolutely gut-wrenching to see a tree lying on the ground, and to think that it had lived for more than 500 years and then it can be gone in the blink of an eye, never to be seen again,” said Watt, who photographed the forest as part of a grant from the Trebek Initiative, a partnership between the National Geographic Society and the Royal Canadian Geographical Society named after the late Jeopardy host.
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