Raincoast FlightIan McAllister and his wife Karen founded and
direct the Raincoast Conservation Society, a group of activists working to slow
the destruction of the British Columbia rainforests. They live on a tiny island
on the edge of the Pacific, accessible only by boat or plane. Together, they
wrote and photographed. The Great Bear Rainforest, a book of compelling words
and images about the land they love and work tirelessly to protect. It is an
area of incredible diversity: grizzly bears, whales, salmon, bald eagles and
forests of huge trees tucked between the ocean and the coastal mountain ranges.
A number of their photographs have inspired Heron Dance art.
Q: So how are you doing?
A: I’m doing pretty well. The sun has finally started shining here…It
rained for nine days, but now things are drying out.
Q: Could you start, Ian, by talking a little bit about what it is that you
do, how you see the work you do.
A: Sure. That’s one of those difficult questions. (laughs) People often
ask us, “What exactly do you do?” and it’s hard to answer that
because I guess, we’re doing lots of different things on many different
levels. In terms of the work, the conservation work we do, we’re involved
in the whole spectrum of events that we’re trying to facilitate change
and make meaningful change on the ground so it involves political work, lobbying
politicians. It involves mapping work, mapping out grizzly bear habitat. It
involves community work, youth education, working with communities to get away
from, say, destructive logging practices or maybe sport hunting of carnivores.
We’re involved in public education and we’re involved in scientific
research, trying to learn more about eco-systems and the life forms that are
supported by the temperate rain forests and our marine environment. So, we’re…there’s
many different aspects to the work we do.
At many levels we’re doing the work that the Canadian government should
be doing itself; should have been doing it for a long time. I think...to better
understand these areas and the cycles, the ecological cycles that exist here
and find a way to bring that to the general public so that more educated decisions
can be made. That encompasses all kinds of things as you can imagine.
Q: And how difficult is the battle, so to speak, in the sense that how willing
are they to listen?
A: We seem to have gone through a similar change in politics that you have south
of us. The extreme shift to the right and the almighty dollar at the expense
of the environment seems to be very much the case here. Most of the land use
issues and wildlife issues and most of the substantive issues concerning the
environment are in provincial hands. That would be in your state hands. And
so right now with the government that we have, with the massive conservative
majority, we’ve got virtually no political protection of the environment.
Canada doesn’t have endangered species legislation. We don’t have
any political means to affect environmental change. So we’re very much
forced to go through the court systems, to work with local communities, or to
go the international marketplace to exert pressure on Canada. I think this is
one of the most unfortunate aspects of conservation work in B.C., and in Canada
in general.
We have to go abroad — we have to ask the world for help.
It’s very similar to people working in sweatshops in Southeast Asia and
South America. The changes are largely happening through international condemnation
by other countries, by scrutiny of their practices. If it’s Mitsubishi
and the Amazon, it’s pressure on Mitsubishi and pressure on maybe Japan
that is causing the significant changes in the Amazon. It’s not necessarily
from the Amazon government itself.
It’s very similar here. It’s not a hidden agenda by the provincial
government. Their stated intent is just to convert these old forests into tree
farms. And it’s to extract money from these areas any way possible.
I live in a remote area. We live on a little, tiny island on the edge of the
Pacific, only accessible by boat or by plane. All my neighbors…they are
small-time fishermen, or hand-loggers, that sort of thing, can only get to our
house by boat. And yet the policy that affects this region is coming out of
the capital in Victoria, out of the mindset that this is an area where people
don’t live. It’s just an area where resources can be extracted. On
the one hand, you want to tell the world that this is a beautiful place and
this should be protected. And should just be left alone. And yet you’re
dealing with a country that says that the reason we have our social systems
and our health care and our education and all of these programs is because of
the raw resources that we extract out of the remote parts of Canada. And we
need to share it.
We’re in a unique situation here where we’ve got huge areas –
over ten million hectares in size when you sort of look at the great Bear Rain
Forest region, the mainland coast of Canada – very few people live here.
In fact, far more people live in southeast Alaska than they do on the mainland
coast of B.C. And there are small communities – maybe a hundred to a hundred
and fifty, largely First Nations people living in small, little, isolated areas
throughout these long fiords and inlets, outer coastal islands. And you look
at the rich marine resources: salmon and all the shellfish and the extremely
rich rainforest, large stretches of intact temperate rainforest, and you realize
that if there was a place that could truly be sustainable – I hate to use
that word these days; it’s so confused – but a place where people
could live from the land in a way that could last forever without destroying
the ecological balance it would be here.
And so people here are fighting for a way of life as they know it and life as
they would want it for their children and yet the rest of the country is saying,
“Well, that’s just not fair. We’re going down and you’re
going to go down with us.” That’s kind of the idea. So I guess when
people ask, “What do we do?” I think, in a perfect world, what I would
like to say is, we do scientific research; we do photography; and we spend all
of our time and resources and effort to better understand these magnificent
wildlife and wilderness eco-systems that we have — bears and wolves, and
all of that stuff. But it would be all for nothing if there wasn’t a social
contact or component to that work that, that we can engage people on the importance
of this bioregion. And so you very much become a social activist on many levels
and I think we would be failing miserably if we weren’t able to somehow
bring people into the struggle to protect these areas. It’s very much a
struggle for human and non-human communities alike.
Q: What else do you do, Ian?
A: I try to fix leaks on my roof. I fix docks and boats — as soon as you
put together a dock up here, you turn around, and they’re already rotting
from underneath. The rate of decay is quite something. So, yes, there is actually
quite a bit of that, just basic survival. It’s an expensive place to live
if you bought all your food. you’d have to have everything shipped in and
whatnot. So we rely a lot on the sea; we jar and smoke and can a lot of seafood,
especially salmon. We eat a lot of crabs, so there’s definitely a hunter-gatherer
component to living here. And, again, it’s based on necessity. It would
just be cost-prohibitive to live in a remote area like this without it.
Q: Do you do a lot of stock or other commercial photography?
A: No. I wish I had more time for it. I sell pictures to help pay the bills.
But I think if I had a choice, when I go out and go exploring or hiking, it
would be without a camera. The novelty of taking pictures is somewhat worn off
and just all the pounds of gear and all that junk you have to carry around.
The reason I take pictures is to attempt to show people how beautiful these
areas are and it’s a way that illustrates a lot of the more academic rationale
for protecting temperate rainforest eco-systems. And we also do quite a bit
of video work; putting together documentaries on bears and wolves and the work
we’re doing and the rainforest, the people that live there.
We’re dealing with such a tiny – such a short time period to protect
these remaining river valleys. Every year we’re losing more and more of
them. Just since I became actively involved in the Great Bear Rain Forest area
on the coast here, we’ve seen over 40 large, intact river valleys become
industrial zones, roads and clear-cut, and all of that. And every few months,
another one experiences the same fate. So we’re dealing with a time issue.
And it would be great if we could say that we have time to work out a lot of
these issues so that when people realized how rare and precious these river
valleys are, and they'd want to protect them. But in order for that huge shift
in public consciousness to take place, we need to defend these places. And we
can’t expect that kind of shift to take place in the time we have, so taking
images, photography, and videos is a great medium to show people what these
places are like; people that will never get the opportunity necessarily to see
it first-hand. So it’s very much, I guess, a campaign tool. I mean, I enjoy
the photography; I love the images and what not. But I’m taking pictures
for other purposes.
Q: Aside from the work that you do, is there a reason for why you live the
way you do in terms of location and simplicity?
A: Well, I think that…I couldn’t imagine in my wildest dreams a more beautiful place to be living. If the lights went out and there was no access to the outside world, we could continue living here quite well on our own steam. And I think having that fallback plan – it always sits there at the back of your mind – is important to us, certainly. It’s also, that I’m not the kind of person, I think, would could fight for a remote area with the kind of passion that’s needed and the round-the-clock work that’s needed unless I was intimately involved in it and was living there.
I have so much respect for people who work on campaigns. Maybe they’re based in San Francisco and they’re fighting to protect the Congo, or these remote areas; places that they may have never even seen with their own eyes. I don’t think I could do that. I think I would lose interest and begin fighting for some recycling program in my back alley (laughs).
It’s also very important that we work closely with First Nations’ communities on the coast and there tends to be limiting respect by First Nations for non-Native people who come in and tell them what they should do and tell them what they should protect. They’ve had several hundred years of white people coming in and telling them how to do things, and certainly lost interest quite a long time ago. There’s a saying in Bella Bella that “If you return three times, you’re here for life,” and so we’ve been here for – just traveling around here for over ten years and it’s taken that kind of time, that period of time to build the trust and respect of the chiefs and elders. And it’s largely based on the fact that they know we’re never going to leave, that this is home and we’re fighting for home even though we’ve lived here for a relatively such a short period of time. So I think that that is another important part of living here.
Q: How big is the community you live in?
A: Well, I live on an island. There’s probably about 40 or 50 people on it, I guess. But across the way, just on another island there’s a Native community of over a thousand people. It’s quite large…it’s one of the largest Native communities.
Q: And what percentage of the people in the little place you live are white?
A: Mostly white. It’s sort of the end of the road for Canada. People who end up here realize they can’t go any farther so they just stop.
Q: What have you learned about finding happiness in life?
A: I suppose happiness is often right in front of your nose and we’re often looking much further a field for it. I suppose one of the things that I’m slowly learning is to take those few moments in a day to look around and try to look at things with a new eye and appreciate the beauty. We have such a beautiful view just from our house and I begin to take even things like that for granted. So some days you just stop and you look out and it sort of hits your heart or your insides in a powerful way. And that’s a happy moment, and that’s something that you need to take time for.
Q: What’s most difficult about this life that you’ve chosen to live?
A: We have some great elders that we work with and great older supporters who fight passionately for the protection of this area. And I think it wears hard on them when they think that they’re nearing the end of their lives here on Earth and yet they see things continually compromised and degraded in society and in the environment. It’s hard for them to know that they won’t be here much longer with so much uncertainty. I suppose humans have probably always felt that way.
I think that they feel that there’s something positive about leaving things, I guess, in our hands. The Raincoast Conservation Society is quite a young organization; most of us are in our 30’s and we all work passionately on this issue. But I think…so that’s I think is, something that we reflect on because there’s a huge amount of responsibility with that but I think it also is…is a good thing. It’s inter-generational in sort of passing the torch on and there are some positive aspects to that.
Q: How old are you?
A: I’m 33…from the environmental aspect, the most difficult part is the destruction of so many globally rare areas. I feel like I’m so young and I’ve been here for a very short period of time and yet the destruction that I’ve witnessed – it’s almost incomprehensible that it’s been done in such a short timeframe. So I think that’s probably one of the most difficult — one of the most difficult things to witness and be part of and somehow finding a way not to always feel responsible for it is, I think, one of the most difficult challenges because we always do feel responsible for it. When we’ve done everything possible to try to protect a special area, an ecological or a cultural area, and we weren’t successful. You need to find a way to move on and I haven’t probably quite found out how to do that yet so it just kind of adds to the weight I carry around.
Q: The next question I have written down here is from where or what do you get your strength, but I think you’ve answered that in part from the land or mostly from the beauty of the rain forest there and the physical surroundings, and also from the older people that you have come to know.
A: Yeah, and absolutely, there’s…especially in these small Native communities who... they’re just the most generous people on the planet. My Irish blood always tells me that, we should fight and go to war and that this is just an outrage, and I look at how the Native people here have so much patience and yet so much dignity in the face of continued genocide that Canada commits on its people and industry commits on indigenous people and I get a lot of strength from that...
Q: What brought you there in the first place? How did you get into this work? Did you just kind of stumble across this area and fall in love with it?
A: Well, I grew up on Vancouver Island, so just as a kid, I was always exploring little bays and sailing around…
Q: Where on Vancouver Island?
A: Down near Victoria. That was a place where you could go out and catch a few link cod and rock cod when I was a kid. Now there’s complete bans and closures ‘cause there’s no more rock cod. Borrowing a neighbor’s sailboats and canoes and heading out, exploring. And then after high school and then the University of Michigan, I went further up the coast exploring more and more remote areas and got involved in some forest campaigns — sitting up in trees and all of that kind of thing. And then just kept moving north.
Vancouver Island is a huge island. There are about 85 watersheds on the west coast and there are only about ten of them that are still intact. The entire east coast – east side of the island – there wasn’t a single intact river valley. The west coast had about ten. They’re working on trying to protect some of those. Then I had an opportunity to go further north, up into the central and north coast of B.C., an area that was since named the Great Bear Rain Forest, and here we started looking at some of the maps and realized that there were almost 80 large, intact river valleys, salmon, and grizzly bears and whatnot. And so…it was sort of just a northern progression of interest and love with a smaller understanding of how precious places like this were globally. For example, there’s not a single intact valley left in Washington state, California, Oregon, and southern British Columbia. Every single watershed has been bogged, eroded or dammed or subject to some form of human intrusion or industrial development.
As soon as you get into this part of the world, you suddenly are in intact valley after intact valley and you realize that there’s an extremely strong correlation to First Nations language groups still surviving. As soon as you get into intact rainforest, you have intact cultures where traditional languages are still spoken. You still have grizzly bears. You’ve still got whole flora and fauna, of assemblages of large carnivores and plant communities and communities that are still living off the land. As soon as you lose those intact valleys, the language groups go extinct, the large carnivores disappear, and communities fall into complete disrepair. So there’s a strong correlation with human health and cultural integrity, I suppose, and psychological integrity.
Q: Does anything scare you about the decisions that you’ve made to devote your life to this work and place?
A: No, I think the only regret is…not being maybe…not having…just not having enough of an army to fight these things. One of the things that’s neat about Raincoast is that it’s a group of like-minded people and, we’re able to put all the resources that we have into the work we’re doing. There’s no bureaucracy and very little administration. Our strength and our integrity lies in being smaller and able to react to issues and things like that. But I suppose, yeah, to answer the question, it would be that we wish we could do more. I suppose everyone does.
HowlQ: What does the term “a life of meaning” mean to you and how does it…if it does relate, how does it relate to the term or terms “following your leading, following your call”.
A: I’m often called upon to do presentations to politicians and it’s an incredible responsibility to have to somehow articulate such a vast landscape, such ancient cultures, and issue of such incredible importance to so many thousands of life forms. To go into a sterile office or hall somewhere and have to somehow find the passion to make people think twice about the decisions they’re making. I first try to think about standing in a river system with salmon awning at my feet. I try to come back to what it’s like to be here, and to think like some of the Native people and elders and chiefs who live here. Their blood goes back into these forests for so many thousands of years. That’s something that I try to do and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But it kind of helps steer the course a bit.
Q: What advice might you have to someone who is in their early 20’s or for that matter, in their early 50’s who wants to embark upon what might be called the life of meaning? What have you learned about living a life of meaning?
A: I don’t know. I guess I’m still trying to see if I have a life of meaning. It might be hard to give advice on that other than I know that many of the things that we’ve accomplished have been done in spite of all the advice that we’ve gotten. When we embark on an issue that’s impossible, that’s not politically expedient, that it’s this, that and the other thing, and we persevere and we’ve had some tremendous successes. Some of our greatest successes and victories have been the most outlandish projects. So I think that one has to be careful about getting. But if your heart and soul is into it and you know it’s the right thing to do, there shouldn’t be anyone that can stop you.
Q: How about the role of living a centered, balanced life in trying to do your work? Is that a challenge?
A: Yeah, it’s very much a challenge. This work is very hard on relationships. It’s very hard on everyone because everything is a crisis. We’re kind of in crisis-mode 24 hours a day and the more, the more you take on – or maybe it’s the older that we get – the more we’re taking on and there seems no end in sight. It’s not easy to say no to things. When people come to you with problems or when there are environmental issues that need to be addressed, it’s very difficult to say, “No, that’s not part of our agenda or our mandate.” It’s just very difficult to do that because, well, we’re so personally and deeply involved in this work. And yet you need to find a way to do that somehow because it just becomes so overwhelming that you’re no longer effective at even the small things.
Q: Is having the discipline to have down time, quiet time, time alone in wild places, or a contemplative or spiritual practice or just the role of silence and solitude. How much of that do you make room for and how does it affect the rest of your work, if you do?
A: I guess some part of it is that I’m living a little bit vicariously through the grounding that I received originally, ten years ago. Karen and I... we bought the sailboat in Ontario and sailed it around. We used to spend 7, 8, 9 months on our boat while virtually seeing no one, just exploring these river valleys. And just hiking and just observing grizzlies and wolves and cougars and just getting to better know this incredibly remote coastline. We would do that year after year. And that’s what formed the basis of our love and understanding, limited as it is, of the coast. So we’ve gone on from taking off 8 or 9 months a year to the point now where we’re actively working on campaigns like ending sport hunting of bears, that we take very little time off.
Q: So 8 or 9 months for how many years?
A: I guess it was about 4 or 5 years that we were able to do that. And then after about maybe 4 years, I think four seasons of that, then each year it became 7 months and then 6 and then 5. Now we live here on the ground so we’re not on our boat anymore, so in a sense, we’re here 12 months a year.
I don’t often hop in a boat, and go to a valley for a day. It’s almost too much of a tease. You need that first week to get the sounds out of your mind and start to smell again and start to hear again, and all those wonderful, wonderful senses that….
Q: And do you do that, Ian?
A: Yeah, I do, a little bit but not as much as I used to. That’s the vicarious part, I suppose (laughs). I always know or I always feel that if we can get past this next hurdle and we can just get rid of this next government, that the rest of my life will be like that again. I suppose that’s a real motivating force. Don’t tell me otherwise (laughs).
Q: Can you imagine yourself being an old man there doing that same work but also taking 2 or 3 months a year, or 5 months a year in a sailboat or a kayak or whatever.…
A: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I just…I feel so connected to this coast and to the rain and the moss and everything. The sunshine scares me now. It burns my nose. No, I can certainly see that. And I wish that everyone could spend more time in the natural world. If they did, the human world would be such a different place. This coast would be such a different place if you could get people out here to see it. That’s been actually quite a large part of our work — bringing people here, borrowing larger boats and getting politicians and decision-makers and journalists out here to see this first-hand so that they can take those experiences back with them.
Q: What I think you are saying is that if natural beauty was a central value around which people based their lives, your work would be a lot easier.
A: Absolutely. Beauty in an encompassing sense, the respect for life cycles and respect for water and respect for cultures, just general respect for life forms. People are so separated. I’m sure you come across this all the time in your work. I think one of the great contributions of Heron Dance is that you’re bringing a lot of that to people in the cities who are disconnected. Everything becomes very academic, which is hard on a lot of the spirit and passion and gut instinct. We have a great friend who sails around the coast and he always says, “If it feels right, it probably is,” and, we are just so…as a culture we always try and stay away from answering questions or pursuing thought based on what feels right. That’s unfortunate because if you could get people to be honest with themselves, and ask them the question: “Is this the right thing to do?” we’d be a lot further ahead. But, instead we got mired in science and the social layer, the ever-complex social layer, human social layer. It tends to askew things considerably.
Q: Was there an experience in your life that was a turning point, that was particularly profound, or was it just kind of a natural progression from growing up close to the ocean and then that leading to traveling and working on Vancouver Island and then further and further up the coast?
A: Yeah, I have sort of thought about that before and I can’t for the life of me think of any particular event. I think you’re right that it was a progression. I think that I was fortunate at a younger age, like in my mid-teens. I got to know some neat, beautiful people on the west coast who were living what certainly I always felt was the idyllic lifestyle where they were living in a beautiful place on the west coast somewhere, not far from the surf, and had a small boat and could always get out there. Artists and photographers and that sort of thing. People living a down-to-earth lifestyle, consuming very little but living an extremely rich lifestyle. And I remember even when I was 15 or so, looking at that and thinking, “that’s all I would ever want out of life.”
Q: Your parents didn’t indoctrinate you with the money ethic or attempt to; there was nothing to rebel against or fight in terms of career, etc.?
A: No, my father was very much an environmentalist. We sort of figured it out for ourselves just based on assimilation. I’ve traveled a little bit in Asia and different places and stuff, and I’ve seen some beautiful areas. But I just still can’t imagine anything as beautiful as this. And I suppose mainly because of the richness; here there are still fully functioning — marine and terrestrial systems. I’ve walked into the middle of a pack of wolves just five or ten minutes from here. Bears are coming out of the estuaries right now. It’s all within just a short little ride.
Everything is so beautiful here. I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. From my perspective, this is absolute heaven.
Q: Do you see big differences between the way you live now and the way those people who inspired you when you were 15 lived in the sense of the level of engagement? I mean, I see that life of living on a coast with a boat very simply as being a pretty idyllic life. I see the life of an environmental activist or wilderness protection activist being much less idyllic, and I wonder if I’ve got it right.
A: Well, yeah, I mean, I guess sometimes I wish I could just go and just sort of focus on one thing and do it well. Or at least one thing at a time and I feel that, we’re dealing with sport hunting issues, logging issues, and all of these issues, that each one is extremely complex and has its own set of challenges that make for a lot of sleepless nights.
So, yeah, I wish I didn’t have to deal with it, quite honestly. It’s not fun. It’s very draining and I wish I could just focus on more creative or artistic work. A lot of what we’re doing is confrontational.
I suppose the positive side to it is that we’re trying to find creative, new ways to wake people up and somehow get them to do something. It would be great if people were a bit more sensible and there wasn’t just this voracious appetite, a global marketplace, for what we have here. I mean, I don’t think there’s a single thing that exists now that they don’t want to take. They’re harvesting everything: the gooey ducks and the clams and the urchins and the oysters, every species of tree and they’re mining clay. They’re putting industrial fish farms in every bay and the list….I could keep the list going for hours. It doesn’t seem like there’s anything that’s safe or secure.
We’ve had a few victories and we’ve been able to protect a few areas – hopefully, we’ll protect many more – but even once they’re protected, there suddenly becomes a management regime or process that takes over. How do you manage people in a protected area? That becomes extremely complex. Even protecting an area just sets off a whole new set of challenges. Guess we’ll be at it for a while.
Q: I admire the fact that you don’t give up. It must cross your mind often enough.
A: I couldn’t imagine giving up. I couldn’t imagine living here and giving up. That would be…that would be like…I just couldn’t even imagine that. You’d be just living in a sense of total denial. A lot of folks do live that way.
One of the things that I’ve learned since I’ve lived up here – I’ve gone to people when things are down and everything feels overwhelming. And I’ve learned that if we’re not feeling positive about where you’re going then that reflects on all your work and it reflects on all the people who we ask support from. So it’s important that we stay positive. The best course is to admit that those problems are there, to talk about them and to somehow realize that you’re not responsible for them. We talked about that earlier, but I guess that’s still the tough one.
How do people cope with an insurmountable feeling of responsibility about how human beings are degrading the planet and our society?
Q: There is almost nobody who thinks about that that I know, that I’m aware of. It’s a strange situation. I think of it very much. In the earlier days of Heron Dance, I wrote a lot about people who worked to protect wilderness and I rarely do now mostly because I became disillusioned with my experience of them over time. There are a lot of people who profess high ideals, very few who live it. It is an industry. It’s tiny in relation to the global marketplace or in relation to industry and corporate America or corporate Canada. Nonetheless, there are thousands of people involved in the environmental movement and lots and lots of money, perhaps billions but certainly hundreds of millions of dollars and very, very few people who seriously attempt to live in harmony with the natural world. There are conference centers and very intelligent people and lots of books written and papers given and magazines put out about it and yet to find someone who doesn’t live a life centered around financial security and consuming and material possession is so rare.
I liken it to an obese person who is very intelligent, who knows that the answer is to go on a diet but loves food so he writes papers about it and gives speeches and tries to inspire other people to go on a diet and blames corporate America for having invented McDonalds’s and has charts and graphs. But actually going on a diet is out of the question, and if you ask him why he’s not on a diet, you are quickly outcast out of the community, considered a piranha, and I’ve been thrown out.
A: When we first came up here and realized that the timber companies were very interested in this area and had started taking inventory, we traveled around to cities and begged and pleaded with the large environmental groups to get involved, to do something. We told them that this whole region was about to go down.
Now they’re finally focused on the area and I have a lot of regrets about some of their involvement now because they just refuse to get on the ground and to see what’s happening here. They’re using the same models that use in all of their other campaigns around the world, and they’re not necessarily applicable here. So in some ways, our battle is now with some of the large environmental groups as much as it is with the timber companies because they actually think quite similarly.
Q: Oh, yeah, absolutely.
A: So that…sort of created a monster.
Q: But Ian, I think that as a species if we don’t get our act together, there will come a time when it affects our standard of living here in the heartland of America. Global warming, ozone depletion and acid rain, water quality: these things will have a major impact on our standard of living. It may be too late at that point to implement the kind of change that would be necessary because once you don’t have an ozone layer, you have a problem. The thing that I take comfort from is, nature will survive. Nature will go on evolving its beautiful life forms, and humans will disappear or be marginalized for a few hundred years, or a few thousand years. Hopefully, if we do come back, we’ll come back with a little more wisdom.
A: Yeah, yeah. I think of that sometimes, too. I think of large, geographical time spans….a billion years.
Q: A lot of work for the environment, I think, is work for to protect a middle-class American standard of living.
A: Yeah, and that’s definitely something that’s very difficult to articulate and very difficult to make people aware of.
Q: And if it fails, nature will be fine and humans won’t exist. And if that work succeeds, then humans will be living in harmony with the natural world, which is inevitably, I think, how it has to be if we’re going to continue to exist.
I often ask people: If you had to pick four beliefs that have been at the core of your life, what would they be? Have they served you well? Most of what you’ve talked about have been your beliefs. Mostly how those beliefs affect how you live and work, but is there anything else about that that you can say?
A: I mean, it’s….it’s a journey for sure….I always want things to change quickly and I think that one of the things that I’ve realized probably just in the last couple years – when we started this, we thought, we’ll get this wrapped up in a few years and get all these valleys protected, stop all this industrial mayhem and get on with life. If you have an environmental group, the first thing you should be trying to do is put yourself out of business. You work for the day when you meet and wrap things up and say you achieved what you set out to do. Now I’m realizing that there may never be that moment. Things aren’t getting better. They’re getting worse. If that’s the case, if it’s not going to be possible to walk away from it. This is my life. (laughs) I only actually thought about it recently (laughs). This is it. It’s not a bad thing, but it’s a different mindset.
Q: It is. In many ways, it’s one of the major differences between an indigenous stable, indigenous culture, and a European culture. We’re always planning and working for tomorrow; it isn’t about this minute, this moment, this day. It’s about a long-term plan and how life’s going to be different once we accomplish it. So, four beliefs that have been at the core of your life…could you summarize that one in a sentence?
A: I tried to evade it.
Q: I have to let you evade it. Do you want to go onto the next one?
A: I just don’t know what comes to mind…I think, yeah, living with the natural world in its true sense is kind of at the foundation of my belief. I do know it’s possible. And I know that we can all live good, healthy lives and produce everything we need to live that kind of a life from the natural world. So I certainly believe that it’s possible. That’s what we’re fighting for, I suppose. Maybe we don’t work hard enough to educate people about how to do it mainly because, I suppose, I don’t have those answers. I don’t live a sustainable life. We’re still burning gasoline in our boat and things like that. But those things would end if we were living within our means. So, I suppose, yeah, I mean, that would be one of the beliefs – treating people with respect, being open and honest and transparent in all your dealings is important. People always think that’s there some kind of a hidden agenda with environmentalists but our agenda couldn’t be more clear. Just maybe people can’t accept that that’s the agenda. It’s on our website. I don’t know what the problem is.
Q: When I was using that analogy of the obese man, I wasn’t trying to suggest that environmentalists should stop eating. I’m not suggesting that people shouldn’t burn gasoline in their boats but I kind of condemn snowmobile races, you know?
A: Sure, yeah. Absolutely. Eating is an important aspect to everything that we’re doing here because virtually everything we’re fighting for, relates in some way to food for people, whether it’s protecting a salmon river or an eco-system. It’s something people relate to. That’s why I love it when Peacock visits up here because, we go out on these crazy hunter-gatherer expeditions and find so much more new stuff to eat and, the more you eat off the land, the more you realize how precious it is, and in ways that you may have never thought of from a cerebral or academic viewpoint on why you love or protect wilderness. There’s endless books and journals on it but food is a common base that all humans can understand. And that’s why we eat the food from the ocean we live on. It’s not only a necessity but it’s a constant reminder of how important this work is.
Q: Do you have any thoughts on the role of the mystical in your life? Unseen powers that have accompanied you?
A: The more and more you explore this coast, the more you realize that humans have been here. We know from archaeological evidence that Native people have been living here for over ten thousand years in sites that have had continual human occupation. That is humbling for those of us that are so new to this continent. When you travel through these watersheds and walk through these forests, you just can’t help but walk ten feet without finding signs of the past. Old sites and burial posts and culturally modified trees, and all of these physical signs. But there’s also far more than just the physical signs. I feel that more and more…the more I get to know people here, the more I get to understand the land, the more I reflect on how people have lived here for thousands of years. And it’s everywhere, at every beach that I look at, I think of what it was like with the canoes, the wooden-dugout canoes on it. And so I think that the spirit of the land is from the Native people that lived here and continue to live here. I come from a strong Catholic upbringing and I certainly don’t go to church anymore. I was an alter boy.
Q: You were an alter boy?
A: Um-hum. Two boys drowned here this week, just near our house actually. They tried canoeing across the water late at night. They haven’t found the bodies. So I had this dream. I saw thousands and thousands of boys that have drowned probably in these same waters over the thousands of years that Heiltsuk people have lived here. And it was an overpowering feeling. It was like when the elders talk about how, when the archaeologists or the forest companies come in and say, “Well, we want you to map out your special areas ‘cause we’re gonna log around everything else,” and they always respond by saying, “Our blood is in this land. Our bones are everywhere.” And that seems like a general response, but the more you look around with your eyes open, the more you realize how true that is. The conservative estimates of human occupation in the Heiltsuk territory when the first white explorers arrived on the coast here, is between thirty and forty thousand people. That is in about ten thousand square miles of territory. There are about a thousand to fifteen hundred people living here now.
Q: I want to propose a spiritual theory to you and not because I want you to accept or believe or even that I believe it; I just use it as kind of a mental exercise. So if just for a minute you’ll accept that we’re put on Earth to learn something and life keeps presenting us with opportunities over and over to learn our own individual important lessons, what has your life been about or your journey?
A: Yeah…what is it about? I don’t know. I hope it’s something more than just a crisis. I mean, I certainly believe that, we are being tested in some way. And we’re failing the test right now. And I certainly believe we’re going to pass the test eventually. I mean, the resiliency of humans is hard to imagine. When you think of the cultures under attack around the world and how people, if there’s still a breath to take, they’ll take it. People endure the worst hardships. I think that that speaks to a nature that we possess that will see us through the test.
So I suppose the test is how we are going to live with this planet. How are we going to live with this Earth? How are we going to see to it that this Earth continues to look after us? Until that decision is made, I don’t know what will happen. I wish I had that kind of wisdom.
Q: What about life or this existence fascinates you the most?
A: Well, sometimes I think that maybe the more cynical side of me just wants to hang around and see what happens. And, I think that that’s always going to be a part of me for better or for worse. You do everything you can. When I talk to mentors and people I respect, and they say, when you’re able to look back at how you lived your life and how you fought your fights, if it was done with integrity and with respect and you gave it everything you could within your means, then that was…that’s a good life. It’s sort of a simple thought but it’s quite a comforting one, I think.
Q: So what fascinates you the most?
A: What fascinates the most is the cycles. Millions and billions of herring just came from places we don’t even know and they migrated into all of these little bays; in the same bays they’ve been going into for thousands of years. Little genetically unique species of herring going into the same little bay where they’ve laid all of their eggs, sprayed all their sperm in the water and billions upon billions of little eggs are now forming little eyeballs right now and are about to sprout into fry. The sea lions and whales follow them in and… an incredible cycle. There’s a huge herring fishery here. Massive industrial herring fishery. Boats come from all over, all over Canada to fish the herring and yet, you go and look at all of the available literature and talk to all of the scientists about it and we don’t have a clue about the cycle of herring. So, I mean those kind of life processes fascinate me and I think, that’s kind of at the core of what we’re trying to protect and what keeps us going. That humbling notion that we’re just scratching the surface of our understanding of these systems and yet we’re manipulating and changing them to such a profound degree.
Q: Are there contradictions about life that particularly fascinate you?
A: Well, I think that the obsession with money is quite fascinating. I can’t quite understand it, when you have everything you need to survive and to live a good life, I mean, all I want as a person or out of life is to have time to just go out and observe and enjoy it, and have that kind of spare time. I don’t seem to have much of that these days. So, those are things that money can’t buy and things that can’t be given to you in a monetary sense. Not from my perspective. So that, I mean, that’s kind of fascinating. Like, why are we so fixated with money?
Q: Is there anything that I should’ve asked but didn’t or that’s been on your mind as we have been talking about what we’re calling the Seeker’s Journey, living a set of values different from those of the dominant culture, trying to do a work of meaning, trying to live in relation with beauty, with natural beauty?
A: Well, I think, just that when we moved up here full-time, we were quite separated from human contacts or human society. I guess some would call it kind of elitist that, we were protecting wilderness and wildlife.
We’ve been accused of doing things for our own gratification. I’ve kind of come to grips with that a little bit and understanding where that comes from. And also gone full circle, where you meet people in Los Angeles, in New York, people never leave big cities and they still for some reason, want to know that polar bears are still walking ice flows in the north and that grizzly bears are still catching salmon on the coast. They don’t even necessarily ever plan on going to see it, but they want to know that wild places still exist. It’s a part of being a human on planet Earth. So I think that’s a good thing that it’s in people.
Maybe we need to bring that out more in people. And we need to be responsible for our collective actions. It’s kind of a challenge. Yeah, I suppose that’s part of it. And maybe if everyone was an environmentalist, I would be the king of industrialism. (laughs)
Q: You have a basic contrary streak?
A: Some of my teachers have said that. Well, I mean, they always say that about the marginalized people of society – all my friends and everyone who I can connect with. Strange way to describe them. No, I agree with that. I mean, we definitely need the reinforcement and we need to have our victories. I know I need it. When things aren’t moving, I go through my darker days. But I’d be doing it regardless. I guess it’s back to that. It seems like it’s the right thing to do and that’s important. And, yeah, every day is so precious.
Q: A lot of what motivates you seems to be serving something that has touched you more deeply or as deeply as anything ever has in your life.
A: Yeah, yeah, and it’s….I find one of the difficult things is to explain why we do things to people. Like when your first question was, what do you do? It’s kind of the most difficult question. For example, there’s this important cultural site, also an important grizzly bear valley, among other things, just south of us here. It was a private piece of land and it came up for sale and so we worked hard for six months and were able to get – it was a million dollars Canadian to buy this land – and we found the money. It actually came from the Buffets, one of Warren Buffet’s sons and they put a million dollars up and we bought the land. We gave the land, lock, stock and barrel, no strings attached, to the Heiltsuk. And had a huge ceremony there last summer. It was just a beautiful, beautiful event.
So I get people from the village that still want to know what the deal is. They still want to know where the strings are and…I find it uncomfortable to explain. It’s because they’ve been screwed by so many people for so long. This is the first piece of land that they’ve ever been given back since European contact. It’s been a year. There are people who come and say hi, you know? They have a look in their eye, like, “That was a nice thing that you did.” And, that’s rewarding. It’s not why we did it, but it’s all that you would ever ask for.
Q: Do they treat the land with respect?
A: There’s a generation of chiefs and elders that still speak the language, that still treat the land with respect and have so much reverence for the land and species. And there’s a strong cultural revival that’s happening. We need to move quickly now; every week or every month, another elder is dying. If that generation dies off then I think the future would remain very uncertain for how the Heiltsuk would treat the land. But right now the leadership is very strong in an environmental way. It’s good.
