Demonstrators Defending Old-growth in Fairy Creek, BC

While the northern light (Aurora) is considered the spirits of the ancestors celebrating, the forests for indigenous people are the churches, mosques and synagogues.

This paper will study practices of plantation and logging , in the past and recent future and their impact on indigenous communities and their sacred lands.

While mass timber construction advocates for renewable more sustainable ways to design, construct, build and live, the very product of mass timber is a controversial conversation between forest idealists (forest preservers) and wood materialists (logging companies and big corporations).

Tree plantation sites was an experiment that showed a lot of promise in managing the trees, managing expectation of quantity, quality and duration of wood production.

How much product and when the product is harvested were all statistically determined which made the economical process more predictable. On the other hand, and with scientific evolvement, we learned more about what a tree takes to grow, the ecosystem it needs to flourish and what a tree can give to the ecosystem in return.  Just like a child can grow outside of a family but a family is needed for a child to flourish to their full potential.

Forests are like indigenous communities. A tree needs an ecosystem and the ecosystem needs the tree just like an indigenous community where individuality doesn’t mean as much as the entity and entirety of the community.

While wood is the future in the building and construction industry, trees come from the very home of many communities around the world and create the lungs of our planet earth and a large carbon reserve.

Aboriginal forestry can be the way to go. Inhabitants of the home (forest), managing the home with land ethic and fundamental principles of their beliefs. One example is the Tl’azt’en Nation who owns and operates Tanizul Timber Ltd.

Ethical Logging & Eco-colonialism is a project of IAAC, Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia developed at MMTD in 2021/2022 by student Soubhi Mobassaleh. Faculty: Daniel Ibanez. Course: MMTD01 – Narratives