Tree huggers vs. tree cutters: logging in Clayoquot Sound

This paper looks at the conflict between environmentalists and MacMillian-Bloedel over the logging of Clayoquot Sound on Vancouver Island, British Columbia (BC) and attempts to model the situation using conflict analysis and hypergame analysis. There are three major decision makers involved in this conflict, environmentalists, loggers, and the BC Government. The paper ascertains the possible options of each decision maker, eliminates infeasible outcomes and constructs an outcome table from the remaining outcomes. After the preference vectors are established for the decision makers, stabilities are calculated for each individual decision maker as well as for the overall game model. Sensitivity analysis and hypergame analysis are also performed on the model. Conflict resolutions obtained from the model parallelled to the actions taken by the decision makers in the real word situation, which confirms the utility of these techniques