Introduction

In the summer of 1993, local environmental organisation, the Friends of Clayoquot Sound (FOCS), set up a peace camp to support blockades of a logging road into an area of coastal temperate rainforest (Figure 13.1). Clayoquot Sound (pronounced ‘klak-wat’) is part of the traditional territory of the Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations. Though more commonly known as the West Coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, in Canada, this is land which is unceded territory and has never been the subject of any treaties with the Canadian government. Hence it is land over which the Canadian state has no rightful or even legal jurisdiction, but where the logics of settler colonialism enable dispossession of Indigenous peoples from land and the ongoing extractive industry of deforestation. In this complex context, activists created a peace camp in a site named as ‘the black hole’, as a ‘moonscape’ (Figure 13.2), a reference to the fact that the land had been clear-cut, and that the practice of tree-planting clear-cut areas had not been successful. The camp was in a bleak landscape, tents pitched wherever a relatively flat and even piece of ground could be found, between the stumps of trees, and along the side of a rough logging road. New arrivals at the camp were offered workshops teaching consensus decision-making and the practice of non-violence to support the protest of civil disobedience in the early morning blockades of the logging road. Over the course of the summer of 1993 over 12,000 people passed through the camp and over 800 people were arrested, in one of the largest acts of non-violent civil disobedience in Canadian history. The camp offered a creative and inspiring site of the kind of prefigurative politics to which many chapters in this volume testify, intervening in forest policy and creating an alternative way of living and working together, complete with compost toilets (see also Chapter 8 by Haran in this volume) and a fine view over the devastation of the clear-cut.

I spent a few weeks at the camp in 1993, and was arrested there during the daily blockades of logging roads.