for National Geographic News After more than ten years of
dispute, government, industry, environmental, and indigenous
groups in British Columbia (see map) agreed last month to create
a massive new wilderness preserve. The Great Bear Rainforest
lies within a 15.5-million-acre (6.3-million-hectare) region of
steep-sided fjords and islands along the Canadian province's
Pacific coast. Under the deal, the new park's 4.4 million acres
(1.8 million hectares)nearly twice as large as Yellowstone
National Parkare off limits to loggers and largely closed to
mining exploration. Logging companies can fell trees in a
sustainable manner over the rest of the region. "[The agreement
is] a living process, which I don't think is ever finished. But
in today's terms, I think we have balance," said Gordon
Campbell, premier of British Columbia. According to tribal
legend, a godlike creator in the form of a raven turned one of
every ten black bears white to remind humankind how clean the
Earth was during the Ice Age. These "spirit