International Call to Reject Pipeline, Protect Great Bear Rainforest

German environmental organization delivers 4,600 letters for Clark to Canadian Embassy in Berlin

Joint Press Statement from Sierra Club B.C. and ROBIN WOOD

 

Hamburg and Berlin, Germany, and Victoria, B.C.-- German conservationists in bear costumes, and with a banner reading “No Pipeline, No Tankers, Save the Great Bear Rainforest, Half the forest isn’t enough,“ hand-delivered 4,600 letters for B.C. Premier Christy Clark this morning to Canada’s embassy in Berlin. The letters were sent by supporters of Robin Wood, one of Germany’s most well-known environmental organizations. The protest was timed to coincide with the 23^rd anniversary of the Exxon Valdez tanker accident in Alaska that polluted 2,100 kilometres of coastline.

 

The letters ask Clark to take a stand against the Enbridge pipeline and oil tankers through the Great Bear Rainforest, and to “speed up the process to fully implement the 2009 agreement to safeguard healthy ecosystems and healthy communities“ in the Great Bear Rainforest. Robin Wood was one of many groups that organized protests in Germany in the 1990s calling for protection of the Great Bear Rainforest, citing the close ties that German consumers have to B.C. logging companies.

 

”People in Germany and around the world care deeply about the Great Bear Rainforest in British Columbia,“ said Robin Wood Forest Campaigner Rudolf Fenner. “There are few natural ecosystems left in European countries but we have learned from a past where we did not have the public awareness and the knowledge we do now. Canadians have the opportunity to protect some of the most spectacular wild places left on the planet, and to slow the extraction of fossil fuels and global warming.“

The proposed Enbridge Pipeline would transport crude oil from the Alberta tar sands over more than 1,000 kilometers to B.C.‘s Port of Kitimat. From there, oil supertankers taller than the Eiffel Tower would transport the oil through the hazardous narrow channels and reef-studded inlets of the Great Bear Rainforest. More than 100 coastal First Nations and the Union of B.C. Municipalities oppose oil tanker traffic through the Great Bear Rainforest.

 

“We are urging the B.C. government to devote resources to honour the Great Bear Rainforest Agreements in which they took such pride,” said Sierra Club BC Executive Director George Heyman. “Just as British Columbians care about what happens to wilderness in the Amazon and Alaska, Europeans are speaking out to save B.C.‘s Great Bear Rainforest. The Great Bear Rainforest is a global treasure and its protection is a global responsibility.“

 

Bigger than Switzerland, the Great Bear Rainforest is the largest intact temperate rainforest in the world. It is home to at-risk grizzly bears, coastal wolves and the rare white Spirit or Kermode Bear that does not exist anywhere else on Earth and is fewer in number than the endangered Panda Bear. Following more than a decade of protests against logging in the Great Bear, the B.C. goverment promised far reaching conservation measures in 2006. To date, however, only half of the Great Bear Rainforest is off-limits to logging.

 

For more information:
ROBIN WOOD Forest Campaigner, Rudolf Fenner, Tel. 01149 (0) 40 - 380 892 11; wald(at)robinwood.de

Sierra Club BC Executive Director, George Heyman, Tel. 00 1 604 - 312 659

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