The Most Exciting Conservation Story On Cortes Island

Roy L Hales/Cortes Currents - Transcript of a radio broadcast by Sabina Leader Mense

Just last weekend several of us were at the Cortes Island Museum for the launch of Sheila Harrington's new book 'Voices For The Islands: 30 Years Of Nature Conservation In The Salish Sea.' What Sheila does in this book is she celebrates this amazing community of conservationists that are living and working in the Salish Sea.  

In the foreword, Briony Penn wrote, "If you've picked up this book, chances are that you've fallen in love with the islands in the Salish Sea. You might have wondered how the heck they've retained their natural beauty against the hostile tsunami of contemporary clear-cuts, cookie cutter suburbs, and mindless malls that are encroaching elsewhere.”

Briony talks about the collective efforts of thousands of people over generations that have actually been working to maintain the beauty of the islands. 

Sheila's book documents the last 30 years of people (voices in the islands) who have been working at conservation. She includes a chapter on Cortes, so we're in there with the best of them! I encourage everybody to pick her book up and have a read  to see what the island community of conservationists have been doing. 

The most exciting conservation story on Cortes today is definitely the Children's Forest! This is the 624 acres of forest lands that stretch all the way from the Carrington Bay Road trailhead, east across Carrington Lagoon to Goat Mountain, just on the northern shore of Blue Jay Lake.  These are lands owned by Island Timberlands. It's part of their privately managed forest land base on Cortes Island.

When Island Timberlands announced imminent logging plans for their  forest lands in 2009, several of us invited Briony Penn and Mort Ranson to come to Cortes. They were defending forest lands on Salt Spring Island in 1999. Mort is a videographer and produced a fabulous little video called 'The Money, The Money, The Money.' We asked Briony and Mort to come to Cortes to show the video,  and  to brainstorm with us and with the community for solutions to how we might conserve some of these lands. One of the sparks that came out of that conversation in 2009 was this idea of a forest in trust to the children.

So that concept was established in 2010. By 2012, we had managed to register ourselves as a B. C. Society, the Forest Trust for the Children of Cortes Island Society. By  2014 we had charitable status and we've been hard at it ever since! 

We have engaged Island Timberlands with the goal of purchasing these 624 acres of land. We're tenacious! We're in there hanging on, and we have a very dedicated negotiations committee that's actively engaged with Mosaic Forest Management, who now manage the Island Timberland  forest land base.  

The Forest Trust for the Children of Cortes Island Society has a vision and that vision is twofold. Firstly, we're setting out to protect in perpetuity natural forest lands on behalf of children and future generations. Secondly, we're there to nurture relationships between children and nature and to inspire advocacy for the natural world.