But during our deliberations, it became clear that Jim's track record as a committed environmentalist, his experience as a politician, the high esteem he commanded from First Nations and communities, his irresistible personality, and his exuberant energy made him the best choice. Our final decision was unanimous, and we were thrilled when Jim accepted our offer. We could pay him only a fraction of what he could command elsewhere, but when I apologized, he replied that he would get a pension from his years as a member of Parliament, and besides, “we have to be lifers on these issues.”
By the time we hired him, we had already begun to acquire the financial support that enabled us to move to a new office on Fourth Avenue in Vancouver, in the heart of the Kitsilano neighborhood that had been a hippie magnet during the 1960s and '70s. It was an ideal location, and the building, built and owned by businessman Harold Kalke, is heated and cooled through geothermal heat-exchange pipes driven into the earth.
During the '60s and '70s, when I had an active genetics research program at UBC, the people in the lab worked and played together, a surrogate family. When I walked into our offices at the foundation, I felt a similar joy. Here were people earning a decent living wage and believing they were working toward a better world.
Jim came into the job with great vigor and soon launched projects as if we already had the money. I'm still hostage to my early years of poverty, but he had faith that we would raise the necessary funds. And he was right, but in the beginning, I was very nervous about all the spending. We were a brand-new, tiny organization with big plans; less than a year after opening our doors, we had a list of ten project areas we eventually wanted to cover.
If we were going to be effective in communicating with the public, we had to know something about what motivates people to change their behavior. After all, we would be going up against corporations such as the automobile, fossil fuel, forestry, and pharmaceutical industries, which spend billions on advertising and public relations. So we sponsored a conference in May 1995 and invited people who have studied and helped influence social change to share their insights; those talks were published as “Tools for Change,” a document that has infused the way we do our work.
These days we are bombarded by media stories and headlines crying that the economy is the bottom line and should dictate the way we behave, our priorities, and our sacrifices. That never made sense to me — we know we are biological creatures, that if we don't have clean air, water, soil and energy, we cannot lead healthy, productive lives — so we commissioned John Robinson, head of the Sustainable Development Research Institute at UBC, to write “Living Within Our Means,” which outlined humankind's fundamental needs and the real bottom line of sustainability.
AS WE BEGAN TO scope out our first project on fisheries, it became the model for later work. Salmon are iconic animals for aboriginal peoples on both the Pacific and Atlantic coasts of North America. If northern cod pulled Europeans to the shores of Newfoundland for five hundred years, the five species of Pacific salmon — sockeye, pink, chum, chinook (or spring), and coho — lie at the heart of Canada's coastal First Nations cultures, nourishing them physically and spiritually.
In thousands of rivers and streams along the west coast of North America, the return of salmon to their natal waters — in numbers that dwarf those of the fabled bison and passenger pigeons in the past and the caribou and wildebeest today — is one of nature's greatest spectacles. But salmon had disappeared from hundreds of rivers, and runs in many others were dropping steeply. Urban development, farming, logging, pollution, dams, and fishing had deeply affected populations that once flourished from California to Alaska; now they were maintained in large numbers only in B.C. and Alaska. As well, ocean-bottom trawling was destroying habitat crucial to marine biodiversity; a roe fishery to supply Japanese markets was devastating herring populations that were critical feed for many species, including salmon; salmon aquaculture was being touted as a replacement for wild populations.
We asked a group of distinguished experts to meet and discuss the nature of the problem, its primary causes and potential solutions. We then sought a more detailed analysis; Carl Walters, a world-renowned fisheries authority at the University of British Columbia, accepted our invitation to write a scientifically based evaluation of the state of Pacific salmon. Carl brought the analytic powers of computers to the fields of ecology and fisheries management and was known for his hard-nosed approach and fearlessness in telling it like it is. His report was extensively reviewed by scientists and fishermen before publication to ensure its accuracy and credibility.
The report, “Fish on the Line,” concluded that salmon runs were in trouble along the coast of B.C. It put the responsibility for the problems on the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO), indigenous peoples, and commercial and sport fishers — in other words, on everyone with a stake in the future of the fish.
With so much finger-pointing, it upset everyone, as expected. All interest groups knew the fish were in trouble, but none was willing to give up its share of the bounty. The report was criticized bitterly, and the media played up the angry critics. The David Suzuki Foundation had a major impact in delivering the message that the salmon runs were in trouble, and that there was clearly a need for a different management strategy. Now, what could be done about it?
In our next study, Lynn Pinkerton, today a professor at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C., and Marty Weinstein, adjunct professor at the UBC Fisheries Centre, both longtime workers in First Nations communities, identified common features in sustainable fisheries around the world. In all such cases, the resource was managed by the local fishing community, which not only was responsible for maintaining stocks but also was held accountable for their state, and the knowledge and experience of the fishers themselves provided the basis for the fishing practices. These findings were published in a report entitled “Fisheries That Work.”
Canada attempts to manage its Pacific and Atlantic fisheries from faraway Ottawa in Ontario and relies on government experts who are not free to state the scientific evidence in public or to make recommendations based on it; government scientists are under intense political pressure to provide information and advice that support the government of the day. The observations and advice of those who make a living on the ocean and in rivers and lakes are rendered marginal or ignored. Such an approach on the east coast of Canada has been catastrophic — the cod fishery, for example, has long since collapsed — yet DFO has been unresponsive to the knowledge of local fishers.
“Fisheries That Work” was a good-news report, giving lots of examples of what works elsewhere and answers to outstanding questions. It was well received by local fishing communities, but the study received almost no play in the media. Crisis and confrontation make stories, but good news is deemed to be boring.
Undaunted, we funded a group of First Nations, commercial fishers, tourism operators, and environmentalists in the village of Ucluelet on Vancouver Island to apply community management of the local fish. The jury is still out on whether local management of species of salmon that migrate long distances can work when they are intercepted in the ocean. As a model for other projects, our fisheries studies provided a good one — do the analysis, look for solutions, then apply what was learned.
Since then, the foundation has funded numerous fisheries projects, including University of Victoria biologist Tom Reimchen's seminal work on the biological marriage between salmon and the rain forest; a province-wide DSF-sponsored inquiry on salmon led by the eminent B.C. judge Stuart Leggatt; a report on the DFO's policy of licensing the killing of spawning herring just for the roe; and a challenge to salmon farming.