A Victory for the Great Bear

A few facts about rainforests:

• Currently 121 prescription drugs are made from plant-derived sources, about 25% of those from rainforest plants. But less than 1% of the plants that grow in rainforests have been tested for possible medical benefits. More than 100 pharmaceutical companies are now carrying out research on plants in an attempt to develop new drugs.
• One-quarter of the active ingredients in cancer-fighting drugs are from plants and animals found nowhere except rainforests.
• Eighty percent of the food we eat, worldwide, originated in rainforests—corn, potatoes, rice, winter squash, yams, avocados, coconuts, figs, oranges, lemons, grapefruit, bananas, guavas, pineapples, mangos, tomatoes, black pepper, cayenne, chocolate, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, sugar cane, turmeric, coffee, vanilla, Brazil nuts, and cashews.
• As recently as 1950, rainforests covered 15% of the world’s land surface. Today that’s down to about 6%, and we’re losing an additional 200,000 acres every day, or about 78 million acres a year, to logging, farming, ranching, and other activities.
• Some experts believe that we’re in danger of losing the majority of our remaining rainforests in the next 40 years.

(Sources: Raintree and Pax Natura)

When we think of rainforests, we most often think of tropical ones, but there are millions of acres of temperate rainforests throughout the world as well, with their own diverse species and their own set of threats. One of those rainforests has just gotten a permanent reprieve.

The 12,000-square-mile Great Bear Rainforest in British Columbia is the largest temperate rainforest in the world; it represents about one-quarter of the coastal temperate rainforest still remaining. On February 1, British Columbia and the governments of 26 First Nations signed an agreement to permanently conserve 19 million acres here, putting strong protection measures in place and banning logging throughout 85% of the area. A $120 million fund is in place—about a quarter supplied by the Canadian government, a quarter by the provincial government of British Columbia, and the rest from private donations—to support the conservation effort.

Why is it called the Great Bear Rainforest? The traditional symbol of the region is the “Spirit Bear”—actually a black bear with a recessive gene that makes its fur white, so it looks more like a polar bear. Only about 400 of these bears exist, and they’ve been adopted as a symbol of conservation.

You can see a video about the bears (and the conservationists who “hunt” them to get a rare sighting or photograph) here.