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"Our mission is to inspire conservation of the world's temperate rain forest," says Gordon Patterson, an American expat who in 1999 turned his five-hectare private property into the non-profit Tofino Botanical Gardens, and this summer unveiled the Clayoquot Field Station, a kind of hostel for students, researchers and anyone interested in learning about the region.

Patterson's new field station couldn't be more timely: With the B.C. government announcing earlier this month that it has reopened logging throughout Clayoquot Sound — ending a 1999 agreement that put the area's pristine watershed off limits — public interest in local conservation has spiked once more.

The $1.5-million facility opened in June to provide affordable accommodation in a town where a booming real-estate market has pushed an acre of empty ocean-front property over the million-dollar mark. With its basic bunk rooms, communal kitchen, classroom facilities and $32-a-night rates, Patterson says his field station is inspired by a similar facility he visited in a biosphere reserve in Costa Rica.

The idea, he says, is to provide a place where rain-forest research and education can flourish. "It's getting so expensive to stay out here that we've had Masters students and senior researchers camping out for months in order to do their work," he says.

While four of the 32 bunks will always be reserved for researchers, the station is open to all. The two-night Clayoquot 101 program is a particular bargain for learning-oriented travellers — the $89 price tag includes accommodation, a tour of the gardens and rain forest, a naturalist-guided bird walk through the Tofino mudflats, and an evening lecture by a local scientist or visiting scholar.

Like Patterson, almost everyone you run into in Tofino is from "away," and shows a streak of Clayoquot conservationism when you scratch the surface. The wonderful waiter who delivers your perfect Dungeness crab cake at the upscale Long Beach Lodge is also a local filmmaker (producer of Filling Days: People of the West Coast, which celebrates local indigenous culture) and is the proprietor of the local Groovy Movie store. The former Edmonton family who owns the stunning Pacific Sands Beach Resort is pioneering eco-friendly accommodation and green geothermal energy, gardening with native plants, and sponsoring educational initiatives such as the local Rain Forest Interpretive Centre (RIC). The town is loaded with other environmentally- and health-conscious businesses, too, from organic groceries, bakeries and juice bars to retailers like Fibre Options, dedicated to reducing the pressure on ancient forests by promoting alternative fibres like hemp and organic cotton.

Even as developers move in to build multi-million-dollar homes, and young surfers arrive in hordes to catch the big West Coast waves, there seems to be an understanding that Clayoquot Sound comes first. "Nearly a million people a year now visit Tofino, swelling the summer population from 1,500 to 20,000," says Marcia Moncur, an interpreter at the RIC. "We are here to promote awareness and understanding of this unique natural environment, whether it's the annual migration of grey whales, endangered plants in the rain forest, or the tidal mudflats that are feeding areas for migratory birds.

"This is part of the largest remaining tract of temperate rain forest in the world and although we are a non-advocacy organization, we are here to teach people about this very special place on Earth."

It was in 2000 that UNESCO declared Clayoquot Sound's 350,000, hectares of mountains, valleys, marine areas and islands British Columbia's first biosphere reserve, a designation which doesn't actually protect an area from development, but rather recognizes it as a sort of a poster child for sustainable growth.

In Tofino, that translates into a protected core area (110,000 hectares of parks and ecological reserves, including Pacific Rim National Park), a 60,000-hectare buffer zone where sustainable resource extraction is allowed, and a 180,000-hectare transition area, including communities and their inherent commercial activities. The biosphere reserve status gives local groups — from the Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations to the Clayoquot Sound Science Panel, the Central Region Board, and private sector interests — a formal framework for balancing environmental and economic interests to create a sustainable economy within a protected natural area.

Not to say there aren't still issues here. Tofino wears its activist badge on its sleeve, proud to be the site of the largest single act of peaceful civil disobedience in Canadian history. When more than 850 students, grandmothers, First Nations leaders and other Friends of Clayoquot Sound (FOCS) were arrested in 1993 in a blockade to stop logging on Meares Island, they put this isolated town on the activist map.

The FOCS office is still operating in downtown Tofino, where you can stop in to talk to the people who continue to lobby governments and corporations to end logging in the region. They have also taken up new Clayoquot causes, campaigning against the proliferation of salmon farms in the area and promoting the use of paper products which are free of ancient and endangered forest fibre.

Their methods are more sophisticated than sit-ins and blockades, but the message is the same. "We're still here, working on the same issues," says Diego Garcia, a young FOCS staffer, sitting behind a desk cluttered with paperwork. "In terms of Clayoquot Sound, logging is still happening and we keep plugging away to get a moratorium, trying to find different and creative ways of doing it.

Garcia's work took on a new urgency with the B.C. government's recent logging announcement. "We are hopeful that this will not come to another conflict scenario," Garcia says, recalling the 10,000 people who stood on logging blockades here in the early 1990s. "There were some anxious moments, but we have met with First Nations representatives who assure us there will be no logging in the pristine valleys any time soon."

The FOCS office has been deluged with "a huge outpouring" of support since the announcement, he adds. "We share certain values and goals with the First Nations, in that we want the ecological integrity of Clayoquot Sound to be maintained and they must be consulted before anyone fires up a chainsaw," he says. "The main thing now is that the province, and the federal government, need to become engaged and act on the majority opinion. Even the Science Panel, the author of the current recommendations, say the pristine valleys need to be set aside."

It's always a struggle to balance business and conservation but it's inspiring to visit a community like this, where the big picture has such a prominent place on the local agenda, and where people are proud to fight for it. "Preserving the old growth is a game you don't ever win," says Patterson, "but we're helping people recognize that what we have here has global significance. The Clayoquot Field Station is an important first step in the development of a research and education sector as part of Tofino's new regional economy."

Special to The Globe and Mail