From Appalachia to The Netherlands to the Canadian Rainforest
  

In 2006, Dr. Bettina van Hoven, a cultural geographer from the University of Groningen, The Netherlands invited OLP producers Jean Andrews and Steve Fetsch to come to Holland where we led a video documentary workshop for Dr. van Hoven's graduate students.  Our job was to show them how to make a documentary in the style of our oral history video, 'A Forest Returns: The Success Story of Ohio's Only National Forest' as told by Ora Anderson'.

Inspired by Appalachian Narrator Ora Anderson's story and how it was told on the movie screen, the Dutch producers subsequently travelled to Canada and produced their own environmental video documentary.  Ora Anderson's passion for preservation and beauty of our natural world continues to inspire others to tell their stories using video.  Anderson's inspiration has gone global! 

'A Forest for the Future' explores the human-nature conflict surrounding the establishment of the Great Bear Rainforest in western Canada.  In 2006, newspapers around the world announced groundbreaking conservation plans for an area roughly the size of West Virginia, situated along the coast of British Columbia, stretching from northern Vancouver Island to the Alaskan border.  At 6.5 million hectares (16 million acres), the Great Bear Rainforest is one of the last and largest remaining intact temperate rainforests in the world.  The announcement was said to end the 'war in the woods', which captured media attention from 1997 onward, when remote Roderick Island became the scene of a confrontation between environmentalists and the logging industry.

 The Great Bear Rainforest includes over 100 unlogged watersheds, sustains 20 percent of the world's wild salmon population, and supports extraordinary biodiversity.  It is home to 68 different mammal species, genetically distinct wolf populations, numerous bear species including the endemic white Kermode bear and a wealth of botanical resources.  It is the home territory of 24 First Nations groups who have inhabited the region for more than 10,000 years.