ANCIENT FOREST ALLIANCE
Protecting our elders
We take photos to capture cherished memories; activist and photographer TJ Watt is using the medium to save the planet’s ancient woodlands TJ Watt’s latest photo series is a story of two halves. In the first, the nature photographer stands beside the giant ancient cedars of the Caycuse Valley in southern Vancouver Island, Canada, on a clear blue-skied day. The second half tells a darker story. We see Watt posing against the same backdrop, but now the thousandyear-old trees have been cut down to their stumps. The Canadian began his Caycuse Before & After project with one aim: to draw attention to the deforestation of British Columbia’s oldest trees. “You 20
can’t argue with what you’re seeing,” says Watt. “[This is] the destruction of one of the grandest ecosystems on Earth.” An environmental activist and self-proclaimed “big tree hunter”, Watt has been recording the activity of the logging industry in the Caycuse Valley for the past year, finding old-growth trees marked to be cut and capturing them before and after. “I had to measure how far away I was from each spot, record which lens I was using, and GPS where each tree was,” he says. “Then, when I THE RED BULLETIN
