October 24, 2020
The endangered old-growth forests of British Columbia are about to get some international exposure starting at the United Kingdom’s largest media arts festival, the York Mediale, which opens to the public today with the exhibition of the film Embers and the Giants by internationally renowned Canadian artist Kelly Richardson.
Richardson, a professor of Visual Arts at the University of Victoria, developed Embers and the Giants by using IMAX technology to film the endangered old-growth forests near the town of Port Renfrew, dubbed “Canada’s Tall Trees Capital”, on Vancouver Island in the unceded territory of the Pacheedaht First Nation band.
BC’s old-growth forests are among the grandest forests on Earth, with trees that can live to 2000 years in age and grow over 6 meters (20 feet) wide and almost 100 meters (over 300 feet) tall. They support endangered species, First Nations cultures, clean water, wild salmon, carbon storage, tourism, and recreation. 97% of BC’s high productivity old-growth forests, where the largest trees grow, have already been logged, and conservationists and First Nations have been fighting for decades to protect these ancient stands.
“Embers and the Giants is a large-scale video installation which presents an endangered old-growth forest during last light, articulated by thousands of floating embers of light. Initial impressions may be that we are witness to a rare and exceptionally beautiful display of fireflies or the embers from a forest fire out of frame,” stated artist Kelly Richardson. “The longer viewers look, the more evident it becomes that we are not witnessing a natural spectacle. We are witnessing human intervention through thousands of tiny drones mimicking a natural spectacle, suggesting a time when we will need to amplify the spectacle of nature in order to convince the public of its worth.”
The York Mediale is the United Kingdom’s largest media arts festival (here) and will take place in multiple venues across the city of York. Embers and Giants will be exhibited at York Art Gallery, the centrepiece of the mediale – here
Embers and the Giants was also commissioned as part of XL Outer Worlds, an IMAX project in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the invention of the film format, and supported by Canada 150.
The commissions included films by some of Canada’s most established moving image artists: Kelly Richardson, Oliver Husain, Michael Snow, Leila Sujir and Lisa Jackson. Last year the work premiered as an IMAX film at Cinesphere in Toronto as part of the Images Festival.
Richardson is known for creating hyper-real digital films of rich and complex landscapes that have been manipulated using CGI, animation and sound. Her projects have received major international acclaim, having been featured in the National Gallery of Canada, in galleries around the world, in an official Canada 150 exhibition, and in the upcoming IMAX film series.
Her most recent project and work has previously been highlighted in various news media:
CBC: Ancient Rainforests Under Threat
Saanich News: Old Growth Film Premiere
Times Colonist: Capturing the Art of Nature and Change
Chek News: Victoria Artist Showcase
“Embers and the Giants looks at our calls for environmental protection at a time when large-scale environmental breakdown caused by climate change is not a case of ‘if’ but of ‘when’. The idea for the work was inspired by two news articles accessed in 2016 about threatened old-growth forests which, after the discovery of a natural spectacle (fireflies and giant trees respectively), successful cases for preservation were argued. Both areas are now extremely popular tourist destinations. In light of the terrifying fallout of continued, large-scale biodiversity loss worldwide, when are vital ecosystems worthy of preservation? How are we able to continue to justify their loss at such a critical juncture? Under what metrics is that justification measured? In the future, how will those metrics be viewed? What will our futures look like given current predictions?” stated Richardson.
“Old-growth temperate rainforests in British Columbia are among the grandest forests on Earth. However, today the classic forest giants are extremely scarce after a century of industrial logging. BC is one of the last jurisdictions in the western world that still has 500 to 2000 year old ancient forests, but it is also one of the last jurisdictions to support their large scale industrial liquidation for two-by-fours and toilet paper. To come across a stand of these forest giants today and to cut them down, is like coming across a herd of elephants and slaughtering them all. It is both unethical and unnecessary, given the dominance of a major alternative, namely vast second and third-growth forests that constitute most of the forested landscapes of British Columbia today. The rest of the industrialized world is logging second and third-growth forests, and we need to do the same, in a sustainable manner. Time is short, and the more attention there is on BC’s endangered old-growth forests, including internationally through Kelly Richardson’s amazing work in the art world, the greater pressure there is on the government to have to protect them,” stated Ken Wu, Endangered Ecosystems Alliance (EEA) executive director.
Over the years, Vancouver Island’s old-growth forests have drawn considerable attention from the artistic community, including Emily Carr who produced pieces depicting the old-growth trees, giant stumps, and forests of the region in the first half of the 20th century; Canadian landscape artist Ed Burtynsky’s Augmented Reality (AR) rendition of “Big Lonely Doug”, Canada’s second-largest Douglas-fir located near Port Renfrew (and nicknamed by the EEA’s Ken Wu in 2014) as part of his renowned Anthropocene Project; scores of renowned artists who contributed to the best-selling art book “Carmanah: Visions of an Ancient Forest” (300,000 copies sold) in 1990; and increasing numbers of artists and filmmakers in recent years featuring the ancient forests around Port Renfrew, including Richardson.
More BACKGROUND Information on BC’s Old-Growth Forests
In BC, the unique features of old-growth temperate rainforests take centuries to develop — in a province where the forests are re-logged every 60 to 80 years on BC’s coast. As a result, old-growth forests are not a renewable resource under B.C.’s system of forestry and are not replicated by tree-planting.
55,000 hectares of old-growth forests are logged on average each year in BC, including about 9,000 hectares on Vancouver Island in a typical year.
Numerous studies show that protected areas, including protecting old-growth forests, typically results in greater net positive impacts on the economy than the traditional resource extraction industries, when factoring in recreation and tourism, enhanced real estate values near protected areas, clean water and fisheries values (commercial and recreational), non-timber forest products, carbon offsets, and attracting skilled labour (including high tech workers) who relocated to areas with a higher environmental quality of life. See here and here.
BC’s old-growth forests are in the spotlight right now, as the BC provincial government recently released the recommendations of the Old-Growth Strategic Review public and stakeholder input panel. The recommendations included immediately placing moratoria on logging of the most endangered old-growth forests in BC, namely, over 400,000 hectares of the remaining “high productivity” old-growth forests with the largest trees (the “ecological heart of BC’s old-growth forests”), of which only 3% remains in BC, and in the most endangered forest ecosystems.
The panel recommended science-based targets be enacted within 3 years to protect old-growth forests, requiring a “paradigm shift” and “regime change” in BC’s forest management legislation and policies.
The BC government has failed to adopt most of the panel’s key recommendations, instead placing logging deferrals on only 3,800 hectares or 1% of the 415,000 hectares of high productivity old-growth forests that the panel recommended for deferral.
Importantly, the BC government has also not committed any vital funding for First Nations land use plans and Indigenous Protected Areas, which is foundational if logging is to be deferred in old-growth forests and for their eventual protection in legislation. See a media release from the Endangered Ecosystems Alliance on the BC government’s new old-growth policy direction.