Meares Island sits at the heart of Clayoquot Sound, one of the many islands surrounding Tofino. Named in 1862 by Captain George Henry Richards in honor of the British fur trader John Meares, the island carries a much deeper history than its colonial name suggests. Opitsaht, the principal village of the Tla-o-qui-aht First Nations, has occupied the island's shore for centuries. Fort Defiance, the winter quarters that American captain Robert Gray built in 1791 to construct a sloop, once stood on the island's eastern coast. The geography features two notable peaks, Lone Cone and Mount Colnett, both visible landmarks for anyone navigating the sound. The island is accessible only by boat or water taxi from Tofino, a short crossing that delivers visitors into one of the last major tracts of unlogged temperate rainforest on the west coast.

When MacMillan Bloedel announced plans to log Meares Island, the response united two movements that did not always see eye to eye. The Nuu-chah-nulth people, specifically the Tla-o-qui-aht and the Ahousaht, asserted that the island was part of their traditional territory, never ceded by treaty. Environmental organizations, including Greenpeace and Friends of Clayoquot Sound, joined them in opposition. Together, they erected a blockade that physically prevented logging crews from reaching the island. Both sides pursued legal action. The court's ruling was unprecedented in British Columbia: because the Nuu-chah-nulth had filed a territorial claim that remained unresolved, no development could proceed on Meares Island until that claim was settled. It was the first time the province had been overruled on a land claims issue, establishing a precedent that would echo through subsequent disputes over Indigenous rights and resource extraction across the province.

The legal victory did not end the conflict so much as transform it. According to accounts documented in the environmental manual Ecodefense, opponents of logging spiked thousands of trees on Meares Island, driving metal into the trunks to make them dangerous to saw. Tree spiking is a controversial tactic, condemned by the forestry industry as eco-terrorism and defended by some environmentalists as a last resort against irreversible destruction. On Meares Island, it served as a kind of insurance policy alongside the legal injunction, a physical deterrent layered over a judicial one. The combination worked. The old-growth forest that MacMillan Bloedel had planned to cut in the 1980s remained intact through the decades of legal and political maneuvering that followed.

Since June 2024, large portions of Meares Island have been covered by two new protected areas: the Wanacas-Hilhuuis Conservancy and the Tulpic Conservancy, adding formal provincial conservation status to the de facto protection the island has enjoyed since the 1984 injunction. The Tla-o-qui-aht community at Opitsaht continues to live on the island as they have for generations. Visitors who make the water-taxi crossing from Tofino can hike through groves of ancient cedar, the bark furrowed with age, the canopy so dense that the forest floor exists in permanent twilight. Meares Island is proof that a blockade, a court ruling, and the stubbornness of people who refused to watch their forest fall can be as effective as any act of parliament.