SAVING THE SACRED HEADWATERS

By Wade Davis

Photograph by Ryan Hill

This is not a story of Tibet or the Amazon, of life on the Arctic ice or in the searing sands of the Sahara. It is a story of my own backyard, a land known to the Tahltan people and all the First Nations of British Columbia as the Sacred Headwaters, the birthplace of the three great free flowing salmon rivers of home, the Stikine, Skeena and Nass. It is a high broad valley, nestled among mountains that score every horizon. In a long day, perhaps two, you can follow the tracks of grizzly and wolf, caribou and moose, and drink from the very sources of the rivers that cradled the great civilization of the Pacific Northwest.

When in 1879 John Muir experienced but the lower third of the Stikine, he called it a Yosemite a hundred miles long, and he later named his beloved dog after this river of his enchantment. The Grand Canyon of the Stikine, Canada’s greatest canyon, often described as the K2 of whitewater challenges, was not successfully run by kayak until 1985; since then fewer than fifty men and women, all world-class athletes, have made it through. No raft has ever done so.

In the lower 48, the farthest you can get away from a maintained road is twenty miles; in this northwest quadrant of British Columbia, an area the size of Oregon, there is one road, a narrow ribbon of tarmac heading north to the Yukon along the flank of the Coast Mountains.

I followed this road north in the 1970s, soon after it was built, to take a job as the first park ranger in the Spatsizi, the Serengeti of Canada. The job description was deliciously vague, wilderness assessment and public relations. In two four-month seasons I encountered but a dozen people.

In the course of my wanderings I came upon a shaman’s grave, which led to an encounter with remarkable man, a Gitxsan elder who had lived all his life in the bush as a hunter and trapper. For more than thirty years I recorded stories from Alex, the myths of Wy-ghet, the trickster transformer of Gitxsan lore, who in his folly taught the people the proper way to live on the land. These were all whimsical tales of moral gratitude played out against and within the backdrop of nature.

Through time isolation has been the country’s saving grace; now this very isolation could be its doom. The Tar Sands, Enbridge and Keystone pipelines, these are just elements of a tsunami of industrial development sweeping over the Canadian north. In Tahltan territory alone there are 41 major projects, some with considerable promise, some of great concern.

On Todagin Mountain, a wildlife sanctuary in the sky, revered by the Tahltan as the home of the largest population of Stone sheep in the world, Imperial Metals intends to build a massive open pit copper and gold mine processing 30,000 tons of rock a day for 30 years. The project design calls for hundreds of millions of tons of toxic tailings to be dumped into the lakes of the headwaters, poisoning the source of the Iskut, the main tributary of the Stikine.

In the very meadows of the Sacred Headwaters, Shell has sought to extract methane gas by fracking coal seams that underlie a million acre tenure, drilling as many as 6000 wells and injecting into the ground millions of gallons of toxic chemicals. The result would be a network of roads, pipelines, and flaring wellheads all producing gas to be shipped east to fuel the expansion of the Tar Sands.

Fortune Minerals would tear into the headwater valley itself, on a massive scale, with open pit anthracite coal operations that would level entire mountains.

For more than a decade, the Tahltan clans, Wolf and Crow, have actively opposed these assaults on their land, rivers and lakes. Men, women and children, old and young, even elders in wheelchairs have stood in rain and snow, blockading the only road access to the interior. For them the Sacred Headwaters is home, their kitchen and sanctuary, the burial grounds of their ancestors and the nursery of generations as yet unborn.

With the support of every municipality downstream, of every locally elected politician in every party, the Tahltan to date have blunted these efforts to violate their homeland. But now everything hangs in the balance. The fate of the country will be decided in the coming year.

Just before my old friend Alex died at 96, he gave me a gift, a tool carved by his grandfather from caribou bone in 1910, when Alex was a boy. It was a specialized tool, used by a trapper to skin out the eyelids of wolves. It was only after Alex passed away that I realized that the eyelids in question were my own and that Alex, having done so much to allow me to see, was in his own way saying goodbye.

I now know that for all these years he has been asking all of us to open our eyes to what is happening in the north. The Tahltan have called for the creation of a Tribal Heritage Reserve that will protect the Sacred Headwaters, and in doing so create the greatest protected area in British Columbia, a vast and pristine wilderness that will reach all the way to the protected areas of Alaska. No amount of methane gas, coal, copper or gold can compensate for the sacrifice of a place that could be the Sacred Headwaters for all citizens of the world.

Now, on eve of a New Year, something of a miracle has occurred. Two weeks before Christmas, on December 18, the British Columbia government, Shell Canada, and the Tahltan Central Council announced an agreement by which Shell will relinquish all of its tenures. In addition, the government has vowed never again to issue any petroleum or natural gas tenure in the area. Shell has done the right thing, and deserves all praise, as well as legitimate compensation, royalty credits that will be invested in water recycling projects, yet another sign of this company’s sincere commitment to true and sustainable development in the Canadian north. Much remains to be done. Permanent protection, as defined by the Tahltan, must be implemented. Other threats must be addressed, most especially Fortune Mineral’s plans to extract anthracite from the very meadows Shell Canada, the Tahltan and the British Columbia government have determined to protect. And there still looms the challenge of Imperial Metals plans to establish an open pit copper and gold mine on Todagin, a project that will compromise the headwater lakes of the Iskut.

Still this is a glorious day that bodes well for the coming year. Perhaps the last word should be that of Annita McPhee, president of the Tahltan Central Council, who has worked so hard to save this country.  “We want to acknowledge Shell for its decision to respect the wishes of the Tahltan Nation by giving up its plans to develop coal-bed methane in the Klappan. The Klappan is one of the most sacred and important areas for our people. It is a place of tremendous cultural, spiritual, historic and social importance. Our people do not want to see it developed, and we look forward to working with B.C. on achieving permanent protection of the Klappan.”

BEYOND THE WILD 

By Summer Rayne Oakes 

Photograph by Paul Colangelo

Just weeks before Promised Land had hit theatres, a film starring Matt Damon that delves into the social, environmental and political maelstrom around hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”), an eight year campaign to prevent methane gas exploration across a million acres within the headwaters of the Stikine, Skeena, and Nass Rivers of British Columbia came to a close.

On December 18, 2012, Shell Canada relinquished its tenure to explore for natural gas in the Sacred Headwaters and announced that it will immediately withdraw from the region. The hard-fought tripartite agreement between the government of British Columbia, the Tahltan Central Council and Shell has come at a time when leasing private land for natural gas is at an all-time high.

I was a wide-eyed 16 year-old when I first took a job with my county conservation district in Northeastern Pennsylvania. They elected me to help lead the restoration of Grassy Island Creek, a 5.4 square mile area that was laid to waste from decades of coal mining.  Mountains of rubble rose high above surrounding treetops, openings to old mine shafts left gaping holes in the rocky landscape, acid mine drainage – noticeable by the lack of fish in a once Class A trout steam – coursed through the surrounding riparian areas. When most of my friends might have been making their regular rounds at the Viewmont Mall, I was taking a pick to an impossible landscape of rock-hard culm.

Just as it’s easy to understand not to put your hand over boiling water after you get burned, it’s simple to figure out what not to do with the land you live on once the damage has been done. This, of course, is a lesson that is unfortunately not heeded and the thousands of boreholes that have taken up residency in my hometown are less caused by short-term amnesia than by the difficult economic choices our communities have to make.

In the waning hours of the summer of 2010, I was talking with my dear friend and anthropologist, Wade Davis. A native to British Columbia and part-time resident in the area that is referred to as the Sacred Headwaters, Wade shared a story of the encroaching mines and boreholes within the surrounding watersheds of the Stikine, Skeena, and Nass. The scale of what he described was unfathomable – and the understanding that I had with my own hometown experience was enough to imagine what was at stake. He invited me to travel to see him – and with Above and my friend, cinematographer Clayton Haskell – we made the long trek north.

It is hard to express the beauty of this great expanse of wilderness. Situated in some of the most magnificent mountains and valleys on the alpine-arctic border, the Sacred Headwaters has truly earned its name. For the time that I was there, the fog lay low to the ground, which enshrouded the land with an ethereal splendor. Very few roads were visible on the mountainous plateaus. The only trails were those left by grizzly, dear and black bear.  As we ambled up Todagin Mountain, Wade snapped twigs every 200 feet or so. “You would be surprised how different the mountain looks on the way down,” he cautioned. It was – I might say – very insightful advice. By the time our crew was ready to turn back after finding over two dozen morels on the top of the highest plateau, the perspective of the entire landscape had changed. It’s as if one turn of the kaleidoscope yielded a completely different landscape.

The native Tahltan people, however, who call the Sacred Headwaters “home,” do not get lost so easily. For centuries they have hunted and lived on the land, celebrating the spirit of its bounty and beauty. It is this great physical and spiritual connection to their home that has given them the vigor to voice their concerns on the mineral and methane gas exploration that, quite honestly, dwarfs the issues happening in my own hometown. The foresight of the Tahltan people has yielded the protection of more than a million acres, especially since British Columbia has released that it will not issue future petroleum and natural-gas tenure in the area. Still, their journey isn’t complete. Fortune Minerals, as Wade writes in his book, The Sacred Headwaters, still owns the subsurface rights to some forty thousand acres. Their goal of producing between 1.5 and 3 million tons of coal a year would yield a cacophony of machinery and create visible excavations that will create the same damage that I saw as a young girl in Pennsylvania…only on a far larger scale.

The Skeena Watershed Conservation Coalition, the primary group spearheading initiatives behind saving the Sacred Headwaters, is now focusing their attention on Fortune Minerals to prevent the exploration of Klappan Mountain. If you would like to learn more about Saving the Sacred Headwaters, watch our film Beyond the Wild and help contribute here. 

WHERE THE WILD THINGS WERE

By Laura Sevier

Photograph by Olaf Wipperfürth

Millionaire Philanthropist Paul Lister wants to fix a damaged ecosystem and doesn’t mind being mocked for trying.  If he has his way, wolves, bears and lynx will once again roam the Scottish Highlands

This land was once covered in thick forest, an undulating wilderness teeming with wolves, bears and lynx. Then all the predators were hunted to extinction – first the bears then the big bad wolves. Tree after tree was chopped down, stripping the hills bare. Less than one per cent of Scotland’s original Caledonian forest survives – which is why Paul Lister, British conservationist and philanthropist, wants to turn back the clock.

It’s a misty, grey June evening and I’m sitting on the lawn outside Alladale, Lister’s lodge an hour’s drive north of Inverness. He points towards the panoramic postcard view of the glen. Where I see a magnificent Scottish view, he sees a scene of devastation, “huge swathes of heather and bracken that have taken over the countryside because of a lack of trees.” Lister explains how the Scottish highlands have been “abused by man for several centuries” and reels off the culprits: the Industrial Revolution, the British Empire, railway construction, two World Wars. This, he says, is the main reason for “rewilding” Alladale, the 9,300-hectare Sutherland property he bought in 2003. His vision is to reforest the hills and welcome back lost species, among them wolves, bears, lynx, wild boar and moose. Human inhabitants still haunted by Little Red Riding Hood needn’t panic: the animals will be enclosed by an electric fence 80 kilometers around.

Unlike many other Scottish estates, where the focus is on managing deer, grouse and salmon for sport, Alladale is called (by Lister) a “reserve” and the keepers are “rangers”. “I want to differentiate it from other land in Scotland. Estate sounds like a link to the past,” he says. “I’m ashamed of the past. I want to go forward.”

Paul Lister is a controversial and unconventional squire, with his hot-wired energy, and boundless enthusiasm. He’s constantly cracking jokes. Much has been written about the fear, feasibility and folly of this “wolfman” bringing back predators to a country where, legend has it, the last wolf was shot in 1743.

Before I met Lister I watched a recent and somewhat irreverent BBC series about him that played up his eccentricities and the opposition he faced from locals and ramblers after unveiling his plan in 2004. Here was a rich Englishman trying to create a Jurassic Park in Scotland. Lister seemed an easy target for ridicule.

In many ways it is a bonkers, hugely ambitious plan and Lister himself is a paradox. He is equally at home in the Scottish highlands as he is in Miami where, along with London and Latin America, he divides his time. During the week I interviewed him I saw him schmooze London’s champagne set at an opulent Mayfair shop where he was hosting a fundraising drive for his other conservation project, The European Nature Trust (TENT). Later in Scotland I saw him sporting black-and- yellow fancy dress and clutching a can of lager at a local lass’s bumblebee-themed birthday party in Ardgay village hall, on the edge of Alladale.

Lister’s family made their fortune in the furniture business (his father Noel was the co-founder of furniture empire MFI) and after a stint following in his father’s footsteps, he turned his attention towards his passion: conservation. Is it just a happy coincidence that Lister has ended up replanting trees instead of selling them as tables and chairs? He has previously joked that his rewilding plans maintain the family tradition of pinewood and four legs. Lister calls himself a “caretaker” of the land and feels a strong sense of giving something back. This humility is countered by a singular, almost fanatical determination to pull this project off. After Lister explained his vision in detail during the few days I spent with him, I found myself warming to the idea, much like the locals who, though initially skeptical, now seem to be behind it. “A recent interviewer from BBC Radio 4 went into the nearby village, Bonar Bridge, to try and get some possibly negative comment about what [we are] doing – he didn’t have any luck,” Lister laughs.

Local farmers who feared the wolves would escape and devour livestock have been reassured that the animals will be enclosed within an electric fence. “Any animal that gets close to it won’t go near it again.” Lister also insists that wolves are not a danger to humans, that “wolves are terrified of humans.” Although wolf attacks on humans are incredibly rare, they do happen. A recent attack on a jogger in the Alaskan wilderness is a case in point – although admittedly that incident happened on unfenced land.

Alladale’s proposed fence is not welcomed by everyone. The Ramblers Association is angry about Lister’s plans to enclose the entire property, which would jeopardize their legal “right to roam”. Lister counters that once the wolves and bears

arrive, the place will become a magnet for tourists, bringing money and jobs into the area. “For an area of land that 300 people a year have to forfeit the right to roam through, we’d get 20,000 visitors and employ 100 people.” Ramblers would still be allowed there, albeit under the supervision of a ranger.

Lister’s vision for Alladale, however, has a long way to go. So far, there are just nine wild boar and two European elk (moose), all of which have to be enclosed under the Dangerous Wild Animals Act, as well as a herd of 30 Highland cattle. Wild cats, European bison and red squirrels are next on the list but there’s no sign of them yet. The 100,000 trees Lister’s team have planted have yet to grow into anything resembling a forest, but another 260,000 trees will be planted, including alders, willows, birch, rowan, Scots pine and aspen. This is a serious restoration project.

At the moment, Alladale treads an unusual path between wildlife reserve, stalking destination and luxury lodge – some people enjoy taking pictures of deer while others go to shoot them. Whatever happens, Lister is keen for Alladale to be commercially successful. If the wolves do arrive, stalking would stop altogether and guided 4x4 safaris more akin to African game reserves would be the main attraction. How does reserve manager Innes MacNeill feel about managing predators in an enclosure? “I’d be happy to go into the enclosure. I’m not worried. If you travel to Spain and Scandinavia you see bears and wolves in the wild.”

Wolves aside, Alladale is breathtakingly beautiful, spanning five glens and two rivers. The safaris are already up and running: you can get up close to the wild boar, pet Highland calves and witness the immensity of the place by Land Rover, mountain bike or Highland pony. Walk along the rivers in Summer and you’ll see salmon leaping up spectacular falls.

“We’re the lead predator on the planet,’” says Lister. “Can we put up with these other predators? I think we should be able to.” He points out that the population of red deer has burgeoned to roughly four or five times beyond what it should be. With no major predator they are left to just chomp away at the vegetation.

Lister cites the example of Yellowstone National Park where wolves were successfully reintroduced in 1995 after a 70-year absence. Because the wolves were “chasing deer around 24/7” this helped give the forest time to regenerate. In Scotland, it’s presently left up to man to do the job with a rifle; Lister says you’d have to cull 700–800 deer a year just to keep on top of population numbers.

So what’s holding up the process at Alladale? “The biggest obstacle so far has been land,” Lister says. He figures that 20,000 hectares is enough space for two grey wolf packs and “half a dozen or a dozen” European brown bears. As this is double the amount of land he owns, he either needs to influence his neighbors to follow his example or buy more land.

Red tape presents further challenges. Although Lister does not want Alladale to be labeled a zoo, he has had to apply for a zoo license because “undomesticated” animals here are available to the public for more than seven days a year. The matter is complicated further as Scottish law forbids predator and prey to share the same enclosure, whatever the size. Even bringing back red squirrels is mired in technicalities. A lengthy process needs to be carried out to check that the squirrels can survive there, despite their flourishing in nearby Highland regions. “There is a lot of bureaucracy,” laments Lister.

As man’s actions have triggered a massive disruption of natural ecosystems, so it is up to us to jumpstart their regeneration. In the grand scheme of things, rewilding is still a niche experiment – in many places it’s just not practical.

Whether or not Paul Lister pulls off his own ambitious rewilding project at Alladale, he certainly deserves credit for trying – and for challenging our notion of what may be considered a “practical” way to right the wrongs of the past.

CRYING FOR THE WOLVES

Photograph for Above by Olaf Wipperfürth

Through precautionary tales and fables, we’ve been culturally trained to think of the wolf as the enemy, a species synonymous with trickery, aggression and a ravenous appetite. However, this ostensibly cunning and deceitful character is under vicious attack by mankind and is federally unprotected in many states and countries around the world.
 

On Thursday, a legendary, “rock star” of a wolf, known as “’06”—and since she was collared by researchers last year, “832 F”—was gunned down just outside of Yellowstone National Park. Her death has shaken the wildlife conservation community and has gained widespread media attention, making her a celebrity figure posthumously.

In the wake of this recent incident, we had the chance to speak with Maggie Howell, Managing Director of the Wolf Conservation Center (WCC) in New York, about the killing of ‘06 and the situation in the Northern Rockies. Howell admitted that, despite this particular killing, there is some good news: Montana has shut down hunting in certain areas bordering the Park. Unfortunately, she says, “this conservation effort has come retroactively,” due to the outcry against the increasing number of wolf deaths, instead of earlier in the year, when wildlife groups advocated for the state to establish a zone to protect the animals.

In August, gray wolves in Wyoming, including ‘06, were removed from the endangered species list, opening them to unregulated killing in 85% of the state. Since the onset of this year’s hunting season in the West, a total of 257 wolves have been killed in the Northern Rockies ten of which were, according to Howell, Park wolves and seven of those were collared for research. “Since [‘06’s] death it seems like her celebrity has grown even bigger in a way where hopefully it will demonstrate some of the challenges of wolf recovery—or some of the unnatural challenges—in our western landscape and hopefully people will be inspired to learn just about the educational, economic and ecological impacts that wolves in Yellowstone can have,” Howell states. “The hardest thing for people who have followed the life of ‘06, or perhaps have seen her in the wild, is the fact that she had to die this way.”  She continues, “this wild, rule-breaker of a wolf—which she almost seemed like at times—is now a hunter’s prize and that’s a tough thing to swallow.”

REFLECTIONS ON THE HUDSON RIVER SCHOOL

THE HUDSON RIVER School commenced around 1825 with the stunning landscapes of famed American painter and early conservationist, Thomas Cole.  The School would henceforth be known as our first indigenously American school of scenic painting.  Ironically, these distinctly illuminated, majestic homages to the “new” land would also serve as compelling documents to help establish the need to set aside and preserve large sections of pristine, U.S. territories for future generations.

Prior to the widespread use of photography and before the Transcontinental Railroad linked the coasts in 1869, the Hudson River artists, along with great American poets of the day such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, clearly understood man’s potential to destroy our natural wonders, especially as the Industrial Revolution made an emphatic arrival on our shores.

The highly acclaimed 19^th century artists—Albert Bierstadt and later Thomas Moran, for example—made arduous treks out West where the grandeur of the landscape inspired outstandingly beautiful and treasured works of art.  These depictions, combined with public support and enthusiastic press, resulted in major historical moments including the U.S. Congress’ establishment of Yellowstone National Park in 1872.  These early, impassioned efforts helped to convince Congress to withdraw this huge parcel and other expanses from public auction – a concept and action very difficult to imagine occurring now.

Ultimately, the gifted Hudson River School painters made an immeasurable contribution not only to our cultural aesthetic history but also to the understanding of our collective obligation to safeguard and sustain our land’s natural riches.

Mindy Moak has been a grateful specialist dealing of 19^th and 20^th century American paintings for over 30 years.  

She co-owns and runs MME Fine Arts in New York City.

Photo: Thomas Cole’s paintings that capture the sublime beauty inherent in the wild American landscape in the 19^th century are the very works of art that inspired the Hudson River School.  From 1833 to 1836, he produced five paintings as part of The Course of Empire series, beginning with The Savage State.  This painting depicts a dominating wilderness where man works in harmony with nature as shown by the hunter chasing after a deer and the canoes serenely streaming up the river.  Yet however peaceful this scene appears to be, the foreboding storm brewing in the dawning sky alludes to the forthcoming destruction of the environment by mankind. 

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