Betty Joreen Shiver Krawczyk: Aug. 4, 1928 - May 9, 2025
When the friendly fellow from a small Vancouver Island logging company sold Betty Krawczyk a four-hectare remote property in Clayoquot Sound for her latest bold adventure, he assured her that the clearcut mountains surrounding her new homestead would soon be green with new growth. She took his word for it; what did a transplanted Louisiana girl know about clearcutting? But time passed and the forest didn’t return, Ms. Krawczyk recalled in a 1996 oral history she recorded for the Ecofeminist Story Web. The winter rains brought landslides, cutting savage trenches down the naked hillsides and destroying a creek near her homestead. Ms. Krawczyk was horrified but took comfort knowing that the B.C. New Democratic Party was now in power, having won the 1991 provincial election. Surely the NDP would stop the clearcutting, she thought. “I was in Mississippi visiting my mother when I received the newsletter from the Friends of Clayoquot saying no, the NDP would not be stopping the clearcuts,” Ms...