Imagine being a sailor in 1774 on a Spanish ship bound for Nootka Sound sailing along Vancouver Island’s west coast for the first time. You would have seen a shoreline awash with Nootka Roses, hundreds of campfires of Native Indigenous villages, towering trees 2,000 years old, and waters dotted by long cedar canoes and curious peoples. It is easy to replicate – take a drive on any rural road west of the Cascade Crest today and consider that the “green” you see along the roadside, contains but 25% of the number of plant species you would have seen 60 years ago. This writer sailed along the Vancouver Island coast in
1962 on a US destroyer visiting Esquimalt; the pinks of Nootka Roses then dotted the shoreline and hills as they still do today on some of the San Juans. But modern forestry practices spray to eliminate deciduous plants – we wash the land with herbicides every 40 years, Nootka Island attesting. It’s not that the Spanish, Nootka Roses, and Nuu-Chah-Nulth are extinct; it is that species once commonplace are almost gone, replaced by monocultures. Pilchuck Learning Center’s sponsored Western Washington University Survey and Monitor Project’s major finding is not just that our native plants are becoming extinct. It is that the existence of diverse, once commonplace plant species sensitive to herbicides, have all but disappeared from our hills and roadsides; these were sprayed by the County and State with Agent Orange when this writer was a boy – my bicycle friends, Pat and Dave, who ate roadside berries and hips have been dead for year. Agent Orange being freely used by Snohomish (and other) County before 1960.
http://naeb.brit.org/uses/search/?string=Rosa+nutkana
https://thenarwhal.ca/bc-nuchatlaht-title-case-undrip/
https://ancientforestalliance.org/nootka-island-old…/
https://www.cbsnews.com/…/earth-mass-extinction-60…/
https://www.plc215.org/…/01/WA-History-Starts-Here.pdf
https://sccr2017.org/…/2021-aerial-spraying-by…/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mo_hEcyE8mk…
What has caused the seemingly white/tan totally denuded landscape found today on Nootka Island?
both of the below
clear-cutting
herbicides
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