A petition filled with 185,000 signatures was delivered to the B.C. Legislature Thursday morning, demanding more protection for old-growth forests.
Representatives from Vancouver Island tourism and local government, including Victoria Councilor-Elect Laurel Collins, combined forces with Sierra Club BC and Germany-based Rainforest Rescue to deliver the long list, calling on the B.C. government to save the remaining endangered ancient coastal temperate rainforest from clear cutting.
Jens Wieting, Senior Forest and Climate Campaigner for Sierra Club BC, says it's disheartening the NDP government isn't responded strongly enough to the continuing loss.
"We're losing two soccer fields every hour, on average 10,000 hectares every year of the last remaining old growth. There's less than seven per cent of the most productive big tree ecosystem left.'
The petition was addressed to Premier John Horgan, and Minister of Forestry, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development. A representative for Donaldson took the petition, and promised to hand it over.
Sonia Furstenau, the MLA for Cowichan Valley, was in attendance. She said, "The trees have been at the centre of my thoughts on what areas we need be looking to protect. There's not much left; there's not much time."
In addition to jeopardizing B.C.'s tourism economy, the group's say the destruction of B.C.'s old-growth rainforests also threatens biodiversity and Indigenous cultural values and affects tourism.