Exercise #3 Submission
July 13, 2022 By: Zoë
Media item #1: Fairy Creek Blockades.
Link: https://thenarwhal.ca/topics/fairy-creek-blockade/
On Vancouver Island, located in Western British Columbia, thousands of people have joined together to protest Teal-Jones plans to cut Fairy Creeks old-growth forests. Through the public and Indigenous nations objection’s, logging in this area has been halted for a couple of years. Sustainable forestry conservation has been an ongoing fight for over one hundred years. Some forestry conservation has been for the wrong reasons, as noted in our Steinberg textbook, “what was being conserved was not so much the natural world, but a socioecological order that produced monumental material gain at the expense of some vulnerable wildlife and people” (124). Following the Fairy Creek protests over the last couple of years and tying what I have learned in this course thus far made me realize how far too often companies are preserving our forests simply to benefit themselves, and not because forests are a beautiful and vital life source for all of lands creatures.
Media item #2: Swelkwek’welt: The Ongoing Cultural Significance of the Sun Peaks Area to the Secwepmc Peoples.
After reading this article on how Sun Peaks Ski Resort has affected Secwepemc peoples, I was reminded of what I have read in Unit Three, Topic Two: the parks movement, about how national parks have affected Indigenous nations. We are not saying that national parks, such as Yellowstone, or skiing resorts, such as Sun Peaks, are a bad thing. However, it is bad when these parks and resorts steal the cultural practices of Indigenous peoples, like foraging, hunting and traditional ceremonies, that have been going on for generations.