Colleen McCrory will never forget her first exposure to the ugly realities of clear-cutting. It was a warm summer afternoon in 1975 and she was 25 at the time. She and her older brother Wayne were driving through the forest to take a hike along Wilson Creek, a favorite spot near her home in Silverton, British Columbia. Suddenly the fir, cedar and hemlock trees they knew so well disappeared. They pulled into a freshly cut clearing, an instant cemetary with tree stumps for tombstones. Topsoil was sliding across the denuded ground, and the creek had turned brown. "It sickened me," McCrory recalls.
It was not an isolated phenomenon, she soon learned. British Columbia was losing thousands of acres of virgin forest every year to the demand for lumber. Realizing that Canada had become "the Brazil of the North," McCrory dedicated herself to saving her country's irreplaceable woodlands. Working with other activists, she lobbied politicians, badgered journalists, sent out mailings to households, filed lawsuits, and organized demonstrations against logging companies.
After a quarter-century of campaigning she can look back with some satisfaction at a string of victories. Now head of Canada's Future Forest Alliance, she's played a leading role in the preservation of half a million acres, including the huge tracts set aside for the Valhalla Provincial Park and the South Moresby national park reserve called Haida Gwaii. She won the Goldman Environmental Prize (the equivalent of a Nobel Prize for conservation) and Canada's top honor of that kind, the Governor General's Conservation Award.
But the recognition was bought with sacrifice, hardship and ostracism in her own community. Logging meant jobs for British Columbians, and her neighbors didn't take kindly to her crusade. She received threatening phone calls, and a two-year boycott of a clothing shop she owned forced her to close the store. Working for environmental groups didn't provide much income for the mother of three who was divorced by the time she was 28. It wasn't until the $60,000 Goldman Prize came in 1992 that she was able to pay down debts and buy a decent car. The rusted old Datsun she drove for six years had a hole in the floor, which let the snow on mountain roads splatter her long skirts.
Now her main hardship is missing her grandchildren while spending as much as five months a year on the road, taking her save-for-forest drive to cities from Vancouver to Strasbourg. McCrory wants Canada to feel the same kind of worldwide pressure that has prodded Brazil to try to protect the Amazon. For all her success, she knows that most of the forest is still in danger. She can look out from the veranda of her home in Silverton at a deep-blue glacier lake and a lush stand of cedar and hemlock. "Where else in the world," she asks, "do you still have so many grizzlies, black bear, caribou--and pure water you can drink right off a mountain slope? If we didn't have a campaign on, it would all be clear-cut." Like the forest she loved as a child, near Wilson Creek.
