Shortly after entering the ocean, they were moving along the sand when Peterson looked up and saw a white shark passing a few metres away. “One half of me was like, ‘Yes, jackpot,’” Peterson says. “And the other half was like, ‘Oh crap.’”

The animal disappeared into the murk, and then reappeared – first, her dark eyes and toothy smile, and then the rest of her muscular body – moving straight toward them. Peterson grabbed the harness of the other diver, a tourist from the United States, and pulled him to the bottom, where they waited, maintaining eye contact. The shark approached repeatedly, coming so close they could almost have reached out and touched her, before veering off each time (cutting off their exit, Peterson later realized). “This shark was investigating us,” Peterson says. “It was trying to figure out if we were food.”

After three passes, the shark decided they weren’t and disappeared into the gloom. Peterson and the other diver quickly surfaced and swam to shore, where they told the people swimming to get out of the water. With the danger passed, Peterson was exhilarated to have encountered an apex predator in her natural environment. “I was thrilled,” he says. “[It was] such a rare and special occurrence.”

Speaking with a biologist afterward, Peterson discovered it wasn’t as rare as he thought; in fact, he was about the 10th diver in the area to have reported an encounter with a white shark in the past three years.

Across the region, it’s not just divers noticing a change. There’s been a notable uptick in the number of people reporting white sharks along Canada’s Atlantic coast over the past decade. For a long time, white sharks were so rarely documented that scientists thought occasional sightings were just fringe members of a more southerly population. Now, they appear in Atlantic Canadian waters in the summer with a regularity that suggests a recurring seasonal population in the thousands.

“Atlantic Canada is the new white-shark population on the planet, at the moment,” says Nigel Hussey, professor of movement and trophic ecology at the University of Windsor. While there is some uncertainty as to the extent to which white sharks are moving in, scientists say that all signs point to a local population that’s growing, as white sharks recover from overexploitation and move northward because of warming waters.

That increasing presence elicits complex feelings in the region. White sharks have an almost unparalleled ability to inspire fear – yet sharks also have the potential to bring new benefits to the region: in research opportunities, in economic activity and in healthy ecosystems. But experts note that some white-shark prep work is also required, especially in a region billed as “Canada’s ocean playground” by one province’s licence plate.

“It’s very exciting, but also there is some degree of challenge for [Canada] to start generating the data to manage it, because it’s an endangered species . . . and to manage the risk of negative human–shark interactions,” Hussey says.

A shark sector is born

Ocean shorelines exert a magnetic pull for vacationers around the world; coastal and maritime tourism represents a significant portion of the global tourist economy, generating approximately US$3 trillion in 2025. Shark- and ray-based tourism is an increasing share of this, producing about US$314 million annually from activities such as diving, fishing and boat tours, according to one 2013 study. Shark tourism takes place in dozens of countries, and in some cases, researchers suggest that it has the potential to contribute more to gross domestic product than fishing.

In Atlantic Canada, this activity is still in its infancy.

The first company to offer cage diving tours began operating on Nova Scotia’s south shore roughly three years ago. In starting the business, marine biologist Neil Hammerschlag was inspired by his master’s degree in South Africa decades before, where he ran cage diving tours to fund his research. After an academic career in the United States, he began looking for a way to return to Canada and, seeing the increasing number of shark sightings in Nova Scotia, recognized a chance to return to his roots: “I thought, why not kind of use this idea of combining cage diving and the public’s interest in sharks with science, and essentially came up with this concept for Atlantic Shark Expeditions, which is cage diving to support science.”

Hammerschlag says it took a few seasons, but Atlantic Shark Expeditions has managed to dial in its formula. In 2025, they saw white sharks on every expedition and identified 109 different individuals, tagging six sharks with satellite tags. The company has taken hundreds of people on white-shark expeditions, many of whom describe being motivated by the desire to participate in research or to see sharks up close. “Interestingly, it’s not thrill-seekers at all,” he says.

Hammerschlag’s operation came up against some local opposition initially. Local surfers and other ocean recreationalists raised concerns that its approach would make human–shark conflict more likely. Some of that concern was fuelled by rumour. People had heard that the company was throwing fresh chunks of fish in the water, a practice known as chumming, meant to draw the species in. Hammerschlag denies this, though the company does use tuna and seal blubber as bait. It also lowers waterproof speakers into the water to produce a low-frequency sound attractive to sharks. Hammerschlag acknowledges that some people have concerns about changing shark behaviour, but he says their own research doesn’t support the idea that bait causes sharks to hang around. Of the 109 sharks they saw, most they saw only once. “If they’re being habituated, you would expect to see the same ones day in and day out, right? But you don’t. You see completely different ones. They’re moving through.”

Researchers in other jurisdictions where shark tourism is more established have drawn similar conclusions. Studies of wildlife tourism in Mexico and Australia found no long-term habituation from baiting, though that didn’t stop Mexico from banning white-shark tourism on Guadalupe Island in 2023, citing bad practices in the industry that had sometimes proved deadly – for the sharks.

This reflects the broader reality: there were 12 confirmed fatalities from shark encounters worldwide in 2025, and there were 65 “unprovoked” attacks, including one in Nova Scotia, where a white shark bit through a paddleboard at a beach near Halifax (the paddler was unharmed). That pales in comparison to the number of sharks killed by humans, which exceeds 100 million a year.

Despite these stark figures, sharks are nonetheless often perceived as remorseless killers and humans their defenceless victims – a narrative whose strength demonstrates just how deep-seated (and culturally reinforced) our fear of them is. In Atlantic Canada, scientists warn, a lack of familiarity and preparation has the potential to drive conflict.

Nigel Hussey, who runs a field research station tracking sharks on Nova Scotia’s southshore, says that everywhere else in the world where there are significant white shark populations, there are programs to mitigate the interactions with people that will inevitably occur. Yet in Atlantic Canada, these are so far lacking.

Sharks are not interested in people, Hussey says, but because they spend most of their time in the same part of the ocean that we do, conflict can arise. “We’re certainly at a point, and have been for a while now, where [Nova Scotia] needs to acknowledge white sharks are here and they’re here in numbers,” he says. Without the right data and preparation, there’s a risk of a negative encounter, he says, which could in turn be negative for shark conservation.

Steve Crawford, professor of integrative biology at the University of Guelph, points out that visitors may not understand that white sharks are now part of 

the environment in Atlantic Canada. For several years, Crawford says, he’s been advocating for white-shark signage and accompanying trauma kits at popular coastal destinations in the region, as beaches in Maine and Massachusetts have done. “To date, not a single government agency anywhere in Atlantic Canada has made the responsible decision to provide this kind of risk-management signage.”

Getting the opportunity right

Increasing numbers of sharks are not only a source of risk – they’re also a draw.

In other shark hot spots, such as Australia and South Africa, sizable industries have arisen out of people’s desire to interact with sharks; a 2017 study found that shark-diving tourism contributed $25.5 million (AUD) annually to Australia’s regional economy. While research suggests that activities like cage diving have minimal behavioural impact, the context of that research is that it happened in jurisdictions that have navigated a learning curve to establish effective regulations, Hussey says.

Cage diving isn’t the only appeal. White sharks have the potential to fuel a range of economic activity, from scientific research and tourism to wildlife documentary production. “There is a whole economic ecosystem around white sharks that could be very positive in Nova Scotia, but we all acknowledge . . . we need regulations in place,” Hussey says.

It’s worth doing the work to get this right, scientists say, because as white sharks become more established in the region, opportunities to get close could help dispel fear of the unfamiliar.

In mid-summer of last year, Geraldine Fernandez was on an outing on the Atlantic Shark Expeditions vessel, as part of a research project she was doing with Dalhousie University’s Future of Marine Ecosystems lab. It was a day like any other: some guests were enjoying the ocean in the cage, and Fernandez was standing atop the cage, dipping a tool she uses for estimating shark length in the water.

A blue shark glided past, only to suddenly disappear; seconds later, a large white shark swam into view. Fernandez says he was more than four metres long and beautifully coloured, but what was most striking was his gracefulness. The shark was not interested in the bait but spent “what felt like forever” calmly observing the people in the cage and poking his head out of the water (a behaviour called spy-hopping) to look at the people on the boat. “He was soaking it all in with all the guests,” she says. “He was not afraid. We were not afraid. It was an absolutely incredible experience.”

Seeing the people there respond with delight and curiosity to an animal that’s so often maligned was a deeply fulfilling experience, Fernandez says. It’s an example of how, if managed correctly, the increasing presence of sharks in Atlantic Canadian waters can serve as a reminder about what is, after all, the shark’s environment: when we go in the ocean, we’re not alone. And we wouldn’t want to be.

Moira Donovan is an award-winning journalist based in Nova Scotia, specializing in the environment and climate change.

The post There’s a new apex predator in Atlantic Canada appeared first on Corporate Knights.

While the Galápagos is home to many species that exist nowhere else, implementing tourist fees in the name of conservation is common. Bhutan, for example, charges tourists a $100-per-night “sustainable development fee” that funds economic, social, environmental and cultural projects. Greece charges a nightly “climate crisis resilience fee” that is allocated to a dedicated fund for natural disaster preparedness and emergency response.

While the revenues generated from these examples and others fund community and environment projects, it also raises the question: does putting a price on a nature destination help protect it? Or does it just commodify it?

Natural accounting

Defining nature in economic terms – as the movement to codify natural capital as an asset class seeks to do – helps make it visible on a balance sheet. What may seem like an accounting exercise can produce striking insights. For instance, a 2026 United Nations Environment Programme report outlined a staggering gap between finance that harms the environment and investments in nature-based solutions: in 2023, $7.3 trillion flowed toward activities that harm nature, such as public subsidies for fossil fuels, whereas only $220 billion went toward solutions. In other words, for every $1 invested in protecting nature, $30 are spent destroying it.

When harm outpaces conservation 30 to one, building entire industries around keeping nature intact might seem like the obvious remedy. In 2023, the U.S. National Park Service estimated that it received 325.5 million visitors who collectively spent $26.4 billion in communities near national parks. This spending supported 415,400 jobs and contributed $55.6 billion to the U.S. economy. Despite the proven economic gains, the 2027 federal budget proposed more than a $736-million cut in parks funding. This comes after about 4,000 Park Service people were cut from the workforce in 2025. To compensate, already crowded U.S. national parks will need to attract more visitors as a source of funding, putting additional pressure on their infrastructure and habitats.

Markets can help businesses understand the value of nature, says Niak Sian Koh, researcher at the Nature Positive Hub at Oxford University, but economics can’t fully capture nature’s value: “because nature is not only something that’s isolated in a [national] park and in ecotourism – it’s also all around us.” A 2022 report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services highlighted the other ways that nature’s value can be understood and expressed, such as its relational value, like our personal connection to a forest or coastline, and its intrinsic value, the right for nature to exist. In other words, things that cannot be measured in dollars and cents.

Nature’s legal status

When it comes to nature’s right to exist, legislation is another tool that protects places, wildlife and the tourism it attracts. For example, the Whanganui River was granted legal personhood status in 2017, which means that harm to the river is the same as harming the Whanganui tribe. The Maori, Indigenous people of New Zealand, fought for the river’s rights for more than 160 years and have a cultural duty to protect the landscape. This legal status has unlocked protections and finances that are used to support the health of the river ecosystem. It reshaped the market forces affecting the Whanganui River: harm to the river became a liability and conservation became an asset. “Markets are supported by legal structures,” Koh points out. “We can redesign markets to do better, but often we don’t do this.”

While the tourist fees in the Galápagos and other celebrated destinations are designed with good intentions, their relationship to nature conservation is more complicated. Higher fees don’t necessarily equate to better protection. Popular destinations with lucrative markets could find their ecosystems under threat if a sudden policy change fails to prioritize the very nature that makes them special. “Markets can do what we design them to do,” Koh says. If “we don’t design them to think about communities, to think about diverse values of nature, they’re just going to perpetuate the same existing problems.”

The post How tourism is shaping the debate over natural capital appeared first on Corporate Knights.

“What she showed us is that nature doesn’t recognize our borders, and our protection systems have to catch up to that reality,” says Laurel Angell, director of government relations and policy at the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, or Y2Y, a transboundary U.S.–Canada–Indigenous wildlife protection non-profit.

Canada shares a nearly 9,000-kilometre-long border with the United States, and more than 500 migratory species cross that border each year, ranging in size from the monarch butterfly to the grey whale – and that’s not including the animals that roam across the border constantly, such as whitetailed deer, grizzly bears and grey wolves like Pluie.

Nature doesn’t recognize our borders, and our protection systems have to catch up to that reality.

– Laurel Angell, Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative

The two countries have collaborated on cross-border wildlife conservation for decades, sharing research and partnering on initiatives. Key to this has been the relationship between federal agencies, local governments, non-profits, scientists, private landowners and Indigenous groups. But as U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration slashes funding for conservation research and federal departments, and rolls back critical endangered-species laws, wildlife that rely on the stability of these relationships now face unbalanced protection.

“We are genuinely concerned about what’s happening to federal land and wildlife management agencies,” Angell says. “Our federal partners are essential to this work, and when you cut those agencies deeply, you lose the people, the research capacity, the field scientists and the relationships that make cross-boundary conservation actually function.”

In 2025, Trump began slashing jobs at U.S. public land agencies, firing rangers and land managers who protect public parks. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has had an 18% reduction in workforce – about 1,800 jobs, including around 500 biologists. In a letter to the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, FWS director Brian Nesvik said that “almost 60 percent of the nation’s wildlife refuges lack the resources and staff needed to fulfill their missions.”

Sixteen out of 22 land research cooperatives – government research centres that focus on science-based conservation – have been placed on indefinite hiatus. During his first administration, Trump proposed several provisions that would weaken the critical Endangered Species Act (ESA) to make energy and resource development easier. And the 2027 proposed budget would cut funding by hundreds of millions of dollars to a host of environmental programs and departments.

Staff cuts to the Fish and Wildlife Service predate the current administration, says Collin O’Mara, president and CEO of the National Wildlife Federation. But the accelerated rate is worrying, he says, particularly the loss of scientists, who are integral to collecting the data sets that then inform conservation work. As climate change and biodiversity loss affect how transboundary wildlife – including endangered species such as caribou and monarch butterflies – shift their movements, up-to-date data and research is vital.

These aren’t solely U.S. problems. Many species protected by the Endangered Species Act migrate across the border, like the whooping crane, which travels from Texas to breeding grounds in the Northwest Territories and Alberta. These migration routes are essential to their survival.

On-the-ground conservation work across the border has been disrupted, too. “There are cross-border conservation projects right now where the U.S. side of critical habitat and connectivity mapping work is being cut mid-stream, leaving partners working from an incomplete picture of the landscape and leaving many people uncertain about what to even do,” Angell says.

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Connectivity mapping helps researchers maintain and improve wildlife corridors across borders, which are protected spaces that allow animals safe passage through busy roads and private lands. Making sure animal populations aren’t isolated is essential to their survival. For more than 30 years, Y2Y has worked to bridge the gap between two of the largest Rocky Mountain grizzly populations in Montana and Canada, which were split by 240 kilometres. Now, through land conservation and wildlife corridors, that gap is just shy of 50 kilometres. Once connected, the transboundary populations can migrate and mate, strengthening their numbers.

“That’s what we’re trying to protect,” Angell says. “And that last stretch to achieve real, full connectivity – which would be a landmark conservation success story – requires sustained investment and rigorous science, not less of both.”

Both Angell and O’Mara have cause for optimism, however. So far, the U.S. Congress has pushed back on most of the proposed budget cuts, “in a bipartisan, nonpartisan way,” O’Mara says. “I think at the end of the day, there’s so much support – across regions, across political ideology, across the national boundary – for this work,” he says. “That’s what gives me hope.”

Ayesha Habib is a Toronto-based journalist who has written for The Globe and Mail, The Walrus, The Narwhal and Maisonneuve.

The post Cross-border wildlife conservation between the U.S. and Canada is under strain appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Coste’s organization forms part of a complaint filed before the Competition Bureau of Canada challenging the integrity of SFI, a system created by the pulp and paper industry in 1994 that is meant to reassure environmentally conscious consumers. The standard applies to everything from furniture to cardboard boxes and toilet paper.  

The Competition Bureau enforces the Competition Act, which prohibits false and misleading statements about products or services companies offer. 

“People desperately want to believe that logging can be done well, and that we can meet our needs for timber and fibre without having a devastating impact,” Coste says in an interview. “The story that can’t be manipulated is the one told out on the land. You get out into some of these areas, into some of these clear-cuts in forests that are SFI-certified, and there’s absolutely nothing sustainable about it.” 

The complaint, led by Ecojustice on behalf of the Wilderness Committee, Greenpeace Canada and several other environmental groups, was filed three years ago. The complainants say they want SFI to stop calling their certification “sustainable,” to issue public correction of their claims and to pay a $10-million fine. 

SFI, a non-profit organization, has now certified more than 150 million hectares of forest in North America, of which 76% are in Canada. Products that bear its seal are understood to be sourced from forests that are responsibly managed.  

But, critics argue, forestry companies certified by SFI can continue to clear-cut forests, spray glyphosate to suppress natural regrowth, and replace them with lucrative softwood plantations. Coste calls it “greenwashing.” “Some of the biggest clear-cuts in the rarest old-growth forests are in SFI-certified forest operations,” Coste says. “It undercuts the credibility of all third-party certifications.” 

In an emailed statement, SFI tells Corporate Knights that “this complaint has no merit and attempts to create confusion in the marketplace,” adding that “complaints like this are used to mislead brands, governments, and the public into the real value and impact of the SFI Standard.” 

Another signatory to the complaint, Peter Wood, is a professor in the Department of Forest Resources Management at the University of British Columbia. Wood has been studying forestry certification since 1999, first for the province’s Ministry of Forests and later for non-government organizations.

“Forest certification initially held a great deal of promise, as a way to bypass government inaction in addressing unsustainable rates of logging and ease pressure on the world’s few remaining primary forests,” he says. “This is not the way that it has played out.” 

In a 39-page complaint submitted to the Competition Bureau, the environmental groups argue that the SFI standard does not require specific environmental outcomes. While the framework outlines steps that could contribute to sustainable forestry, it does not mandate them.

Wood says many of the requirements are “vague and discretionary, largely aspirational.” Companies seeking certification hire the auditors who assess them, he adds, and the standards focus on whether companies have programs in place rather than whether those programs produce measurable results. As a result, Wood argues, industry-led certification systems have allowed large volumes of wood products to enter the market with sustainability labels, without significant changes to forestry practices. 

SFI submitted a six-page response to the Competition Bureau, arguing that the organization is governed by an 18-member board divided equally among industry (including representatives from Canadian forest-product giants Canfor and Irving), conservation, and Indigenous and social sectors. The organization says it undertakes a standards-revision process every five to seven years, which includes review from technical experts; Indigenous groups; industry; private forest landowners and public forest managers; Canadian government agencies, including the Ministry of Natural Resources; environmental non-profits; labour unions; and others. The public is also given an opportunity to comment on the revisions. 

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SFI also says that their “standards are internationally recognized methodologies” and stated that disagreement among experts does not mean that a methodology is false or misleading. 

“SFI has a very slick website and associated promotional materials, and they make big claims around the label’s ability to provide assurance of sustainable forest management,” Wood says. “But if you take a close look at the forest management standards, upon which all of their claims essentially rest, there’s nothing in there that is capable of assuring a given level of performance.” To illustrate the point, Wood points to SFI’s “performance measures” that require certified organizations to protect endangered species. The problem? They require only that companies to have a program in place that “addresses” this issue, with no reflection on whether a program is effective or what impact logging has had on the species.   

SFI tells Corporate Knights that “while SFI sets the standard, independent, third party-accredited certification bodies certify organizations to the SFI Standards” and that a certificate is issued only after the independent certification body determines that an operation conforms to SFI’s requirements. They also say that annual surveillance audits by certification bodies are “mandatory on all certified operations to maintain certification. So, if an organization doesn’t meet the standard, they do not receive a certificate.” Meanwhile, the complainants argue that they have not seen an SFI certification be refused or removed for not meeting the requirements of the process.  

In response, an SFI spokesperson says that they are aware of 19 certificates that were relinquished between January 2022 and June 2024 by companies that could not meet new requirements. 

“[The] government has a strong role to play in protecting Canadian consumers from bogus claims made in the marketplace, including the sustainability of the products they buy,” Wood says. “But this requires pressure from consumers and voters.”

Wood and the claimant ​​​​environmental groups consider the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), founded in 1993, to be a stronger option. Though smaller by comparison to SFI, certifying just 50 million hectares, Ecojustice’s submission to the Competition Bureau notes that FSC’s structure and governance were designed to give equal voting power to business, environmental and social interests, including Indigenous Peoples. But, Wood says, in the 1990s, the forestry industry put significant effort into creating other options. “It appeared that these were deliberately trying to detract from the efforts of the Forest Stewardship Council, supported by Indigenous organizations and environmental groups,” Wood says. “I hope the Competition Bureau upholds a high bar in this case and prevents corporations from greenwashing . . . It should not be left up to individual consumers to go around verifying the myriad claims that are made in the marketplace every day, or read the hundreds of pages of standards that support these claims.”

Kegan Pepper-Smith, a managing lawyer on the case at Ecojustice, notes the slow pace of resolution. In the three years since the organization brought the complaint, they have not heard anything apart from one meeting soon after the Competition Bureau’s investigation was launched. “The logging practices under the SFI standard continue, and there’s been no redress for our clients or for the consumers,” Pepper-Smith says in a phone interview. 

The Competition Bureau tells Corporate Knights that the agency is legally obligated to conduct its work confidentially and cannot provide details related to the case or its status. Likewise, SFI says that no enforcement action has been taken by the Competition Bureau as of writing.  

“That’s really impactful for folks who want to speak with their money and make choices about what products they buy, and are being misled to think that they’re purchasing products that are sustainably sourced,” Pepper-Smith says. “It’s not only about the impact in the forest; it’s also about the impact on the consumers and their ability to . . . [use] their money to support sustainable practices.” 

Leah Borts-Kuperman is an award-winning journalist based in North Bay, Ontario. Her reporting has been published by Canada’s National Observer, The Narwhal, The Logic and The Walrus, among others. 

Response from the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI), sent on April 27, 2026:

“Contrary to the article’s claims, SFI’s Standard requires prompt reforestation using ecologically appropriate native species and prohibits the conversion of native forests to plantations. It also includes multiple safeguards to ensure that regenerated forests do not develop plantation characteristics, but instead resemble native or semi-natural forests at maturity.

The article’s assertion that SFI’s requirements lack measurable impact or performance is simply incorrect. Every Objective, Performance Measure, and Indicator in the Standard must be met and independently verified by a third-party auditor before an organization can achieve certification. These requirements are outcome-based, ensuring that meaningful and measurable results are delivered.

One example is SFI’s robust, performance-based requirements for the protection and conservation of old-growth forests. The Standard also mandates integrated pest management practices that minimize chemical use and prioritize the least-toxic, narrow-spectrum pesticides.”

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Just after 3 a.m. on a recent Friday morning, a 4.5-foot-long leatherback sea turtle covered her freshly dug nest with sand, sweeping and packing it into place with steady strokes of her flippers just above the high tide along a remote, rugged stretch of Ecuador’s Pacific coast.

Nearby, a team of scientists watched the turtle’s every movement, using brief pauses between her motions to carry out their own work: attaching an electronic tracking device, known as a satellite tag, to the animal’s leathery carapace.

“We just satellite-tagged the first leatherback sea turtle in all of Ecuador,” said Callie Veelenturf, a marine biologist from Massachusetts and co-founder of The Leatherback Project, a global sea turtle conservation non-profit. Veelenturf co-led the tagging effort alongside Kerly Briones Cedeño, president and director general of Fundación Reina Laúd, a volunteer-run conservation group in Ecuador that monitors sea turtle nesting habitat.

The milestone marks a new step toward better understanding one of the most endangered marine species in the world and the threats it faces. Eastern Pacific leatherbacks – a distinct population of the world’s largest sea turtle – have declined by more than 90% since the 1980s.

“There are likely less than 1,000 individuals left,” Veelenturf said.

Satellite tagging has long been used to study leatherbacks by tracking where they forage, mate and nest. But most of that work, Veelenturf said, has taken place in Mexico and Costa Rica, where the largest nesting populations have historically been concentrated. That’s left major gaps in understanding how the species uses waters farther south.

“We know very little about how they use coastal waters in the East Pacific and specifically in Ecuador,” Veelenturf said.

What is known, Veelenturf said, is that these endangered turtles face a gauntlet of threats off the Pacific coast, primarily posed by fishing activity.

Ecuador hosts one of the largest artisanal fishing fleets in the eastern tropical Pacific, with tens of thousands of small-scale boats – typically fibreglass or wooden vessels operated by individual fishers. Large-mesh gill nets, widely used by these fleets, pose the greatest risk to sea turtles, which can become entangled in the gear and drown. Sharks, rays, whales, dolphins and seabirds are at risk too.

A 2020 study published in Scientific Reports by the Eastern Pacific Leatherback Conservation Network – also known as Red Laúd OPO – found that Eastern Pacific leatherbacks could disappear by 2060 without concerted efforts to reduce their incidental capture in fishing gear.

In January, Briones Cedeño saw those impacts firsthand. While monitoring a known leatherback nesting beach, she encountered a dead female she recognized as one that had laid several nests earlier in the season.

“We were expecting her fifth nest,” she said. The turtle showed signs of asphyxiation from drowning, she said, likely caused by getting caught in fishing gear. “We presume that she died due to the issue of bycatch fisheries,” she said. “Perhaps if we had tagged her, we would have known she was passing nearby, or perhaps we could have rescued her.”

But preventing these types of deaths requires a clear picture of how leatherbacks move through Ecuador’s waters and the rest of the eastern tropical Pacific region, Veelenturf said. “Understanding the overlap between artisanal, semi-industrial and industrial fishing activities with the leatherback habitat use is just so important,” she said. “If we don’t understand where they’re going and what their diving behaviour is like, for example, we can’t really know how to best protect them.”

Satellite tagging offers one of the clearest ways to answer those questions.

By outfitting the turtle with a satellite tag that transmits its location each time it surfaces to breathe, researchers can now follow the animal in near real time through an online platform developed by Wildlife Computers, a company in Washington State that specializes in tracking marine life.

The tag Veelenturf’s team used, also created by that company, records detailed dive data, too, offering insight into not only how the turtle moves through coastal waters and the open ocean where leatherbacks spend most of their lives, but also how deep they swim.

Because leatherbacks can dive thousands of feet below the surface, protecting them requires not only knowing where they are, but also how their behaviour may overlap with fishing gear set at different depths.

Over the past seven years, Veelenturf has led a long-term leatherback tagging program along the Atlantic coasts of Panama and Colombia, where her team fitted 24 nesting females with satellite transmitters. The resulting data has helped identify critical habitats, show migratory pathways and inform conservation strategies, particularly in areas where proposed coastal development projects, such as ports, may threaten the species.

Now, in Ecuador, Veelenturf hopes similar data can be used to pinpoint where turtles face the most risks and collaborate with local communities to mitigate them by altering fishing gear or establishing marine protected areas where certain human activities would be limited or prohibited.

Satellite tracking can help researchers focus those conservation efforts by identifying specific stretches of coastline or offshore waters where turtles are most vulnerable, as well as the times of year when risk is highest based on migration, nesting or mating patterns, said Bryan Wallace, a wildlife ecologist and co-coordinator of the Eastern Pacific Leatherback Turtle Conservation Network. That kind of precision can make conservation efforts more targeted and effective, he said.

But getting that data is not easy.

Satellite tags are expensive and not always accessible for local communities running entirely volunteer-led conservation operations like Fundación Reina Laúd, Briones Cedeño said. One satellite tag can cost up to $5,000, said Veelenturf, who received a grant from the National Geographic Society to tag 10 leatherbacks in the region in order to understand their habitat use.

The tagging process itself is also time- and labour-intensive.

First, conservationists must find a turtle. And unlike the well-known nesting beaches in Mexico and Costa Rica, leatherback nesting in Ecuador is sporadic.

It took 14 people four days of patrolling more than six miles of remote coastline – by foot, motorcycle and boat – before the team finally located a nesting turtle they could tag earlier this month. The encounter happened on Pajonal Beach, a rugged stretch of shoreline about 5.5 miles south of Bahia de Caraquez, bordered by steep jungle-covered cliffs and the Pacific Ocean.

Veelenturf had hoped to find the turtle while she was laying her eggs – a stage when sea turtles enter a trance-like state and are largely unresponsive. But by the time the team arrived, the leatherback was already covering her nest.

Working in near darkness, illuminated only by their red-light headlamps, the team moved carefully, timing each of their actions to coincide with the turtle’s natural pauses so as not to disrupt her.

“Every time she stopped and exhaled, I would do a next step,” Veelenturf said.

First, they sanitized a small area of the turtle’s shell where they planned to attach the satellite tag – a small, box-shaped electronic device fitted with an antenna designed to break through the water’s surface each time the turtle comes up to breathe over the next two years.

Then they anchored the tag to the raised ridge of the turtle’s soft carapace by drilling two small holes through it, threading small tubes that serve as fasteners for the device. A quick-setting epoxy was also moulded to serve as a secure base for the equipment, helping hold it in place.

Once the tag was attached, the team stepped back and watched as the turtle shuffled its way back toward the ocean.

They called her Lucero, a Spanish word that in English means “morning star.”

“Naming her Lucero is deeply meaningful to us,” said Briones Cedeño. “Just as the morning star guides those who navigate the ocean, this turtle will help guide our understanding of leatherback movements and the future of their conservation in Ecuador and across the East Pacific.”

Teresa Tomassoni is an environmental journalist covering the intersections between oceans, climate change, coastal communities and wildlife for Inside Climate News.

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Launched in 2019, the 2BT program set an ambitious goal: plant two billion saplings by 2031 as part of Canada’s plan to reach net-zero emissions and rehabilitate fire-damaged forests. But progress lagged from the start. According to the auditor general, only 2.3% of promised trees were planted in the program’s first two years. Annual targets were missed again in 2023, the program’s third planting season.

“The 2 Billion Trees program was riddled with challenges . . . its reputation became tarnished,” says Rachel Plotkin, boreal manager at the David Suzuki Foundation. “I don’t know how seriously it was treated.”

Critics called the initiative “broken” and a “failure.” At the same time, Plotkin says, the program represented a commitment, and despite bad press the abrupt end surprised many, especially since it was cut without a proposed replacement. “The 2 Billion Trees program was a kind of centrepiece of having a vision for restoration, and in its absence, there’s a huge void that needs to be filled,” she says.

The majority of our nursery members are privately owned, and they will need to make business decisions as to whether they’re going to start downsizing or not.

 – Rob Keen, executive director, The Canadian Tree Nursery Association

The federal government defends the cancellation as a necessary part of reducing expenses, and the new budget points to ongoing investments in “sustainable forest management.” One billion already-contracted trees will still be planted as the initiative concludes. “The 2BT program will honour and continue to administer funding for existing agreements until 2031,” Devin Baines, a spokesperson for Natural Resources Canada, wrote in an email. “Canada’s commitment to climate action, nature protection, and forest health remains unchanged.”

For Plotkin, the reassurance falls short. “The federal government continues to announce new major projects, many of which will have impacts on ecosystems. To [end the program] in the absence of putting our commitment to restoration front and centre, I think, is just a failure of our responsibility to nature,” she says, adding that the move also ignores the program’s economic value, including job creation associated with tree planting worldwide.

Other countries have led the way in this regard, seeing promising results and proving that socioeconomic improvements and tree planting can go hand in hand. Ethiopia’s ambitious and successful effort to plant 50 billion trees generated 767,000 jobs for nursery managers, forestry agents and seasonal workers. Malawi, the first African country to develop a national forest-restoration strategy, in 2017, has linked restoration targets directly to improved food security and reduced poverty.

Economic impacts

On the flip side, cancellation lands hard on Canadian companies. The Canadian Tree Nursery Association, representing more than 95% of the country’s forest-restoration seedling suppliers, expressed “profound disappointment” in the decision, arguing that the reversal jeopardizes livelihoods of workers and undermines a forestry industry that has built up to meet federal demand.

Rob Keen, a professional forester and the association’s executive director, says the cut will reverberate through the entire supply chain into communities. “There’s no long-term commitments made by the government to restore these forests,” he says. “The majority of our nursery members are privately owned, and they will need to make business decisions as to whether they’re going to start downsizing or not.”

He adds that the program got a slow start partially because it took years for seeds to become ready-to-plant seedlings, plus a significant effort to create the infrastructure to fulfill such ambitious goals. Now that this infrastructure is finally in place, it may need to be dismantled with the sudden drop in demand.

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Keen says the uncertainty created by the program’s end forces employers to make difficult decisions. “Our nurseries were very concerned with this reduced number of seedlings that are being planted at a time when, with all these wildfires, we should be increasing . . . the amount of seedlings being planted, not only for the ecological value that provides, but in the jobs that it provides as well.” Keen notes that many positions created by planting projects go to youth, rural and Indigenous workers. “Then it’s a question of do they start laying off staff?”

Other organizations, including Forests Canada, have issued similar warnings. Evidence for Democracy called the termination “climate backsliding.” Clean50, a sustainability leadership organization, described the move as “short-sighted,” pointing out that more than 8% of Canada’s forests have burned in the past three years and that these areas can no longer regenerate naturally without restoration help. The group wrote in an open letter that some 31,000 existing and expected jobs will be lost as a result of cancelling the program in a move contrary to Canada’s 2030 Nature Strategy, which aims to stop and reverse biodiversity loss.

“Forests are probably our greatest natural resource, and it’s the government’s responsibility to take care of that asset,” he says.

This article was updated with comments from Natural Resources Canada. 

Leah Borts-Kuperman is a journalist based in North Bay, Ontario. Her previous reporting has been published by Canada’s National Observer, The Narwhal, The Logic and The Walrus, among others.

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This elaborate system is an example of what conservationists call “ecosystem services.” In addition to sustaining life on Earth, these services generate all manner of valuable goods; commercial fishing and coastal logging, for instance, have poured tens of billions into B.C.’s economy over the past century. But those profits have come at a steep environmental cost, illustrating an age-old cycle with a vicious feedback loop: nature provides the essentials for a functioning society and healthy economy, from clean water and food to energy and wood. The more we harvest, the richer we get; the richer we get, the more we consume; the more we consume, the faster nature unravels.

The most obvious solution, protecting large swaths of nature from resource-hungry humans, simply reverses the problem. Instead of making money, environmental conservation renounces profit. Ban logging to protect a forest? Okay, who will pay next month’s rent for those loggers? Where will that money come from? And what will the rest of us use to build our houses?

In the early 1980s, amid dawning global awareness of humanity’s collision course with the biosphere, the field of conservation finance emerged to tackle this conundrum. A blend of economics and ecology, the core goal of conservation finance is to harness free markets to pay for ecological protection.

Decades later, however, the original problem persists. It still costs money to protect nature. And if you follow most money far enough, you’ll arrive at a scene of environmental destruction. Wrecking one part of the world to save another is not a sustainable solution. To truly escape the vicious cycle, you’d have to make conservation profitable. Somehow, nature has to pay for itself.

Which brings us back to the coast of British Columbia, to a place called the Great Bear Sea.

A more intelligent resource economy

On June 25, the governments of British Columbia, Canada and 17 First Nations formally launched the Great Bear Sea initiative. It’s a marine sequel to the Great Bear Rainforest agreement of 2007, which invested $120 million in Indigenous-led conservation over 64,000 square kilometres of B.C.’s island-studded northern coastline. That deal converted a resource-loaded region the size of Ireland to ecosystem-based management – logging hasn’t stopped, but 70% of the Great Bear’s old growth is now permanently protected. More than 100 new businesses have been created (everything from small-scale forestry and ecotourism to solar power instalments, kelp farms and tug-boat operations) along with a thousand full-time jobs.

The Great Bear Sea initiative more than doubles that scale. It places 100,000 square kilometres of some of the world’s richest fishing waters under joint Indigenous-Crown authority and gives Coastal First Nations $335 million ($200 million from the federal government, $60 million from B.C. and $75 million from private donors) to build a new economy.

“Our leaders of the day knew the Great Bear Rainforest agreement was going to be a blueprint for us to continue on with this important work,” says Christine Smith-Martin, CEO of the Coastal First Nations coalition and a key negotiator of this new Great Bear Sea initiative. “We are the stewards of our territories. We’ve been able to measure how many new sustainable businesses our communities have grown since we signed that agreement. It’s not just us saying it. We’re actually tracking it.”

Over the next 20 years, Great Bear Sea funding is expected to seed 200 new businesses supporting 3,000 jobs in sustainable fisheries, manufacturing and processing, marine stewardship and research, transportation, ecotourism and more. The Great Bear Rainforest delivered a three-to-one return on its initial investment; this one is forecast to attract $750 million in future business investments.

We’ve been able to measure how many new sustainable businesses our communities have grown since we signed that agreement.

—Christine Smith-Martin, CEO, Coastal First Nations

A substantial portion of the funds will also go into expanding the network of Guardian Watchmen programs that monitor the coast, like a hybrid of biologist and coast guard. But the Great Bear agreements aren’t just aimed at protecting nature; they’re also designed to protect industry. The north coast isn’t being turned into a national park. Coastal First Nations depend on fishing and logging as much as non-Indigenous people do, supplying almost half the workforce of both industries.

In order to survive, those industries have to change. British Columbia, long a poster child of colonial resource extraction, has almost eaten through its entire ecological inheritance. Eighty percent of the province’s primary forest has already been logged, while salmon and herring populations are at less than a 10th of their pre-industrial abundance.

“We have to be a more intelligent resource economy,” says Nathan Cullen, B.C.’s minister of water, land and resource stewardship. “There’s some that choose to say we either have to maintain the practices of three generations ago or shut it all down. Those extremes are not at all where the solution lies. The environment is telling us we’re coming up against the limits of what you can do sustainably. Whether it’s climate change, declining salmon, more expensive forestry operations, forest fires, the list is pretty long in terms of the feedback that we’re getting.”

Cullen emphasizes three interconnected priorities guiding the provincial government: “Reconciliation over governance of the land. A historic protection of land and waters. And a much more sustainable natural resource economy. When we stand up good conservation projects, we have to keep our eye on all of those three primary elements at the same time.”

In the Great Bear Sea, that translates into an overall reduction of just 8% of the commercial catch, from salmon, halibut and cod to shellfish. But the remainder will be far more targeted than before. A network of biodiversity hot spots and vital spawning grounds, known as marine protected areas, will see tight restrictions placed over 30,000 square kilometres of ocean.

“Sometimes you hear people say, ‘Oh, we’re gonna shut down the coast’ – that’s not it at all,” Smith-Martin says. “We always lead these conversations with ‘The reason we are doing it is not just for us. It’s for you, too, so that you can pass on your boat to the next person in your family. If we don’t do these protected areas, you’re going to have nothing.’”

How nature can pay for itself

Expressing the value of life in dollar terms is a fraught enterprise; it calls to mind Oscar Wilde’s definition of a cynic as someone who “knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” On the other hand, it’s helped stop traditional economists from treating ecological collapse as an externality. And the numbers do tend to be eye-opening, even if they involve large margins of uncertainty.

A 1997 study published in Nature, for instance, concluded that global ecosystems provide between US$18 and $61 trillion worth of goods and services to civilization, roughly on par with the cash then circulating in the global economy. A 2010 analysis of the forests and wetlands surrounding Vancouver found that these provided $5.4 billion worth of ecosystem services per year. A 2022 study of Grindstone Creek, west of Toronto, discovered $2 billion worth of flood protection alone.

Figures like these underpin conservation finance, which has turned protecting nature into a global business worth some US$50 billion per year. There is now a dizzying array of international markets and financial mechanisms devoted to preserving ecosystems around the world. Carbon credits, conservation trust funds, resilience bonds, habitat mitigation banking, debt-for-nature swaps and too many more mouthfuls to name have helped bankroll the protection of countless ecosystems, from the cloud forests of Costa Rica to Zimbabwe’s Zambezi River.

What sets the Great Bear Sea fund apart is the direct involvement of Indigenous communities, and the fact that industry here is being reformed instead of cancelled. Nature-protection schemes have a long history of overlooking the people who actually live in said nature (usually Indigenous), often kicking them out to turn their home into a park. But the Great Bear Sea initiative was led from the outset by First Nations; their goal is to keep harvesting every possible resource from the region, just more sustainably than industry has up to now.

Sustainable harvests don’t deliver the short-term bonanza that comes from total liquidation, but if you can learn to live on that interest, you’ll never go bankrupt

The financial model itself is also unique. Half the Great Bear Sea fund is stored in a permanent endowment: money that generates interest, and you spend only the interest. This model of conservation finance has its own ungainly name: project finance for permanence, or PFP. The 2007 rainforest agreement was the first PFP in history; a handful of others have been implemented since, mostly in South America. Altogether, just over two million square kilometres of the earth’s surface – an area the size of Mexico – is now covered by PFPs.

“I would compare it to a private–public partnership,” says Eddy Adra, CEO of Coast Funds, a trust fund created to manage the money first delivered by the Great Bear agreements. “It’s a way of funding a large infrastructure project, where the large infrastructure project in this case is the conservation of a globally significant, ecologically significant territory.”

PFPs offer a good metaphor for the sustainable economy now coming into view on B.C.’s north coast. Think of an ecosystem as nature’s permanent endowment. Human industry can skim off the interest that accrues each year – a certain amount of salmon and oysters and spruce and cedar – but mustn’t dig too deep. That’s how nature pays for itself, with no need for a bailout. Sustainable harvests don’t deliver the short-term bonanza that comes from total liquidation, but if you can learn to live on that interest, you’ll never go bankrupt.

First Nations lived by that economic model for thousands of years before colonization; their leadership now is a defining characteristic of the Great Bear PFPs. “In a typical model, you would see global funders come in with conservation goals and work with government directly,” Adra says. Indigenous communities would be consulted near the end of the process only, if at all. “The Great Bear Sea PFP really flipped that upside down,” Adra says. “This was something the Nations had been developing for 20 years. And when the opportunity came along, they brought in their partners to the table to get this done.”

That opportunity was a rare confluence of provincial and federal priorities – a different kind of PFP, and every bit as crucial as the money. In 2019, British Columbia became the first jurisdiction in the world to sign the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) into law; the Declaration Act requires B.C. to share decision-making authority over the land base with more than 200 First Nations across the province. Canada followed with a federal version two years later. These are now the only two governments on the planet to have gone beyond casting a symbolic vote for UNDRIP, turning the voluntary declaration into binding legislation. Their collaboration is crucial, since oceans fall under federal jurisdiction and forests are provincial.

Then in 2022, Canada hosted the UN Biodiversity Conference (COP15) in Montreal, where member countries agreed to protect 30% of their land and water by 2030. The federal government’s $200-million contribution to the Great Bear Sea comes from an $800-million fund created to meet that commitment.

“It’s not many countries where you have governments sit at the table and say, ‘Okay, Indigenous-led communities, you guys can lead this process and we’ll be partners,’” Smith-Martin says. “It’s a good road map for Indigenous communities, philanthropic communities, federal and provincial governments. How does this all work and what kind of commitment did it take to get here?”

As the ecological crisis deepens, that road map points the way to a new kind of treasure. The Great Bear Sea may be unique, but the history of extraction it’s working to reverse is all too universal. Citizens around the world, searching for a way out of their own vicious cycles, can now look to B.C.’s north coast and say, “X marks the spot.”

Arno Kopecky is a Vancouver-based journalist and author. His latest book is The Environmentalist’s Dilemma.

Reporting for this story was supported by the Sitka Foundation and the Science Media Centre of Canada.

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The South American country struck a $20 million debt-for-nature swap agreement with the U.S. that transfers debt payments to conservation initiatives like improving protected areas and natural resource management. The deal also included four NGOs: Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy, Wildlife Conservation Society and World Wildlife Fund.

The groups donated a combined $3 million — in addition to the $15 million contributed by the U.S. — to make the deal happen.

“Our goal is to contribute to the effective management of protected areas and implement other conservation measures in the Peruvian Amazon,” said Fernando Ghersi, director for The Nature Conservancy – Peru. He added, “The debt-for-nature swap represents a significant step towards achieving the long-term financial sustainability of the Peruvian system of protected areas.”

Peru’s investment grade took a hit this year amid ongoing political instability marked by violent protests, corruption, controversial political reforms and impeachments. The country has had six presidents and several overhauls of congress since 2016. This summer, it entered a technical recession after enjoying years of growth that outpaced much of the region.

The political and economic instability has taken a toll on conservation efforts in recent years. Some government agencies haven’t received sufficient budgets to fight environmental crime in protected areas, an official told Mongabay at the end of last year.

This is the third debt-for-nature swap deal struck by Peru and the U.S. The other two were made in 2002 and 2008 and have generated around $36 million for the conservation of tropical forests, according to the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

The U.S. has now made 13 debt-for-nature and debt-for-climate swaps in Latin America and 22 worldwide. Other Latin American countries with similar deals include Belize, Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala and Paraguay. El Salvador, Costa Rica and Panama all have two deals with the U.S.

Other countries with deals include Bangladesh, Botswana, Indonesia, Jamaica and the Philippines.

“As Global South countries face crushing interest payments, compounded by losses from our climate and biodiversity crises, other multilateral funding sources continue to shirk their responsibility. These countries must not bear that cost alone,” said CEO of Conservation International M. Sanjayan. “Debt-for-nature and debt-for-climate swaps can fill a clear supplementary role in relieving that undue burden.”

In addition to lowering the risk default for countries, debt-for-nature swaps can help improve biodiversity, the IMF has said, which can save carbon sinks, create new opportunities for revenue-generating carbon credits and reduce emissions. It could also create new possibilities for ecological tourism.

Some critics of the debt-for-nature and debt-for-climate concept — which was first introduced in the 1980s — warned that combining debt-related issues and climate initiatives isn’t always the right solution for some countries and could lead to “greenwashing.” Analysts at investment bank Barclays said funding needs to be better monitored to ensure it actually has a positive environmental impact.

But a study of Peru’s previous swap agreements found that funding did in fact go towards work like community resource management, constructing guard posts along rivers, inspecting forest concessions and designing training manuals for forest and water management in Indigenous communities, among other things.

“The Peruvian Amazon, like the whole Amazon, faces multiple challenges, and we must act now to prevent the biome from reaching the point of no return,” said WWF-Peru Country Director Kurt Holle. “…Through innovative debt swap initiatives, we can transform economic challenges into nature-friendly solutions for people.”

This story was originally published by Mongabay.com. Read the original story here.

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How developers made direct requests to a minister’s chief of staff to take properties out of the Greenbelt.  

That government complied, making formerly protected areas available for development.  

For me, the sad thing is how the Greenbelt is conceived.  

Investors and politicians see it as land parcels, dark circles on a map, numbers tallied on a chart. Where is the childhood memory of walking the Bruce Trail in spring surrounded by a flowering of red and white trillium?  

On August 9, provincial Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk released a 95-page assessment of Ontario’s plan to remove from protection 3,000 hectares (7,400 acres) of farmland, wetland and forest. Written in response to a request from three opposition parties, it explains in exquisite detail the removal’s financial and environmental consequences.    

Few will be surprised by the AG’s discoveries – little at Queen’s Park is shocking, these days – but she presents them with admirable assurance. Her findings are damning and definitive.    

Notwithstanding government claims, opening the Greenbelt was never necessary to meet provincial housing goals. Lysyk learned this from city planners working in the regions where the protection designation would be scrapped. Even Ontario’s own Housing Affordability Task Force “determined that a shortage of land was not the cause of the province’s housing challenges and that the Greenbelt and other environmentally sensitive areas must be protected.”  

Lysyk offers a precise picture of land-removal profits. The scale is staggering. It’s one thing for tree huggers to make this point; it’s quite another when proclaimed by the auditor general. She writes: “Developers/landowners could see a $8.28 billion increase in the value of their land after the removal of 15 sites from the Greenbelt . . .” (Ontario wants the private sector to build “affordable” homes here.)  

Most Ontarians refuse to see the Greenbelt as land whose potential is only achieved when it’s monetized. 

The consultation process was poor. Interested parties had just 30 days to weigh in. Indigenous communities were not adequately engaged. And Housing Ministry staffers didn’t have enough time to assess public comments. Government received 35,000 submissions, which were “overwhelmingly negative.” It didn’t matter. Queen’s Park did not change its plans.  

I’m struck by Ontario’s very conception of the Greenbelt. In its response to the AG’s report the premier’s office defends itself, saying it’s “unlocking lands” to build housing. The words are telling. In this worldview, protected green space is seen as imprisoned. Here nature is not in need of preservation, but liberation – in the form of development. When woods and fields become a subdivision, they’re set free. Such is the perverse vision guiding our decision-makers. For Queen’s Park, the Greenbelt is a commodity no different than tin or pork belly. It’s this impoverished notion of creation that troubles so many of us.  

Earlier this summer, I walked the protected Niagara Escarpment near Tobermory. There in a field I saw for the first time a pair of sandhill cranes. I jumped the fence and put binoculars to my eyes. They were bowing their heads, spearing grain as herons spear fish. These were not abstractions. I experienced the birds and escarpment as a personal gift. I’ve loved this landscape since adolescence. I have dreams about its limestone sinkholes.  

I’m not alone. Most Ontarians refuse to see the Greenbelt as land whose potential is only achieved when it’s monetized. Our relationship to it is one of intimate friendship, not commerce.  

This, to its peril, is what the government cannot comprehend.  

Gideon Forman is a policy analyst at the David Suzuki Foundation. 

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Decades later, I never expected to be back on the blockades or fielding calls again from concerned customers of British Columbia forest products. When I was arrested by the RCMP with other forest defenders at a blockade in Fairy Creek last month, I had just visited one of the most beautiful old-growth forests I have ever seen. These old-growth forests on Pacheedaht and Ditidaht territories, on the west coast of Vancouver Island in British Columbia, are among the last of their kind anywhere in the world. I was astonished to see yellow cedars more than a thousand years old. The ancient giant trees that are iconic around the globe are not only the pillars of these rare temperate rainforest ecosystems – they are part of the most carbon-rich forests on earth. Standing among these giants, there is no question that they are worth more than any dollar amount their felled lumber can deliver. It’s clear why Indigenous leaders, scientists and their allies are risking their safety and freedom to defend them.

Civil disobedience is a last resort, especially in the middle of a pandemic. When it comes to old-growth forests in British Columbia, it is no secret how desperate we are. More than 97% of the original large, old forests that stood in this province prior to colonization and the advent of industrial logging have been destroyed. But even more shockingly, the majority of what remains is still unprotected and open to logging. In the case of forests on Ditidaht and Pacheedaht territory, those old-growth forests are still standing thanks to the tireless efforts of forest defenders, but they remain at imminent risk.

On June 9, B.C. Premier John Horgan publicly accepted a call from Pacheedaht, Ditidaht and Huu-ay-aht First Nations to defer old-growth logging in parts of their territories, including areas in Fairy Creek and the Walbran. Hogan called the two-year deferral “monumental.” While it’s an important development, it has not stopped the chainsaws.  The new deferral leaves critical old-growth forests in the area – and in fact, all across B.C. – open to logging. Elder Bill Jones has asked forest defenders to stand their ground and continue protecting these ancient trees. As arrests continue, it is clear that without broad bans on old-growth logging, the situation will only escalate. Elsewhere, many First Nations, including most recently the Squamish Nation, have publicly demanded old-growth logging deferrals or declared moratoria on old-growth logging in their territories.

At Fairy Creek, the logging company in question is not a stranger to the controversy of logging old-growth forests in B.C. Teal Jones, headquartered in Surrey, ships wood products to a variety of locations and sectors, including lumber for building and shingles for siding. As tensions mount around the remaining old-growth forest and the lack of government action, customers of Teal Jones and other old-growth logging companies (including Canfor, West Fraser, Western Forest Products and Interfor) should expect a sharp increase in scrutiny on their sourcing. Many home- and office-supply and building companies, including Home Depot and Staples, have policies against sourcing from endangered forests after long campaigns from Stand.earth (then known as ForestEthics) and our partners. Now is the time for builders, home supply stores, and pulp and paper customers to be proactive and commit to ending any purchasing sourced from at-risk old-growth forests. If they don’t hold themselves accountable, our movement certainly will.

In my experience, what customers of wood and paper products want is certainty. Certainty that the forest products they buy are harvested sustainably and don’t come from endangered-species habitat, endangered ecosystems or increasingly rare old-growth forests and certainty that they will not become embroiled in controversy such as what is unfolding in British Columbia.

Photographer TJ Watt captured images of old-growth trees before and after logging in Vancouver Island’s Caycuse Valley in the spring and fall of 2020. Caycuse Valley is not protected by deferrals being applied to other areas of Fairy Creek.

Provincial and federal governments in Canada have a vital role to play in delivering that certainty. B.C.’s NDP government was elected on a promise to implement the recommendations of an expert panel on old growth, which included immediate logging bans in at-risk old-growth forests like the ones at Fairy Creek. But Premier Horgan and his government have instead faltered on their promise, with recent deferral announcements leaving the vast majority of old-growth forests on the chopping block.

Both B.C.’s and Canada’s commitments to large-scale nature protection and bold climate action are seriously undercut when some of the most carbon-rich forests on the planet are being clearcut. The provincial and federal governments need to collaborate to ensure protection of our remaining old growth and threatened species habitats. They have the funds and the tools to support Indigenous stewardship initiatives and land-use visions, as well as a just transition for workers and communities away from old-growth logging. All they need is the political will, and growing marketplace concern and the escalating actions at Fairy Creek and across B.C. will give it to them one way or another. To date, 222 people have been arrested while standing up for these ancient, giant trees.

Almost 30 years ago when I was on my first blockade at Clayoquot Sound, I knew that the solutions to these issues would be difficult. But I never thought that all these years later, we would still be fighting to defend irreplaceable old-growth forests – only now, even fewer stands of these ancient trees remain. This must be the last time. We owe it to our grandchildren and their grandchildren to leave a liveable world, one where they can walk through an old-growth rainforest and crane their necks up at the treetops in awe.

Tzeporah Berman is the international program director at Stand.Earth, chair of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Committee, and  an Adjunct Professor of Environmental Studies,  York University.

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