 Welcome everybody, you are here for the webinar, a walk through the Great Bear Rainforest Victory, what the wind means for conservation and First Nations rights in the Great Bear and beyond. Thank you so much for being with us today. Our speakers, which if you're on by web, you can see on the webcam, are Valerie Langer from STAND, formerly known as Forest Ethics, and Gary Waters from the Coastal First Nations Great Bear Initiative. Valerie and Gary, thank you so much for your work to get ready for this today and for being here. And I'm Ann Pernick, I'm from STAND, and we're really excited to get started. I'm going to pull up a map here, which we'll be talking about in just a moment, and I'm going to have Valerie and Gary introduce themselves, and then talking a little bit, not just about with your titles and affiliations, about how you came into the campaign, and if there's a story that you can share about that, that would be great. What do you want to have go first? I'll go first. No, goodness. I came into this campaign in 1996. My first time was actually with my colleague and friend photographer Garth Lenz. We went up to take photographs because the environmental groups that were starting to work on the Great Bear had no photographs of this incredible space and place. We got stranded up a river that reverses. Actually, my first time, there's this beautiful lagoon where the high tide, the river blows in, and you can run the rapids into the lagoon, wait for the tide to turn, and shoot the rapids out. And I was used to tides down in Vancouver rather than the rise to 12 feet, but we're a lot further north in the Great Bear. And at night, the tide was 16 feet and rose up under the branches of the big cedar tree where we camped under and took our paddles away. So my introduction to the Great Bear was, everything is bigger. We're going to cut tides. And so I was running the market campaigns at that time. I was one of the couple people who developed the strategy of targeting the customers of the big logging companies in the area. And my work in the Great Bear was actually not in the Great Bear for the first number of years. I worked in Europe, United States, and Japan, cancelling contracts of major lumber and paper contracts. And then it was many years again before I returned and actually met a lot of people in the community. So I worked away. And then it wasn't until 2006 when the Great Bear agreements had actually been negotiated. And this very kind of far-reaching idea that we could implement something called ecosystem-based management, what was agreed to by most of the logging industry, First Nations, the province, and the big organizations. And so I was then brought out of that conflict-based campaigns that I had been doing, which was more my specialty. And people said, well, you think this can happen. You should now sit down and help implement it. I can tell you, it's a very different thing working towards agreement with people who've already agreed to something than to stay in a mode of conflict and just be on the outside saying what should happen rather than being part of what will happen. Yeah. Yeah. I'm Gary Waters. I work with the Coastal First Nations in a position they call General Manager or Senior Policy Advisor. When I came into the organization around 1000, 2001, my background, I had worked with other First Nations organizations in Canada, but a significant amount of my work experiences has been in government. I was deputy minister in a number of positions, both in the provincial government in Victoria and also how senior and deputy minister positions with the federal government in Ottawa. So I had come to Vancouver to take some early retirement and was approached to some of the friends I knew who were associated with doing some work on the Great Bear Rainfall. But to meet some of the First Nations leaders, because the leaders of this time have never come together in any organized manner to work collectively on a major issue. And more and more concerns were being raised by the First Nations on the matter that both the boroughs and to some extent the industry were in discussions about lands. First Nations held their rights entitled. First Nations had crown rights entitled and yet the First Nations were not organized in any manner. They had previously taken legal action at certain things, particularly against forest companies. They had also taken forms of different forms of confrontation, but it was all individualized and therefore they exercised no wheel power. And so the chiefs came and looked for a person who had some background with First Nations, but particularly had a background in negotiations with governments, et cetera, and said we want to go into the room, into the negotiating room. You've got background experience, some of our people know you. Would you be interested in coming on board? That was for a year and now it's 2016. And interestingly, at that same year, 2001, the environmental organization, so Greenpeace, Sierra Club, British Columbia, and Forest Ethics now stand, signed a standstill agreement with the five major forest companies where we agreed to suspend our campaigns against their customers if they agreed to suspend logging in 100 key valleys in order to get the space for solutions to be developed. So there were two conflicts that were at play between First Nations and the province over who had rights to make decisions over land use and there was conflict between the environmentalists and the logging companies over what kinds of forest practices and where logging should happen. And there was this moment in 2001, the millennia had turned and we were forging this brave new world when these two somewhat overlapping the divergent conflicts had to, it was conflicts over the same land days, but different players and different kinds of ideas of what the outcomes would be and we had to find a way to make those fit together. I'm just going to move through the slides. I just wanted to have everybody be able to, who doesn't know this area well, be able to understand where we're talking about and then also see a bit of the people and the wildlife of the area. So I'm just going to go through these and ask you both to make a comment or two and if you want me to move to a different slide, just let me know. All right, well, the slide that you're on now shows the Great Bear Rainforest. It's on the coast of British Columbia and it's pretty well as far away as you can get from Alaska if you keep going north, but it's the wild edge of the Pacific. It's 6.4 million hectares in size, so that's for those of you who are in the states. That's 15 million anchors, so it's about the size of West Virginia, the size of Nova Scotia, the Canadians, and it's a long strip between the mountains and the waters and it's really a place where it's kind of hard to tell where the interaction between the ocean and the forest are just very close. The inlets and key words penetrate up into the valleys and these peninsulas and the archipelago of islands sort of scatter out into the ocean, so it's a kind of water and land or ocean and land are very integral. If you want to change to the next slide, Anne, that gives you a sense of how the ocean and the land from the islands and up into these valleys, it's really quite a spectacular land base and you're looking at them in that photo and there's a tiny fraction of the Great Bear. It takes hours and hours and hours by boat to get from one end to the other, a whole day really, to get one end to the other. If you want to switch to another slide, Gary, I've just got a few slides. Well, there are 26 First Nations that have called this place home for time in memorial. The glaciers receded 10,000 years ago and people have been there. So the forest, unlike the tropics where there are millions of years old, those forests and people have come into those forests, they were already millions of years old. The forests on the coast of British Columbia and across Canada, they've grown up over the last 10,000 years and people have been in those forests for the entire time. So there isn't people separated from the forest. It's been a completely integrated evolution of culture and ecosystems in this area. So the culture is absolutely connected with the land, the salmon. And it's unique. These are unique cultures, unique languages. The ecosystem is rather majestic as reflected in the cultures. The next slide, you'll see that there's some very iconic species like the spirit bear. Most people associate the great bear with spirit bears. It's a white furred black bear. It's not an albino. It's kind of like having blondes in my family. It's very unusual. So about one in every 10 black bears carries the recessive white fur gene. So a black bear can have white cubs. A white bear can have black cubs, as you see in this photo. So that's one of the unique species. There's also tailed frogs, mountain goats, I don't know how many, tens, thousands of bald eagles. It's a, and the humpback whales, five species of salmon. It's a very rich and chico system. In fact, the salmon that return every fall, it's the largest biomass migration in the world. So we think of migrations as like the Serengeti with all those animals crossing the Serengeti. Well, coming across the Pacific Ocean is more live things. Just the mass of salmon coming across, and then all of them swim off the rivers in the great bear and down the coast. That's what that next slide shows. Some of the sockeye salmon coming up one of the rivers. They change color. When they hit fresh water, they transform, which is very much reflected in First Nations culture. The idea of transformation of your whole body form is reflected in a lot of the transformations and stories that are passed down. The humans moving into, you know, between wolf and human, whale and human. And when you look at the experience there, the salmon, you know, they're one color and one shape when they're in the ocean and they turn different colors in different shapes and they hit fresh water. That makes a lot of sense to me. That would be part of the way people would see themselves. So that gives you a little sense of this magnificent place. I passed right over grizzly bears and black bears. And can you each talk a little bit about what was your, what was planned for this area 20 plus years ago? I mean First Nations always have had a long term sustainable plan for the region. They just had little power to influence that. There was always strong concerns about the kind of commercial industrialization of fisheries and forestry. How that took away not only jobs, but how it affected not only the economy, but particularly the environment. So they've always had concerns about better sustainability, balancing, conservation, and cultural values with economic well-being. And so, you know, 20 years ago the plan, as a discussion was going on with industry and the environs, and as the provincial government became to recognize that they also had to come into the room First Nations determined that they were going to come together collectively, organize themselves, and become part of government to government. So the plan was essentially to get involved in land use planning. We never envisioned that the organization would build from that and evolve into a much broader organization that not only did land, have done land use planning, but also got into the whole question of land use management. I got into the question of economic well-being, and now I have began to pit with that over to the marine side. Just a quick follow-up on that. Can you talk a little more about the difference between their vision for the region and what was planned by the logging companies? Well, there were two parts of it. And the first part was the kind of conservation and cultural impacts. In the area of First Nations have significant cultural importance in the forestry area, okay? Number one, hopefully modified trees, etc., were being cut down with no regard to their cultural implications. Clear cuts were going on, cuts right up to the riverbeds, major salmon streams were being impacted. Salmon is their food of life for them and many of those kind of communities. And so forestry they just saw was a rape and pillage. I mean, there was a high level of frustration with the forestry practices there. That along with the whole idea that the forest companies would fly in workers in the camps, keep them in camps, take the wood and log them all out, and there were no jobs. So there was no economic value to forestry and the environmental values were significant. So you can see why there was a natural working relationship with the envirals and First Nations as the power play began out here. When I got involved in this 20 years ago, the practice of large scale clear cutting was that was just the way that forestry businesses happened. The process was to punch a road up a valley, log right up the very steep hillsides, and you've got to remember that rainfall could be up to 20 feet a year in the backs of some of these valleys. It's a high, rain tall area. So landslides off of the roads that were punched up the sides of these steep mountain sides and valleys, clear cuts would go over the top of one mountain and down the valley across the river at the other side and just progressive clear cutting. And the pace was picking up and this is a really isolated area. So just by virtue of being on the other side of the mountains and not really accessible by road, most of the Great Bear hasn't been logged. That has been its good fortune, but as logging progressed in the southern parts of British Columbia and basically they logged everything that was easily accessible, the less accessible old growth became more profitable. So the pressures to log the Great Bear were increasing and the cut went up to four million cubic meters a year. So by the time we got the Great Bear agreements negotiated, and agreed to in 2006 logging four million cubic meters a year. And that didn't include high to glide. That's right. So you add another two million, so six million cubic meters a year. It was a tremendous amount of old growth was going down and the conflicts were extreme. I would say that between blockades and first nations and chiefs were getting thrown in jail for blockading, it was acrimonious between the conflict between first nations, logging companies, the province and the environmentalists. It was a time of high tensions. When we came in in 2000 was really the stage was set by the kind of confrontation that had occurred over the last five years prior to 2000. The what was called the war in the woods with the imbales in the marketplace, first nations in litigation, and I said first nations fighting on the road allowances with forest companies created an environment that both industry for commercial interests and governments for better certainty became aware that a time for a change was needed. Now there's a lot of story to tell about how that change got manufactured, but the setting the stage of it was to some degree the kind of conflict that was out there and the willingness for people to want to change. Let's talk a little bit about what was one and how the process moved from being so acrimonious to eventually being able to get this agreement, which is a huge question. I realize that, but just a few notes on that because it seems that in many ways the process that happened here is as important in terms of the outcomes as as the specific wins in the Great Bear. So if you can switch to the next slide and that will help people to see. Gary and I have gotten this going over this briefly and do you want to talk to first nations? What I think what happened was the first thing that occurred to really manage the change is very powerful groups came together and by that we all gained power. The environment came into the room with a lot of power because of what they were doing in the marketplace. Industry of course had power all the time as the governments and first nations then began to organize themselves and we then became part of the four-legged stool that all of us came into the room with power and interest. That was the first thing. Secondly, I think we all recognize that if you are going to manage change here, you have to manage it by creating a consensus here. Just to get a deal with government and only have industry later on or even the environs later on ask for more change and not be part of the equation is I think it was critical that although first nations themselves hold rights and title and we see ourselves as governments and the province as government governments by bringing both industry and environs into the same room in a planning process was a critical part to develop what I call the long-term legacy here and all of us had our own interests. All of us used each other. But there was a great deal of respect between the parties who I believe believed that there was an opportunity to maintain and a willingness to do that as a result of what I call the past history. I'll talk a little bit about how we used each other. I'll go over quickly what I see as the big wins and Gary touched on it. So first nations gained power. That's the biggest change that's happened. I think the conservation wins are dramatic and interesting and really great. But the durability of that conservation and the scale was possible because first nations gained power. There was a rebalancing of the power dynamic in the Great Bear. I think that's the biggest gain and culturally it's fantastic for Canadians to be to see that happen. It's a model I'd love to see more of. There were economic agreements that were agreed to drafted between the province and first nations and first nations and industry and then there are legal requirements in the logging rules that to maintain cultural spiritual and economic interests of first nations. So those three things very important gains in the Great Bear. On the conservation side about 38% of the entire 6.4 million hectares is in protected areas. When you look at it just as forest because not all of the Great Bear is forested. There are glaciers and mountaintops. That's about 42% of all the forest is now in protected areas. But not all of the conservation happened through protection. That's part of the new model that's recognizing that conservation happens through a number of different modes. Protected areas is one. Legal rules that require areas to be set off limits through other legal mechanisms that the first nations requirements etc is another. And so when you put the series of legal mechanisms together and add them up 85% of the Great Bear rainforest forests are off limits to logging. So it's a new kind of packaging together in a way because first nations don't want to have all of their territories protected. It's you know that just as we wouldn't want to have everywhere the entire Canada in a park because then you can't actually live and work in a park. There's the same sensibility. So 85% is off limits to logging. It's there's a new legal designation called Natural Forests and that covers 3.1 million hectares. There's a new legal designation called Managed Forests and the logging companies are only allowed to log in that 550,000 hectares that's designated as Managed Forest. And then the total amount of logging has been reduced to 2.5 million cubic meters a year. So this is a 40% reduction over what it was in 2006. So it's a quite from the conservation perspective. The new legal rules governing forestry and ecosystem-based management have our package of legal mechanisms and a framework that fit together in a broader framework called Human Well-Bean which recognizes that conservation and economic opportunities have to form an integral package together in order for us to live a good life in a healthy ecosystem. Great. And Valerie and Gary, I'm going to pull up the slide, the map that shows. Yes, we're okay. We're thinking. So if you can see that map, the areas that are on the right are on the left-hand side. That's 2005 prior to the Great Bear First Agreements and about 7% of the total area is either in protected areas or in some kind of recreation study area waiting to see if it's protected. And then on the right, you see the dramatic, as everything that's gray, by the way, is open for logging, is available for logging. And when you look at what happened on the right, it's a series of designations by ecosystem and by landscape unit that have dramatically increased the amount of either fully protected or off limits through legal rules. That leads to the 85% of the forest being off limits to logging. And that map is a pretty dramatic representation of what changed. And that's on the conservation side. It's very difficult to represent the change in the kind of the politics and the decision making and the opportunities that First Nations have. You can't do that in a map, but this shows the conservation side. And if you go to the next slide, the pie chart, or it's the slide I had, I think, the pie chart, that gives you a sense that the red 15% is what's available for logging under new ecosystem-based management rules. And then the light green and dark green represent, dark green is the protected areas, and light green is those areas off limits to logging through other legal mechanisms. And it is hard just to show it, but let's talk a little bit more about the First Nations oversight piece and what that means on the ground. Okay. The number one, as we came into these discussions, was very limited capacity, human resource capacity in the community. And I'm going to break this down into two kind of levels of discussion. As an organization, it was interesting that we just had a very, very strong board of First Nations leaders, okay, who basically all of them came together, signed a declaration of values and high conservation and cultural values. And that leadership was critical. Like, without that leadership, we would have never been able to move the activities itself. That's one thing. Secondly, they did allow the board, though, asked us as technical people to ensure that we had the skills and the knowledge in the room to be in the rooms to plan at one level. And I would say the skills and the ability in the room to meet with senior folks on industry governance and that to basically help bring that home. And our board give us a lot of kind of leverage to support on one hand, but a lot of freedom to put together the bureaucracy with the skills and knowledge to assist that full traditional knowledge and what I call more technical knowledge today, okay. At the community level, there was limited capacity. What was happening is some money was flowing and communities began to do land use plans. But most of that capacity were outside consultants. And one of the major things that happened over the last 15 years is we were successful thanks to foundations and virals and governments. Governments, as we finalized the Great Bear Rainforest, put 30 million into the area for economic development. Foundations put in 30 million. Out of that 30 million, there were conservation. Those were set aside where the interests of those were to help communities build the capacity for stewardship management. 60 million. Sorry, yeah, 60 million. And to that end now, we have in every community a stewardship office, a director. Some of them are fairly large. Like HealthSuch has over 20 people employed there. They have Watchman program. They look at all forestry management plans. They look at all referrals and essentially play a joint decision making to ensure that the land use plans are implemented in the way that they're supposed to be done. We've built huge capacity. They have an office of stewardship of over 50 people now through various sources of funding that we have. So we never expected that. We somehow got involved in a land use planning process, but ended up to evolve into a joint management over decision-making over those lands once the plans were done. Yes, let's see if I can find that. Yeah, so this is where the outcome, you know, aside from you, when you say 85% is protected. There's a framework. This is a massive shift in how large area is managed. This is happening at scale. It's not like a small pilot. This is an area the size of some countries. And with 26, 27, if you're including high-level first nations. All right, so you have a framework that, at its core, says we're going to achieve two goals. And it's a complex system. The two goals are going to be ecological integrity, and we're going to have science. And experts determine what that means. So that was getting, the science came out and wrote, they wrote a handbook, and it said 70% of the natural range of old forest has to be maintained. So that became our goal on the science side. And then it said, the other goal, the equal goal is human well-being. Well, you can manage, you can manage by switching legislation here or rules around forestry to get 70% or 85% of forest off-limits. That governments write those policies. But you can't just write policies and say, human well-being will now exist in these communities. So the two, we've only just seen the beginning. From a management perspective, we now have 85% of the Great Bear rainforest off-limits to logging, but the human well-being component. What Gary was saying is that we are just seeing the beginning of the communities in the Great Bear through their capacity and their stepping in as managers of the land. We've only just begun to see the real changes, I think, in this area, in this region and the model that's being pioneered in this region. So just setting those goals was a dramatically important shift. And then what's been formalized is how culture, science and data, and the forest economy are integrated. So this is not just haphazard because there's a framework that formalizes an integration in that relationship. The power dynamic or the adjustments or shifts, if you want to call it, and the power balance, those have been formalized and collaboration has been formalized. So I'm going to go back to this little story I was going to say back in 2009. We didn't do this all at once. It was difficult. We're inventing this as we go along. Somebody says, go forth. Do ecosystem-based management. Everybody says, what the hell is ecosystem-based management? We've got a bunch of numbers you're supposed to achieve and then you're really supposed to do it. And so we were kind of inventing, how about doing it this way? How about doing it that way and just creating ideas and bouncing those off of each other. And at one point, I was in a meeting with industry on the phone with the provincial negotiator and they were suggesting that we do something and we were suggesting that industry do something else and we were trying to get agreement on the phone with the province and every now and then my team, this is Greenpeace, the Air Club, VC, and Forest Ethics representatives would say to our industry partners, that's an interesting idea but we have to discuss it. Can you give us another room in your office and we're going to go in caucus and we go to another room and we call Gary and Art Starrott. They thought we were talking amongst ourselves but actually we're calling Gary and Art Starrott who are on another phone call with the same provincial negotiator and they say, here's this thing. We would agree to this and that but you'd have to reinforce to Ted who was a negotiator for the province that it's okay with you because he's not going to sign on to anything if First Nations don't support it. So then Gary and Art would say, well would this change? Yes. So we'd say, can you just call Ted right now so then Gary and Art would call Ted and we'd come back into the room on the phone with the same provincial negotiator and industry waiting for us to make up our minds and all of a sudden the province would say how about we do X and it would be this thing that we discussed in there literally the room next door with Gary. So there were just times when in order to come up with the ideas that everybody could agree to there was you know we were leaning on each other and we would support we would say Gary would say we can't accept X or Art would say we can't accept Y and so then we get on the phone with the provincial negotiator and say we can't support X and Y because we knew that that they needed something that some backing so there was there was this capacity to be able to you know in the moment you know to create new ideas and check in with each other rather than coming to a table and then just you know disagreeing with each other it was lots of times we'd pick up the paper see the national globe and mail with the environs having a big article about to say we're going to walk so there was still a tension between negotiations and the side of some company but I thought yeah that's true in order to get to even we had to have conflicts sometimes there had to be a reason to come up with new ideas and it was it just wasn't easy we had to have conflicts and then that sparks new ideas the things you would never have thought of to get around it the other thing that made it all work was the resources that foundations put in I mean clearly it gave us all capacity you know you didn't get money from government if the foundations had not come in and supported both of us yeah we would have never been able to have the staying power in the room and the kind of independence in the room I have two more questions I want to ask you before we open it up up to the audience yeah it's about time so the first question is are you seeing kind of the history of this campaign shaping other campaigns for First Nations rights and for and for conservation and then the second question that I'll ask you is did you how did your vision of success what what a win would be how did it change over the course of the campaign well I'll answer the first question number one just for our organization we have now moved with Canada not the province because it's over the oceans where it's mostly federal jurisdiction and we are now into very serious discussions on marine use planning in a very comprehensive way and that will be very interesting it's the same goals as we had before so that's that clearly with our capacity and we've got resources we're now doing that I do think we were in a unique situation though I mean first of all we had the great better rainforest not everybody has a great better rainforest in their backyard as I said secondly we had the financial resources to make it work thirdly as I said we had the dynamics of conflict and we requirement for change in the rule and then fourthly we had personalities who had the ability to work together you know differences but willing to work together to achieve a common goal and a common result and so when you say you see others doing that I think others are reaching out now we may have better examples than I do but those dynamics are hard to recreate you know but there's good lessons to learn both good and bad that one should what you're doing I think is great because there are there are lessons that we can learn from at least change elsewhere well yeah so I think you're very risk the magic you can't uh moments you can't recreate personalities will will all be different so this isn't a it's not a cookie cutter but there are definitely elements uh that can be a model for how to approach uh protected uh conflicts in other geographies we've had the Cree come out from Quebec now where there's conflicts over logging in the boreal who've asked for some um for our inputs on how they might be able to structure something similar also at similar scales or even bigger and and I feel that there's a lot of elements that if we look back on that we could leapfrog over some of the time spent spinning our wheels trying to find how to achieve solutions so the collaboration for example the modes of collaboration uh the understanding of who needs to make decisions and how to uh how to create uh a collaboration that honors the formal decision makers and the informal power and keeps everybody in a proper place environmental groups we hold power but we are not decision makers for example and logging companies uh shouldn't be formal decision makers uh over lead use so that that kind of understanding that the outcome can suit uh the interests of each player that has to be in vision differently so those those aspects of the model uh can definitely be transferred I think there's a lot that we have to look back at having been deep in it it's sometimes hard to see that what was your second question though I'm forgetting how or did you find that your vision of what victory is changed over the course of this long campaign I can say that mine did dramatically because I wanted I wanted the death of the logging companies and my my view and I started in this was that I was going to be dancing on the ruins of multinational corporations and um that there would be preferably no logging in the Great Bear um I saw hearts as the as the answer and my steep learning curve um working with First Nations and working with the logging companies and seeing that uh you can be really right for a long time on all your stats and data and get absolutely nothing accomplished um kind of that that realization that we really had to forge agreements that worked for all the parties who were involved who had power who had uh interests and um so the vision that I had was naive um but you know uh and maybe not stupid but at least naive um and uh not respectful of the you know of the people who actually lived in the area and so my the outcome is very different from what I thought would happen but I evolved with it so my vision has evolved I don't feel like I've lost I actually feel that we gained something really quite beautiful um but it's not what I originally thought would be beautiful that changed for me then the change was really the evolution from a land use planning process evolving into a government to government management process and decision making so that over the land base now First Nations have greater greater role in in the decision making it's not that they play a veto role but they play a very strong management role of what happens in that territory and out of that they've been able to diversify the economy into tourism uh looking at renewables looking at carbon credits broader base of a new economy uh replacing the old economy so those two things evolved that was certainly not part of our original discussions or expectations so wonderful all right we're going to open it up for some questions here let me see which ones we've got in place and uh open up some mics here um Michael you sent in a question pretty on uh pretty early on I'm going to see if I can open up your line give me a minute to do that and for other people there's uh who are on by web there's a little questions pane you can enter your questions in and we'll get to as many of them as we can and uh Michael let's see if we can hear you can you hear me now yes okay perfect uh do you want to uh read out the quest question and I'm not sure okay um I don't know can you oh I can read it but we always like to let people ask ask for themselves if if we can hear them okay okay and so you can hear me fine then yeah okay uh so the question is uh uh is basically we've seen how Aboriginal title works as an effective tool for ecological change uh I'm wondering if based on Gary on your extensive experience in federal political structures and Valerie just your your experience in the field does Aboriginal title or how does Aboriginal title function as a tool for the non-ecological community the general Canadian society given as it's really Aboriginal title becomes a constitutional presence in a world that hitherto is being divided between the feds and the province so how does it work as a tool for for for everyone else or I wonder if you have any yeah when we came into the room of course First Nations have a strong history of their their rights and title but over the years as you know that has been not not well respected in terms of governments okay and for some time when the process started First Nations were invited to rooms as just a stakeholder okay municipally you know as a stakeholder interest and that's where we came together and said no we hold rights and title they're unextinguished governments hold rights and title we have to find a way to reckon reconcile those two ownership issues and we clearly came into a room on government to government and vials respected that pretty quickly industry had some hard time with that I think what helped make it work this industry was in the room a lot participating in trying to find solutions but in the end it did the rights and title became a key part of our toolbox and our power in the room and third parties gained to respect it but it was an unusual it was the first time there was what was called a government-to-government relationship in BC under a framework agreement so I hope that answers it michael yeah that's that's a good start time the United Nations declaration on rights of indigenous people so we're starting to feel a shift and I think one of the issues is that we tend to confuse the laws and the rules right the rule we've had the laws in place for a long time the Aboriginal title has been legal for a long time that First Nations have to keep going back to court to to reassert their legal rights and so that's kind of where I see the the capabilities and the abilities of environmental organizations or and other parts of civil society in the way that we support First Nations is it the rather than focusing just on legal rights it's actually the rules which are our society accepts the rules accepts the legal rights and doesn't allow that they not be enforced because there's a lot of legal things that just aren't enforced and First Nations rights and title has been one of them so I think the places where where you see that shift to where the rights and title is being recognized there have been collaborations to bring power and so the the First Nations have a tremendous building power through their legal cases and inserting that and groups like our organization so you know for example on the pipeline campaigns have been helping build that sensibility within the Canadian population that those rights that title those legal requirements actually have to be enforced respected and honored and so it's the that's the cultural part that I feel brings that legal tool that First Nations have just tremendously powerful tool brings it into a leverage point as well so I see opportunities for leverage going forward in other areas yes there's just one other example I'd like to add to this very quickly is the GUI trust based on Haida GUI which essentially is a regular Canadian municipalities and small unorganized Canadian communities working with Haida communities that collaboration has resulted in a fund which is probably worth about 17 million dollars right now and his decisions are made by the basis of consensus so I think that Aboriginal title also opens up opportunities for small communities that don't have much power and influence in the world to actually collaborate to to to their economic benefit yeah agreed thank you Michael yeah and we have a question from Hannah Hannah give me a moment to open up your line Hannah it looks like you might be self-muted also there you let's see you might have put yourself on mute I'm hoping we can hear you if not I've got your question there we go hello can you hear me yes hi Hannah hi all my question is does the Great Bear Rainforest cover all of the significant areas of importance in BC or might there be other areas adjacent to it or outside of it that might have concerns for NGOs or First Nations oh the Great Bear Rainforest is 7% of British Columbia so there are lots of forests so our hope is that the model that we've developed certainly around forest management and First Nations are likely looking to what Coastal First Nations and Nanoclosal Council have negotiated here as opportunities to improve dramatically that logging in British Columbia is generally quite horrible we have a terrible legal structure and then we have these small areas with that are exceptions to the rule so we would like to have the Great Bear Rainforest be a model that can expand across British Columbia but clear cutting just very high scales or there's 72 million cubic meters of wood a year or get logged out of this province it's one of the although it's only one province in Canada it produces half of the total volume of forest products for the country okay thank you are there any other hotspots that you're aware of in BC that you know absolutely so there there are a number of them all of Vancouver Island is a hotspot for example as some companies think of Vancouver Island as Fiberola it's their fiber baskets and it's the opposite ecosystem wise to the Great Bear there's less than 30% of the original forest is left and so and that's in small disparate patches except for Clackwood Sound so there's a number of organizations starting to work on conservation of Vancouver Island and in the interior there are the northeast where the caribou habitat is being very is already quite fragmented the arid basin where which is probably the most intact caribou habitat in British Columbia woodland caribou we'll need to see some dramatic protections and the First Nations up there the Fort Nelson First Nation we'd like to see it as well there are lots of places that need attention thank you thanks Hannah we have a question from Maynard I think we have time for maybe one or two more questions we have one more in the queue Maynard give me just a moment to open up your line there we go my question is quick what does a wood become can you hear me yes what does the wood become yes of course the logged wood goes into the economy in some way what does it become does it become housing does it become firewood does it become wood that's lower value than others the lower values can end up in pulp the low low values end up in pulp the more medium values end up in two by fours and strand barred et cetera the high values like cedar and some of them end up in manufacturing projects okay so it's a whole range of of uses I would say the majority of the use is for housing though in Japan island of the US okay thank you there are a number of sawmills that the wood goes to in British Columbia and then a number of pulp the chips from those sawmills then go to two pulp mills primarily and then but there is you know companies like timber west for example are exporting raw logs to Asia primarily so I mean there's a lot of work that can still happen obviously to to harvest the value of the wood to maximize the human well-being in in British Columbia and in the in the region we'd love to see more of that but so the this first stage is obviously in in protecting the ecosystems and then building the economic value out over time thank you that's the end of our questions in the queue and I was taking a quick peek it looks like most of the people who are on by phone have muted their phone so they probably don't have questions but yeah so I think I think we've gotten to most of our questions which is great and so I'll just ask our speakers if there's anything they'd like to add well what to add I guess this is what what I would add is this that for the the first 18 years of my work on forest conservation which was out on Vancouver Island in Clapwood Sound I worked in an area that was considered really big and we were you know working at 265,000 hectare scale and it was very difficult and we got some major conservation there and it developed some strategies in order to scale up conservation instead of dealing with a hundred hectares here and a thousand hectares there to go for a big area and then when when a group of us were brought in who came together and said let's set these tactics are working let's look at a bigger area and it was the Great Bear Rainforest you can imagine that going from having worked on protecting a hundred hectares here a thousand hectares here to 265,000 to then looking at 6.4 million hectares and working with 26 birth nations that it was really daunting at the time but now that we've gone through this process and it took 20 almost 20 years to get to this space now you know I personally I feel this sense of gratitude for for being able to be able to participate in something at this scale it's like when you when you start in as a kind of radical ideal idealist and you know and and and and think the world is possible and then you get kind of beaten down a few times and you lose a lot along the way to be able to work on something at this scale and this the kind of depth and breadth of the change that we manage I just sometimes I just think wow yeah not and I hope more people get to experience this mine is the same comment just it was a great opportunity appreciated it these types of opportunities in life oh sorry Gary sorry Gary can you turn towards the microphone one last time we're just saying being part of this change was a real honor well I want to thank you both so much for for telling us more about this incredible story today I want to thank our audience for joining us too