Facing crushing development, First Nations withdrawing permission

Mar 202013
 

Editor’s Note: Oil and gas development proposals are rampant across British Columbia, punctuated by Enbridge, Inc.’s plan to build a pipeline across the province, to carry bitumen from Alberta’s tar sands to the Pacific. In an excerpt from a piece that appeared March 17 in the Toronto Star, former Ecotrust leader Ian Gill looks at why Canadians and, especially B.C. First Nations groups, are saying: no way. And in the extended piece, he suggests that indigenous people lead the revisioning of economic development for this century.

By Ian Gill

One week before Christmas, 2012, the B.C. government announced a permanent ban on oil and gas development in the Sacred Headwaters. “As part of a tripartite agreement, Shell Canada is immediately withdrawing plans to explore for natural gas in the Klappan by relinquishing its tenures,” the province said in a statement. “In addition, the Province of British Columbia will not issue future petroleum and natural-gas tenures in the area.”

“Today is a huge milestone,” said Annita McPhee, chair of the Tahltan Central Council, which governs the Tahltan First Nation. “I am just beyond words about how deeply moved I am about Shell giving up its tenures in the Klappan.”

Karen Tam Woo, a campaigner with ForestEthics Advocacy, one of the environmental groups that spearheaded the international campaign to protect the Sacred Headwaters, was jubilant. “Days like today are few and far between,” she said. “It’s a big deal when small communities can stand up to one of the biggest corporations in the world and win.”

Shell, which reportedly spent $30 million and a decade going nowhere in the Klappan, was rewarded with $20 million in development credits in the province’s northeast and, after removing its test wells and remediating the area, will leave the Klappan for good.

In attempting to build the Northern Gateway pipeline, Enbridge should be so lucky. It is reportedly spending $250 million promoting a project that will no doubt win National Energy Board approval in the coming months, although almost certainly to no avail. The informed consensus is that the Northern Gateway pipeline is dead because too many First Nations communities oppose it. Perhaps out of fear of setting a precedent, the company persists — as does the government — in a doomed approvals process that no one seems to know how to call time on.

First Nations and community groups who are opposed to the pipeline are forced to spend their own countless hours and millions of dollars locked in successive rounds of futile hearings, while drawing the ire of Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver, who characterizes anyone opposed to industrial development as a “radical.” In early February, a key coastal First Nations intervenor finally gave up, its paltry funds simply no match for Enbridge’s quarter billion, and the inexhaustible resources of government.

When Enbridge, like Shell before it, abandons its project, it will no doubt seek to be compensated for its failed efforts. First Nations and environmentalists won’t be compensated, but will otherwise feel rewarded with another “victory” against industry. But there will be plenty of new battles to lose, as Canada continues to encourage investments in an old industrial paradigm that has long-since run its course. Maybe we’ll ship tarsands products east, not west! Maybe Keystone will take them south! — and if we can’t find investors here at home, we can always sell off nationally crucial energy assets to countries like China, who will be happy to extract resources in a foreign country when it can exploit that country’s weak environmental laws.

That irony alone should give serious pause to Canadians. Certainly, it adds more fuel to Idle No More, given that First Nations are at the front lines of just about every attempt — large or small — to develop Canada’s natural resources in this, our climate change century.

Ian Gill (left) and Patrick Dodson, a Yawuru leader who is Australia's figure in aboriginal reconciliation and rights, and former chair of Ecotrust Australia.
Ian Gill (left) and Patrick Dodson, a Yawuru leader who is Australia’s top figure in aboriginal reconciliation and rights, and former chair of Ecotrust Australia. Photo by Spencer Beebe

Coming back to Canada after almost three years abroad, it is hard not to conclude that this is a lousy way to run a country. The reflexive response from many people is to demonize the Conservatives, and blame Stephen Harper for everything. Mere hours after arriving back in Vancouver last fall, I found myself in the middle of what has become a constant, unofficial (and admittedly unscientific) disapprovals hearing. At the grocery store: a mother and teenage daughter buttonholing me to tell me they will lie down naked in front of bulldozers if construction of Northern Gateway is ever attempted (well, I actually think the teenager was humouring her mother, as I doubt she’d really lie down in the buff in front of a bunch of pipeline workers).

Over dinner, people who have never evinced even the slightest interest in aboriginal issues now siding with First Nations’ opposition to Bills C38 and C45. In the news: the Premier of B.C. and the Opposition leader in rare, pre-election agreement that Northern Gateway ill-serves British Columbia. On a trip to Toronto: decidedly unradical, un-environmental Canadians telling me that they are ashamed of the country’s addiction to oil and its treatment of aboriginal people and, unprompted, making a causal link between the two.

I’m asked about Australia, where I lived and worked most recently, and the news from there isn’t really any better. Canada is not alone in suffering from a split personality when it comes to managing the demands of a growing and greedy society in an era of fiscal austerity and rapidly accelerating environmental stress — let alone dealing fairly with its Indigenous people. Australia, precariously ruled by a government that is the antithesis of the Harper Conservatives, is in precisely the same bind. Sure, Prime Minister Julia Gillard has brought in a carbon tax and, with the Greens holding the balance of power in the Senate, has been forced to accommodate a plethora of demands that not even the wettest Chrétien or Martin Liberals would have tolerated in their most progressive years.

But Australia, like Canada, remains in a kind of dead man’s dance between government and industry and Indigenous people, largely because both national governments are unable or unwilling to honestly confront the depth of the deceit upon which both countries have based their economies. Both nations have begun to reach the limits of government authority based on a lie — the continued denial of the rights and title of aboriginal peoples. They are beginning to experience the stirring of what might come to be — almost as a mirror to the ecological disruptions that threaten our physical existence — a succession of century-defining social and political disruptions that could put our national governments on an endangered species list all of their own making.

What we are beginning to witness, and it goes well beyond Idle No More, is a withdrawal of permission.

Read more>>

ian gillIan Gill, who served as president of Ecotrust in Canada, the U.S. and most recently in Australia, is a former newspaper and CBC Television journalist, and the author of All That We Say Is Ours: Guujaaw and the Reawakening of the Haida Nation. He is an Australian and Canadian citizen. He lives in Vancouver. gillfile@gmail.com . Twitter: @gillwave

Community rights movement gaining steam

Feb 072013
 

As the swing states of Pennsylvania and Ohio decided the White House race this fall, another drama — perhaps of greater long-term importance — was playing out on the ground on election day, well below the national media radar.

Communities in those two states, joining a growing number across the country, cast a vote for self-determination, by passing local laws that establish inalienable rights of nature and the community, and ban dangerous practices such as hydraulic fracturing for shale gas.

Marcellus Shale Gas Well

Drilling for natural gas via hydraulic fracturing is rampant across Pennsylvania. Photo by wcn247 via Flickr.

It’s part of a growing nationwide movement, inspired and encouraged by a little-known, forward-thinking Pennsylvania-based group called the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund. The aim is to reverse the national trend in which individuals and companies legally degrade the clean water, soil, air and broader ecosystems that people and communities depend on everywhere.

“It’s really about elevating the rights of people and communities and nature above those of commerce and corporations,” says Mari Margil, CELDF’s associate director.

The legal defense fund has been instrumental so far in educating communities across the country, and, increasingly, around the world about the shortcomings of legal structures that promote the interests of environmental exploitation, over the interests of communities that will face the direct impact of those activities. On the whole, laws fail to protect the most basic things such as community water and food sources, in the face of the powerful interests of a mining or livestock corporation.

CELDF’s efforts grew out of legal assistance given by founder Thomas Linzey to Pennsylvania communities looking to stop incinerators and mining quarries in the 1990s. Soon, CELDF and Linzey realized that although certain appeals could waylay developments, most activities were eventually approved because they were legal under state law, regardless of their long-term harm to communities.

“Most communities don’t have a ‘fracking’ problem or a sewage spreading problem on their hands,” Margil says. “They have a democracy problem.”

CELDF has set up over 200 legal education forums — “Democracy Schools” —in communities across the country, and local groups have pushed dozens of new ordinances and city charter changes to ban unwanted activities.  Building on this organizing, in 2010 the City of Pittsburgh became the first city in the country to pass the CELDF-drafted community bill of rights and ban on hydraulic fracturing – or fracking.  (Fracking, now a national buzzword, involves a cocktail of chemical and water injected deep into the ground to access hard-to-reach natural gas reserves.)

Linzey and Margil also worked with the Quito-based Fundacion Pachamama to collaborate with members of Ecuador’s constitutional assembly in drafting rights of nature  provisions  for the new Ecuadorian constitution adopted in 2008.

As fracking has swept across the nation, CELDF is helping organize more and more communities in Ohio, New Mexico, New York State, Maryland, and Pennsylvania to follow in Pittsburgh’s footsteps to ban fracking and establish bills of rights.

The movement is gaining momentum, sharpening its tactics and overcoming all sorts of obstacles.

In Spokane, WA, where CELDF has been organizing since 2007, local partner  Envision Spokane badly lost a community bill of rights ballot measure push in 2009, as the city council aligned with business interests to defeat the measures.  Emboldened, the movement pushed a bill of rights again in 2011 and lost by a single percentage point. The Envision Spokane movement plans to be back with another measure in the fall of 2013.

Towns in New Hampshire’s lake region have learned from several unsuccessful efforts to use existing laws to fight water mining by drinking water companies; Barnstead, NH has now become the first town in the nation with an explicit ban on corporate water mining.

Even in Ecuador, where President Rafael Correa’s administration has heavily pursued oil and gas development despite the new constitution, Margil and others don’t see a total lost cause. They are merely working, as one activist put it, “at the pace of culture.”

Pachamama Alliance board member John Perkins on Ecuador’s President Correa and rights of nature.

“You could argue that the suffragists spent 80 years failing before they finally got the right to vote,” Margil says.  “But they spent 80 years building a mass movement.”

In that light, this movement is just hitting its stride.

Investing in what we need, not what we want

Jan 222013
 

Imagine the essential transformations necessary to live well in the years ahead — the progress we must make toward healthy, local and diverse sources of food, water and energy, meaningful jobs, lively cities, and functioning ecosystems.

The goal is enormous, but the steps are clear.

We must start by asking: Is there a way to encourage an ethical, social movement in these directions and make money at the same time? Might there be a more natural model of development that generates competitive financial returns to workers and investors while actually improving social and environmental conditions? How do we find financial reward building a more reliable prosperity?

The Natural Capital Fund’s investment in Ecotrust Forests, an ecosystem investment fund, has created long-term wealth through healthy watersheds, habitat for nature-based tourism, carbon storage and stable forestry jobs in rural communities. Photo by Sam Beebe

Ecotrust believes this is possible because for over twenty years we have been carefully growing tangible initiatives that generate competitive returns while improving the wellbeing of both people and place.

Instead of investing in traditional Wall Street financial products like derivatives, large-cap public equities and corporate bonds, we have used our Natural Capital Fund – our working endowment and signature investment vehicle — to back things that deliver better returns. Our long-term forest ecosystem investments protect pristine habitat for nature-based tourism, build healthy watersheds for clean water, reduce carbon emissions and create more stable jobs in rural communities. We have used our capital and expertise to help build the nation’s first environmental bank, to lend to fishermen growing local, community-based fisheries, and to pioneer green building infrastructure that improves the livability of our cities.

After two decades of investing across the region, our Natural Capital Fund has converted $30 million in grants and program- and mission-related investments into $800 million in assets at work in communities from California to Alaska.

And our experience has more relevance than ever, as private capital is increasingly seeking to serve greater good. A broad group of investors is now actively looking for social and environmental, as well as financial, returns; In the United States alone, this market is valued at over $4 billion.

Investors are looking for social and environmental, as well as financial, returns — an approach we have taken in building a loan fund for community-based fishermen in the North Pacific. Photo by Melissa Berns/Old Harbor Native Corporation.

So our question now becomes: How can we better leverage this powerful global movement involving millions of investors and hundreds of funds and financial institutions to scale our collective efforts and move the global economy toward a more reliable prosperity?

We are not necessarily inventing a new idea here, but rather building on a strategy inherent in nature: invest in diversity and redundancy to withstand unforeseen shocks. Patagonia founder, Ecotrust friend and Natural Capital Fund investor Yvon Chouinard puts it simply, “The safest thing to do is invest in what we need, not what we want.”

Today people call this “impact investing.”

Tomorrow, we imagine people will simply call it “investing” — the standard and accepted way to design a more reliable prosperity.

It is the best way to catalyze the change we seek in the world.

It’s an idea whose time has come.

 


A rich sense of honor: Learning from tribal leaders

Dec 062012
 

In this world of broken economies, broken climates, and broken institutions, it’s an opportune time to ask: what if native people were in charge?

On Haida Gwaii (the Islands of the People) off northern British Columbia, an area one-third the size of BC’s lengthy Vancouver Island, native Haida are back in charge. They don’t just oversee a pittance of a government-defined reservation. They own and co-manage the whole place, as a matter of sovereignty and inherent rights, part of a series of hard-won stands, court cases, alliances, negotiations and the occasional reconciliation agreement over the last two decades with the provincial and Canadian federal governments.

Here’s what’s happening on Haida Gwaii now: The vast forests aren’t being auctioned off to the highest bidder, freeing the islands from the endless boom-and-bust cycle of industrial forestry. Instead the Haida have implemented a go-slower harvest of trees, certified their own holdings under the rigorous Forest Stewardship Council, and begun supplying high-end niche manufacturers like Martin guitars and Steinway pianos – while looking after cultural and environmental matters.

Indigenous Leadership Award honorees and staff

Ecotrust Indigenous Leadership Award winners past and present gather with Ecotrust staff on Nov. 13. Photo by Liz Devine.

Where only a few years ago trophy hunts for bears on native lands by non-native outfitters were Haida Gwaii’s claim to fame to some, now Haida people are hosting ecotourists and sharing traditional ecological knowledge about the temperate rainforests there — its hot springs, staggeringly diverse marine life, endemic bears, and local salmon runs. Haida artistry — so desired around the world that Haida totem poles were lifted by early invaders and sent to European museums — is now flourishing again on the island, supported by a new cultural center.

An economy and way of life rooted in place is re-emerging and growing stronger in resource use, land and marine management.

Most telling, non-native loggers on the islands recently cast a vote of confidence of sorts, siding with the Haida in a recent blockade. The non-Haida logging families voiced support of the Haida Nation in the Supreme Court of Canada saying that they would rather entrust their future to the Haidas than international corporate giants or the provincial government.

“It makes sense to have people who depend on a place also manage its resources,” says Guujaaw, the President of the Council of the Haida Nation. “Timber companies just don’t have to think about fish or the long term on the earth—only this year’s bottom line.”

All up and down the West Coast of North America, from the Aleutian Islands to the Mexican border, Alaska Natives, First Nations, and American Indian tribes are resurgent and the results are hopeful: more holistic land and resource management, stronger advocacy for the things we all need (like clean water and healthy fish), a renewed focus on community health, family and personal wellbeing. Native leaders and governments are positioning their communities and those around them for recovery and long-term health. This is the sort of leadership we’ve been yearning for but lacking in the United States and Canada.

As Jon Waterhouse, executive director of the Yukon River Inter-Tribal Watershed Council says: “Maybe it’s not that we don’t fit in, it’s that they don’t fit in. The modern business model doesn’t work for everyone. And modern culture has lost its way.”

Native people have persisted, survived and are modeling leadership practices beyond their borders. “We have no choice,” Gail Small, Northern Cheyenne, told the crowd on November 13 at Ecotrust’s Indigenous Leadership Awards ceremony, which recognizes the innovative work of leaders like Small to advance cultural, economic, social and environmental resilience.

Leaders gathered for the awards ceremony, many of them past winners, expressed several common goals for the near future.

This group sees it as critical that modern science be informed by traditional ecological knowledge, those timeless management tools and techniques that helped native people through fat and lean times. Along the Broughton Archipelago on the British Columbia coast, Chief Adam Dick (Kwaxsistalla) and Kim Recalma-Clutesi have documented the way native communities once stewarded extensive clam ”gardens” to buffer against cyclic salmon run declines in the region. Inland from their territory, ancient Okanagan teachings dictated that key returning salmon be left in the rivers at the headwaters of the great Columbia River system, to protect spawning stocks.

A new generation of tribal leaders, represented at the gathering by ten outstanding young people from Alaska and British Columbia, are translating the wisdom and the language of their elders into action in native and non-native cultures alike. And they’ll need to do that before it is literally too late — with a dwindling cohort of knowledge keepers such as Adam Dick. Leaders would like to build new institutions of learning to speed that knowledge transfer, the “Harvards of traditional knowledge.”

What was palpable from the discussions of the gathered leaders was the sense of obligation now to lead all groups, Native and non-Native alike. They voiced a common sense of struggle with people and communities everywhere, despite the dark periods tribes have endured in recent history under American and Canadian rule. Jeannette Armstrong, an Okanagan leader, spoke of other communities across the land as “brothers and sisters,” on a shared journey to restore the Earth and to build wellbeing and resilience.

“We can do nothing by ourselves,” Northern Cheyenne leader Gail Small said at the awards gala. “We all need you, all of you, whatever race, whatever culture. We have to come together to protect what’s in jeopardy.”

The journey will not be easy. But Small and others helped bring their communities back from respective states of destitution, landlessness, and near extinction. And they did so by overcoming what the Supreme Court of Canada has recognized as an “impoverished sense of honour” on the part of governments in not recognizing the historical sovereignty and rights of aboriginal people. By insisting upon their inherent human and sovereign rights to living well in their homelands, native peoples are showing the way to a more resilient world.

Living resilience in Rwanda

Nov 082012
 

It would be perfectly alright for Landry Ndriko Mayigane to celebrate normalcy. He could clock in and out at his government job monitoring diseases and expansion in the Rwandan poultry industry. He could sit back and marvel at how Rwanda’s capital city of Kigali, his home, is becoming liveable — expanding and cleaning up, as President Paul Kagame aggressively pushes modernization. He could find a wife and settle down. And given his country’s past, that would be enough.

Instead, Mayigane, 31, is in constant motion. A trilingual veterinary doctor whose passport is thick with stamps, he has ambitions to be a world leader. “One of my goals is to be the UN Secretary General,” he says unabashedly.

Landry Mayigane. Photo by Sam Beebe

He’s not wasting any time. A respected avian influenza authority internationally, he’s part of the U.S. Center for Disease Control’s worldwide network. And he moonlights as one of the global climate movement’s top young exponents in Africa.

He’s organized rallies across Africa for the likes of 350.org and is a serial founder of organizations and chapters on the issue. His latest two groups seem to have staying power and resonance in a world where climate change consequences are quickly piling up: the nonprofit Rwanda YACA aims to turn Rwanda’s ballooning cohort of jobless youth into renewable and appropriate energy entrepreneurs. His African Youth Initiative on Climate Change works to network young people all over the continent with educational and professional development opportunities that will help them approach the continent’s problems from a resilience perspective.

In a wounded country, in a battered region of the African continent, Mayigane is a walking testament to resilience.

“Like our president, I want to dignify Africans,” says Mayigane, who is at Ecotrust for a four-month U.S. State Department-sponsored fellowship. “We need to think and learn globally and act locally.”

Though that’s nearly a worn-out phrase in the West, it’s a more pithy pair of ideas to swallow in Africa, and particularly in Rwanda, where global problems are exacerbating local ones in a small, landlocked and heavily agriculturally dependent country.

Mayigane knows this first hand.

His father was one of 20 children born on his grandfather’s land in the northern part of Rwanda. With land now being distributed to Mayigane’s generation and the next, there is simply not enough to go around. This is happening all over the country; He quotes a figure that 200,000 young Rwandans migrate to Kigali and other cities from rural areas every year.

Meanwhile, global warming alters weather patterns and touches people across Rwanda. In a visit to villages in the eastern part of the country last May, he says that roughly 20% of the poultry he inspected was suffering from heat stress. The chickens were lethargic and panting to reduce their core temperature and egg production was off. Rwanda is also expecting livestock disease to spike along with temperature and rainfall changes.

“It’s going to be a challenge to feed the population in the face of climate change,” Mayigane says. “And that’s where resilience comes in. How can we make cheap technology available, create jobs, and fight climate change at the same time?”

If Rwanda YACA is successful, it will quickly begin employing people to spread cheap energy technologies, from solar panels to charcoal made from food waste. They’ll also begin tree-planting campaigns, to help alleviate wood shortages in villages, in addition to controlling flooding and erosion.

But Mayigane will also seek to boost the social entrepreneurship of group members, through training programs that teach them to creatively seek out and solve problems in their own community.

His own spark came from the seven years he spent at vet school in Senegal. After that, a world of possibilities opened up to Mayigane, beyond the comfortable confines of a good student who cashes in for a government salary and pension.

“My dream,” he says, “Is to help Africa become more competitive so that African youth will be proud to call it home.”

Mayigane on Rwanda YACA (Youth Alliance for Climate Action:

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