Protesters with the Rainforest Flying Squad said Monday that Teal Jones has not yet served them with the injunction at Caycuse nor the Fairy Creek area near Port Renfrew, but they are ready to defy the order and face arrest. They said they “will not back down until the area is saved.” The group is calling on Premier John Horgan to implement the recommendations of the Old Growth Strategic Review and to defer logging in the Caycuse Valley and all other at-risk old-growth forests. The new blockade severs access to six approved cut-blocks in the Caycuse watershed. Teal Jones has been logging there for several years.
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A group calling themselves “forest defenders” have been blocking access to the Fairy Creek area, which they say contains the last unlogged watershed in the San Juan River System. Teal Jones is trying to build access roads to an area it wants to log, but the protesters say it would have adverse affects on a protected area of old growth in the valley below.
Protesters have also set up satellite camps to prevent old-growth logging in other areas, including the Walbran Valley, Bugaboo Creek near Avatar Grove, and Edinburgh Mountain.
“It’s not that we’re anti-logging,” Kathleen Code, a spokeswoman for the protesters, said Saturday. “We don’t obstruct second-growth logging. It’s the old-growth forests we have so little of. … That’s our primary focus, that’s what we are protecting.”