Clayoquot Lives

Clayoquot Lives is an online archive of materials related to the 1993 Peace Camp in Clayoquot Sound, Canada.

In the summer of 1993, thousands of people came to Clayoquot Sound (pronounced “klak-wat”), on the West Coast of Vancouver Island, in British Columbia, Canada to protest the clear-cut logging of temperate rainforest.

Local environmental organisation, The Friends of Clayoquot Sound, set up a peace camp based on the principles of non-violent civil disobedience, with daily workshops teaching consensus decision-making and the practice of non-violence, to support activists in early morning blockades of the logging road into Clayoquot Sound.

During Clayoquot Summer '93 over 800 people were arrested in one of the largest acts of non-violent civil disobedience in Canadian history.

The Clayoquot Lives archive includes 30 in-depth oral history interviews with activists connected to the 1993 peace camp, as well as photographs and other historical documents. Clayoquot was much in the news at the time, and this archive offers unprecedented insight into how this campaign emerged and how a seemingly small place loomed large in efforts to reimagine a more sustainable world, in ways which transformed forest politics in Canada and beyond, and changed the lives of those who were involved.