About 40 people opposed to logging of old-growth trees in the Walbran Valley protested outside B.C. Supreme Court in Victoria this morning as forestry company Teal Jones was inside seeking to extend an injunction to limit blockades of its operation.

Teal-Jones Group, a Surrey-based logging company, gained a permit in September from the province to log cutblock No. 4424, a 3.2-hectare area of Crown land in the Central Walbran, for pulp, paper and solid wood products.

“It’s a forest unlike any other on the planet,” with intact 1,000-year-old trees, said Torrance Coste, a campaigner for the Wilderness Committee.

The cutblock contains 'Castle Grove,' a densely packed group of old-growth western red cedars.

Teal Jones was granted an injunction until Dec. 14 that was extended until today. The injunction allows legal protests and activities but stops protesters from interfering with the company's harvesting operations. Activists began blocking subsidiary Teal-Cedar Product Ltd. from road building work in November.

Now, Teal Jones is applying to the B.C. Supreme Court to extend the injunction again until September 2016. The Wilderness Committee has also been named by the  company in its court application as an organizer of the protests. The activist group says it did not organize the blockades but rather is championing the right of individuals to stand up and fight for the environment.

In this morning’s submissions in court, Teal Jones’ counsel said it has the legal right to log the area and that the activitsts’ fight is with the province. And while the company respects the right of activists to protest, it says those blockades have become a safety issue.

Coste maintains the logging company is essentially trying to bar the law-abiding public access to the Walbran.

“In a democracy like B.C. we have a right to get out and witness what’s happening in our forests, to witness ecological destruction and to report back on that,” Coste said, outside the court. “Teal-Jones is trying to bar that and we’re here to stand up and say the public is deeply concerned about what is happening in the Walbran.”

Counsel for the Wilderness Committee is arguing that the 50-metre zone buffering protesters from the logging equipment is too large and the duration of the injunction too long.

Coste told a cheering crowd outside the court that the group is standing up for the right of individuals to protest and defending the province’s forests.

“We are here in court standing up against Teal-Jones today but a ban on old-growth logging, a legislated solution to this [has] to come from the province of B.C.,” Coste said. “We need to put pressure on them.”

Legally Teal-Jones is legally permitted to log the area, but ethically and environmentally it’s wrong, said Coste said.

“We don’t have the cathedrals, the castles that other parts of the world have. These are our links back in time and they should be protected as such, as historical monuments,” he told the crowd.

“There are no replacements for theses forests, a 1,000-year-old forest takes 1,000 years to grow,” Coste said.

The province should outright ban the logging of old-growth forests and 2016 should be the year, he said.

On Dec. 21, protesters created a barricade in Duke Point in Nanaimo on to stop several trucks carrying old-growth logs from the Central Walbran, near Port Renfrew, from being shipped to the Lower Mainland. 

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Photo: Torrance Coste at a summertime Rally for the Walbran by Jamila Douhaibi