About 10 kilometres down a dusty logging road outside Port Renfrew, a dozen or so officers work to extract a woman who has chained her arm into a pipe and buried it underground.
Officers first remove a low wall of rocks arranged around the woman, then loosen the dirt, shovel it away, outfit her with a helmet and eye protection and bring in a jackhammer to finish the job in a slow process.
Officers specialized in obstacle removal and dressed in blue coveralls complete the extraction under the shade of a tent while the sun blazes.
Then, they drive a short distance up the road and on to the next person whose arm is buried in the ground. This is how the day played out on Thursday, five weeks into almost daily arrests by the RCMP to clear logging roads for forestry company Teal-Jones Group to reach planned cut-blocks in Tree Farm Licence 46 on southwest Vancouver Island.
Protesters are trying to prevent the cutting of old-growth forests, home to trees hundreds of years old. Some protesters have been camping for weeks.
On Thursday, the arrests began with a man extracted from a tripod structure fashioned from logs, the only one arrested in this area.
Media, allowed to enter the court injunction area with a police escort, missed the first arrest of the day, arriving as officers were driving away to the next spot, a section of road near what’s known as Waterfall camp.
About 11:30 a.m., near Waterfall camp, members of the Vancouver Island Tactical Troop, with training in obstacle removal, were extracting the woman who had attached her wrist to a piece of rebar in cement at the bottom of PVC piping buried in the ground. It’s what’s called a sleeping dragon. Protesters use variations of the method to slow police as they make arrests.
Journalists were kept behind yellow police tape, close enough to see if anything goes wrong but too far to see or hear much of the process.
Farther up the road and out of view, officers were removing two people suspended from another tripod structure made of logs. They had chained bicycle U-locks around their necks, with a metal chain also around their necks and attached above them. Media were not allowed to watch the extraction. Officers were concerned that if protesters know how they’re removed, they’ll create more complex obstacles that put them in more danger, said Sgt. Elenore Sturko, media relations officer for the B.C. RCMP.
Officers are seeing an escalation in the types of devices being created to slow police down, Sturko said, “where we actually do fear that someone will place themselves into a serious … injury as a result of what they’re doing to themselves.”
Tactics appear to have escalated on both sides, with police tightening up access to the injunction area and officers coming to camps in the dark, often waking up campers. Protesters say the officers sometimes shake their tents, or take their supplies.
At the start of the month, people could drive on the logging roads until they hit protest blockades. Now, officers at a checkpoint stop vehicles only a short drive up the road, and they search backpacks for anything that could be used to create blockades, such as PVC piping, rebar, cement and carabiners.
Where before police arrested those blocking the road but ignored others along the side of the road, they’re now forcing anyone below their lines to leave the injunction area, sometimes offering rides so people can avoid an hours-long hike out.
On Thursday, police cleared a road leading to Waterfall camp after making arrests and moved their line marking the start of an exclusion zone further up.
Sturko, who has been in the field since Monday, said officers have made progress, but it can’t be measured by how far up the exclusion zone starts.
The goal isn’t necessarily to clear this logging road to the end, before moving to a new area, said Sgt. Chris Manseau, another B.C. RCMP media relations officer. Instead, enforcement is focused on ensuring Teal-Jones has access to areas they want to work in, he said.
Despite more than 300 arrests, protesters are determined to stand their ground, said Kathy Code, a spokeswoman for the Rainforest Flying Squad, a grassroots group behind blockades.
“I think whatever progress they make is quickly undone the next day,” she said. “They can keep arresting all the people that they want. But I think those people will be simply replaced by others who are willing to put themselves on the line. So we can keep going for a long time.”
Theold-growth trees in the area are at least 250 years old. Ssome are estimated to be more than 1,000 years old. They’re rich in biodiversity and support animal and plant species, some of which cannot live in other habitats.
Demonstrators are determined to keep the old-growth trees standing, but are not opposed to logging second-growth forests.
Teal-Jones has said that most of the work in Tree Farm Licence 46, where blockades are in place, is in second-growth forest, but they do cut “a modest amount of old growth as well, as it has characteristics needed for many value-added products, such as musical instruments.”
The B.C. Council of Forest Industries has said old-growth logging supports an estimated 38,000 jobs in B.C. and contributes about $3.5 billion to the province’s gross domestic product.
The court injunction granted to Teal-Jones includes a clause for police enforcemen. The RCMP has stressed that it is impartial in the conflict.
Individual officers are not required to work in the injunction zone, but that doesn’t mean the officers working in the area all support the falling of old growth, Manseau said.
“I’ve definitely heard lots of members say, you know, I support the keeping of the old-growth forests,” Manseau said. “However, laws are being broken and I’m a police officer, and I have to uphold the laws in Canada because that’s my job. And that’s what the public expects of me.”
Those vowing to protect old-growth forests say what’s legal and what’s right aren’t necessarily the same thing. A man who goes by the camp name Axe said people have exhausted their legal options to keep the trees standing. They’ve tried gaining protection for old-growth by calling politicians, organizing petitions and holding protests in cities, but the trees continue to fall.
“This is the end strategy. There’s no other options left. That’s why we’re here,” he said.
Axe said he was willing to be arrested for the cause.
“This is not right. And it doesn’t matter that it’s not legal,” he said.
“This matters to me more than my freedom. This matters to me more than any consequences I could possibly face.”
