The Great Bear agreement was never meant to be a museum
Twenty years on, the parties still argue about who counts as a signatory. The forest does not have another twenty in it.
The agreement that named the Great Bear Rainforest turns twenty this year, and the celebrations have the unmistakable air of a museum opening: retrospectives, anniversary panels, a commemorative map. The map is beautiful. It is also, in the places this newspaper covers, increasingly a picture of how things stood in 2006.
The agreement worked because it froze a war nobody was winning. Logging rates fell, protection percentages rose, and a generation of professionals on all sides built careers administering the peace. Administration, though, has quietly replaced ambition. The joint bodies the deal created meet less each year; the reviews it scheduled slip; and the question this week's Nass deferral put plainly — who actually signs, when parties disagree — has no better answer now than it did then.
Meanwhile the forest itself has declined to stay frozen. Fire has arrived in valleys the 2006 maps classed as too wet to burn. The cedar decline creeps north a drainage at a time. The agreement's architecture assumes the landscape of its signing; its anniversary falls in a different one.
The deal deserves its birthday. The honest gift would be a renegotiation — parties at a table, the new maps in front of them, arguing again about something that matters. Arguments were what built the agreement. Reverence is what will bury it.
