I’ve walked this loop in Stanley Park for twenty years. It’s one of those routes that almost lives in the body — I know where the roots cross the path, where the light shifts in late afternoon, where the trail widens enough to let people pass. My partner and I have had hundreds of conversations here: about owls, about foamflower, about what to have for dinner. It’s comforting in the way only a longstanding ritual can be.
This time, though, something was off. There were trees down, the whine of saws somewhere ahead. There was flagging tape and sawdust where there should have been damp soil and hikers’ tracks. Freshly cut hemlock has a particular smell, and it doesn’t belong — emotionally at least — in a forest you’ve always experienced as ancient and whole. My first reaction was protective and not entirely rational: Who authorized this? What are they doing?
The deeper we walked, the more it looked — at first glance — like a clearcut. Stumps, churned soil, raw cross-sections glowing orange against moss and fern. It was upsetting. Viscerally so.
And then I remembered last spring. We had noticed the hemlocks browning out, whole sections of them. It was a western hemlock looper moth infestation, coupled with drought stress. We saw dead crowns, needles fallen, looking like puffs of smoke in a parched forest. I had read about it; I knew it was serious. What I hadn’t grasped was the scale. Seeing it on the ground — the sheer number of trees — was sobering in a way a news article never is.
The decision to log them out was anything but quiet. In Vancouver, nothing like this ever is.
There were court challenges, protests, accusations of ecological vandalism. For some, this was a reckless overreach dressed up as safety management. For others, it was necessary wildfire risk reduction in a changing climate.
I’m not qualified to judge whether every call was right. Forest management in a warming world is complicated, and urban forests are even more so. But what struck me on that walk wasn’t the policy nor the practice of it. It was the feeling of trying to make sense of what we were seeing.
You see, as we moved further into the affected area, I started noticing details that didn’t fit the narrative of destruction that my emotions had initially supplied.
Some trunks weren’t cut at the base. They’d been topped high in the air, leaving tall columns standing. Habitat snags, I assumed — perches and nesting sites for woodpeckers and bats. The cuts were irregular, jagged, almost mimicking natural breakage rather than the clean, flat face of industrial extraction. I found myself looking up, which is not what you do when you’re angry.
Many of the felled trees hadn’t been hauled away.
Logs lay across the forest floor, bark intact, already beginning their slow return to soil. Nurse logs, most likely — the next generation’s seedbed. The forest did not look erased. It looked disrupted. Transitioning.
And yet the only sign on the trail read:
“Danger. Trail Closed. Do Not Enter.”
That was it. No interpretation. No explanation of what had happened—nor of how they are trying to mitigate the loss. No acknowledgement of what walkers were seeing. No framing of why hemlocks had failed, or why some trunks were left standing, or what to look for as the forest reassembled itself.
Squatting beside one of the larger cross-sections, the scale of the operation’s impact hit me.
That tree dwarfed me. Its rings told a story of decades — light, rain, quiet growth — now abruptly ended. When something that large disappears from a place people love, a strong reaction is not hysteria. It’s attachment.
And attachment is an asset.
The walkers I pass every time — the birders, the retirees, the dog owners, the families who take the same loop week after week — are not casual users. They are the park’s most loyal champions. They are its daily witnesses. They are the ones who notice when a canopy shifts or a trail edge erodes. They are also the people most likely to defend the park when it is threatened.
On that morning, they were given no story to hold onto. Just sawdust and a warning sign. Sure, I was able to piece it together… but I have more context than most, as past president of the park’s ecological society. I imagine some of the park’s most loyal visitors and advocates just felt blindsided.
A little bit of interpretation could have changed all of that.
Interpretation is not decoration. It is not something you add once the “real work” is done. In moments like this, it is the real work. It is how institutions speak to the people who care most deeply about a place. It is how you transform disruption into understanding, and understanding into trust.
Sure, there were press releases and web pages about the whole thing. But there was nothing here, on the ground, in the forest, where the emotional weight of it all is crying out for some kind of sense-making.
A simple panel at the trailhead, a few signs on the trail describing the rationale behind it all could have gone so far to add meaning to what walkers were seeing. It could have explained the looper moth infestation, the drought stress, the wildfire risk. It could have pointed out the standing snags and the nurse logs and invited people to look up, and down, and notice.
It would not have eliminated disagreement. But it would have respected the community’s love—and ability to understand.
Sometimes the most useful work interpretation does is helping people move from “What are they doing?” to “I think I get it.” And in a park like Stanley Park, that shift matters.
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