It took a village to save Langley's Blaauw Eco Forest from becoming another Fraser Valley development
Credit to Author: Gordon McIntyre| Date: Fri, 24 Jan 2020 22:12:17 +0000
Tall western hemlocks share the real estate with an enormous black cottonwood, thriving western red cedars and shore pines, most of them at least 100 years old, in one of the few remaining patches of such an established forest in the Lower Mainland.
In their place could easily have been faux Corinthian columns rising from the ground in yet another Fraser Valley housing development. But, thanks to Langley philanthropist Ann Blaauw and some serendipity, that didn’t happen.
Blaauw donated more than $5 million to Trinity Western University for it to purchase the biodiverse land, now called the Blaauw Eco Forest, in the Township of Langley. It will remain in its natural state in perpetuity, administered by Trinity Western.
“A lot of these places get lost through political and industrial and commercial ventures,” said Phil Henderson, an environmental consultant. “Without Ann’s contribution, it would have been lost to development.”
Blaauw donated $3 million in 2012, then chipped in the rest of the $5 million last summer for an additional six hectares to bring the total to 20 hectares. She also donated $125,000 for the building of new trails and a boardwalk.
A documentary on the forest recently premiered at TWU, tying the ribbon, as it were, on the project.
Ann and her husband, Thomas Blaauw, met near the Glen Valley forest in 1958 and married in 1960. They bought a chicken farm, then established one of the first cranberry farms in the township.
The nearby woods, then known as McLennan Forest, always beckoned to Thomas, Ann said.
“We drove by it many times,” she said. “Thomas liked the land, he liked the forest. At the time he was alive, it was never for sale. When he passed away (at 75 in 2012), it did come up for sale.
“It meant a lot to him. We’re retired farmers, we made our money in Langley, so we spend it in Langley.”
Ann sold farmland she owned to pay for the forest, which the township had acquired in the 1930s and left untouched. In late 2011, the township deemed the forest to be “excess to its needs” and decided to sell the land to raise money.
The land could have been sold to a developer for more money, but the township gave Blaauw a deal. The various players in saving the forest give kudos to Mayor Jack Froese for changing course.
“Well, we heard from the community fast that this land, this forest, was very important to the people who lived around here and to the greater Township of Langley community,” Froese has said.
Ann Blaauw by the stone honouring her late husband Thomas. The couple farmed land next to what is now the Blaauw Eco-Forest from 1960 onward, and after Thomas’s death in 2012 Ann paid $5 million to buy the land off the Township of Langley so it will remain a 50-acre patch of forest in perpetuity.
A stone dedicated to Thomas Blaauw sits in the forest by one of the newly refurbished trails, now accessible to wheelchairs and strollers. It reads, in part: “A good life, a simple life, that’s what he led.”
The forest is a handy resource for TWU biology, ecology and geography students, who have a living lab virtually out their back door. Environmentalists and students have discovered the forest is home to several at-risk species, as defined by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
The preserved area, which will cover 20 hectares once a gravel pit is reclaimed, is home to mosses rare to the Langley area and to a tiny liverwort not generally seen locally. The biodiversity includes a pond and Guirrhoorn Bog, the name a mash-up of the surnames of the TWU students who discovered it — Beth Guirr and Karen Eenkoorn.
In all, more than 200 species of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and plants have been identified in the forest so far.
When the parcel was put up for sale in 2012, Kirk Robertson and a few others formed Watchers of Langley Forest, or WOLF, a non-profit society, to save it from being razed.
“To be honest, I wasn’t that familiar (with the forest) even though I live just a few blocks away and have my whole life,” Robertson said. “But once I knew it was for sale and went and looked at it, I just thought it was crazy the township wasn’t considering any of the environmental value.”
Two decades earlier, Robertson’s dad opposed a township plan to cut down some of the trees to gain access to gravel.
“I guess you could say at the time I felt they were messing with part of my father’s legacy,” he said.
Environmental consultant Henderson and the late Glenn Ryder, a legendary self-taught naturalist from Aldergrove, approached WOLF with a meticulous species study they’d carried out in the forest.
“It’s a remnant of low-elevation mature forest,” Henderson said. “It’s kind of isolated and it’s fairly big so some of the features within the forest are isolated from outside influences such as temperature, wind and sun, human activity.”
Trail map of the Blaauw Eco Forest.
When Capt. José María Narváez in 1791 and Capt. George Vancouver in 1792 first set eyes on Vancouver, they didn’t see the natural beauty we take for granted today as we peer at the Coast Mountains.
They saw treasure, resources to be exploited.
“And people still do,” Henderson said. “There are other sites that exist and only will become known once they’re either developed or preserved, and unfortunately most of them are getting developed.
“If these areas aren’t preserved through pressure, and people, and benevolence such as the Blaauw family, and public awareness, and WOLF’s actions, and Glenn Ryder’s contribution, we lose these lands.”
Or as poet Susan McCaslin, who lives in Glen Valley just east of Fort Langley, puts it: It took a village.
Ann Blaauw first heard of the forest’s for-sale sign thanks to the efforts of McCaslin and other artists who publicized its imminent sale for development.
“My husband Mark and I heard the township was going to sell it to raise capital funds to build a recreation centre,” McCaslin said. “So we went to look at it, strolling under a canopy of Douglas fir, western red cedar, hemlock; stepping over maidenhair, sword and licorice (ferns).
“And I thought, what might an artist do to save this?”
McCaslin, who has had 15 collections of poems published, turned to other Canadian and American poets and artists, especially those who had produced works celebrating the intrinsic value of wild habitats such as the Carmanah Valley on Vancouver Island.
“I decided my contribution would be to organize an afternoon of art and activism in the forest.”
It drew people from all walks of life, including famed naturalist and painter Robert Bateman.
“He said, ‘I can’t believe they want to log this in order to build a recreation centre over in Aldergrove,’ then he pointed down to the earth and went: ‘This is a rec centre right here.’”
That led McCaslin to what she called the Han Shan poetry project, named after a 10th-century Chinese monk who wrote “zesty” poems. The Han Shan project attracted attention from poets around the world.
If you thought you’d never see a poem as lovely as a tree (apologies to Joyce Kilmer), imagine more than 200 poems tied to trees in the forest by ribbons, poems from across Canada, the U.S., Mexico, Turkey, Australia and the U.K.
“The arts are not ineffective,” she said. “Poetry did make something happen.”
Kirk Robertson and Susan McCasilin of WOLF (Watchers of Langley Forest), on the refurbished trails of the Blaauw Eco Forest.
In a way, the preservation of the forest is a playbook for how other wooded gems can be saved.
How rare are these types of forests in the Lower Mainland?
“The answer is that they are rarer now than in the past, especially in the western part of our region,” Joe Foy of the Wilderness Committee said. “To the east there are certainly more Fraser Valley forests, but as urban development spreads, these forests are disappearing.
“And as local forests go, so go the local wildlife.”
Foy grew up on a hectare of bushland in Surrey. A scan of Google Earth shows the area covered in homes today, but as late as 1998 the forest of his childhood still stood, several hundred hectares of it.
“What we have today is not a shortage of forests. What we have is a shortage of ways to protect the forests that we have left. We need to fix that or we are going to lose one of the things that makes this place special to live in, our urban forests.”
The power of the Blaauw Eco Forest story, Foy said, is it shows that people want urban forests protected. We should build on that success, he said, perhaps using the Agricultural Land Reserve as a model.
David Jordan, a tree scientist at Trinity Western, was another who was on board early, teaming with WOLF. He and his students have measured the ages of the trees in the forest — 80 to 125 years for most of the trees, well over 160 years for some shore pine, and somewhere between 200 and 400 years for a majestic black cottonwood, the centrepiece of the forest.
“It’s an impressive array in a forest this size,” Jordan said. “It’s distinct because there just isn’t much intact forest like it left in our Fraser Valley.”
And while they haven’t taken all the trees and put ’em in a tree museum (yet), breakneck development is rapidly eating up natural forested land, Jordan said, especially in Langley Township.
“it’s just crazy out here right now, the development. So these parcels of forest that are so rich in biodiversity are becoming exceedingly rare.”
To McCaslin, the poet, the forest is mystical. To those at Trinity Western, it’s a patch of Eden, a “natural Creation” laboratory.
“It’s a neat term that gives a tip of the hat to the more spiritual side of the forest,” Jordan said. “It’s a place many people will go just for some peace and quiet, a little bit of solitude.
“A place to get away from all the hustle and bustle.”
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