685 000 Square kilometers of forest protected by Pact

Finally! I've been dying to hear something like this. To be clear, there's 300 000 square K where logging is outright banned and 385000 where there are strict conservation guidelines. This is actually shocking to me. The current government is led by evil manifest- I hear it from a reliable source that when Harper looks at a baby, it dies. I guess this isn't a governmental decision, but the trend has definitely been toward profit at any cost.

Here's an interesting angle of it, though :
"Under the agreement, unveiled on 18 May in Toronto, Ontario, 21 members of the Forest Products Association of Canada, which represents the majority of companies in the Canadian logging industry, will set aside slightly less than half of the land for which they hold leases across seven provinces. In exchange, nine environmental groups, including Greenpeace and the Nature Conservancy, have pledged to suspend do-not-buy campaigns against the loggers' products, which range from construction lumber to toilet paper, and to actively endorse them. "

So now environmental agencies are bound to endorse companies that are in many ways still in violation of environmental principals.
Weird. Which is more important, really? Is this selling out? Either way, it's a victory and good news is hard to come by these days (in my admittedly somewhat cynical outlook).

Peace!