Taylor Roades (b. 1990) is a Canadian documentary photographer based in Victoria, British Columbia. Her work is grounded in place and the natural sciences, exploring our connection to land, culture, climate and the environment.






































































  
         


                   04.Canada’s Forgotten Rainforest

Photographed: July 2019
Location: Prince George, British Columbia, CA
Environment and Climate

Published: The Narwhal, August 2020
Writer: Sarah Cox
Winner: Silver Digital Publishing Awards Best Photo Storytelling 

Less than one-third of the world’s primary forests are still intact. Deep in the interior of British Columbia, a temperate rainforest that holds vast stores of carbon and is home to endangered caribou is being clear-cut as fast as the Amazon. 

Please click on the image for captions.
A grove of ancient cedar trees in B.C.’s rare inland temperate rainforest. Some cedars in this globally unique forest are estimated to be more than 1,500 years old. What little remains of the unprotected rainforest is now slated to be logged.
The Inland Temperate Rainforest holds one of the highest diversity of Lichen on the planet. Including oceanic species so far from the coast their presence is “almost inconceivable.” Says Scientist Trevor Goward.
Clear cut logging in the Anzac River Valley. The valley bottom, where caribou migrate to find lichen during deep-snow winters, is also slated to be logged.
Rusted piping and metal debris left behind when Canfor’s Upper Fraser mill closed.
Thousands of spruce and balsam fir logs are piled at Canfor’s Polar Mill near Prince George, British Columbia. 
Forest ecologist Michelle Connolly sits in front of a slash pile in B.C.’s inland rainforest, one of the rarest ecosystems on the planet. Logging contractors attempted to burn this pile and others but were stymied by wet weather. Trees grow to be many hundreds of years old in this rainforest because fire can’t gain a foothold.
Canfor sawmill in Prince George, British Columbia. Prince George is home to three pulp mills, a paper mill, seven lumber mills, a chip mill, a pole and post mill and two pellet mills.

But, with few forests left to fill the shrinking fibre basket, forestry giant Canfor — which since 2006 has purchased a dozen plants in southern U.S. states. It recently announced it will reduce operations at two Prince George pulp mills and at sawmills in Prince George and Mackenzie.

The company also plans to close its sawmill in Vavenby, putting more than 170 people out of work.
A new road being carved into the old-growth inland temperate rainforest east of Prince George, B.C., in preparation for logging.
“It was a rainforest. Now it’s a wasteland.”

says Dr. Dominic DellaSala, president and chief scientist at the Geos Institute in Ashland, Oregon, a partner in an international project to map the world’s most important unlogged forests.
A black bear rests beside a logging road cut through the inland temperate rainforest.
The new boundaries of an old-growth management area (OGMA) are marked with orange spray paint along the Fraser Flats forest service road in B.C.’s inland temperate rainforest. In B.C., old-growth management area boundaries can be moved to accommodate logging, with no requirement that the amount of forest lost be replaced elsewhere.
The inside of a tree burnt from the inside that eventually burnt itself out. Trees can grow quite old here because the landscape is so wet.