ABSTRACT
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a conflict developed in British Columbia over clearcutting of the rain forest on Vancouver Island in Clayoquot Sound, on the west coast of the island. The conflict had two bases. One was unresolved land claims of the Nuu-chah-nulth people; this issue led to an injunction stopping logging on Meares Island in 1985. The second grew out of efforts of environmental organizations to stop the clearcutting that had removed so much forest on the rest of Vancouver Island. Several attempts to resolve the conflict dissolved in further dissension. In the summer of 1993, a large act of civil disobedience, a blockade of a key bridge, received worldwide media attention. A public participation process had produced no agreement, and environmentalists disliked a land-use decision that the Province had issued after that process. Although the Nuu-chah-nulth did not engage in that blockade, they were also unhappy with the land-use decision (Berman et al. 1994).
