Sheila Harrington. Voices for the Islands: Thirty Years of Nature Conservation on the Salish Sea. Victoria, British Columbia: Heritage House Publishing, 2024.
Voices for the Islands: Thirty Years of Nature Conservation on the Salish Sea brings together the stories and experiences of those who rose to protect areas at risk within their island communities. Narratively linked by author Sheila Harrington’s sailing trips over the course of three years to interview more than fifty veteran conservationists, the book shares an in-depth view of local protests and the history and evolution of local conservancies from their timely emergence through legal battles and successful partnerships.
Left: Author, Sheila Harrington. Right: Saturnina tombolo from behind. Photo Credit: Sheila Harrington.
Enjoy This Excerpt from Voices for the Islands
With my small sailboat loaded up, we slipped out of Squitty Bay on the south end of Lasqueti Island with a gentle northwest breeze tickling the Salish Sea. The long summer sky was that deep blue that seems to go on forever. As Tiddy Oggy left our home port, my first mate, friend, and long-time islander, Doane Grinell, wryly commented, “Let’s get these sails up, and let the adventure begin.”
I turned back to look at Lasqueti—situated right in the centre of Georgia Strait. My friend Dana Lepofsky calls it “the island in the middle of everywhere.” Prior to the last century of colonial exploration and industrial resource extraction, people travelled between islands, to the mainland, or to Vancouver Island by canoes or small boats. Dana has learned from archeological evidence that Lasqueti Island, being right in the middle, was a common stopping point in trade and travel. So, it seemed appropriate that I begin my journey here—in the middle of the islands in the Salish Sea.
I was brimming with excitement as I was returning to the Southern Gulf Islands after many years away. I hoped there was still time to locate and interview the founders of the islands’ land trusts and nature conservancies. Twenty-five plus years had passed since these pioneering people had established their local conservancies. What motivated these early directors to voluntarily spend hours on the phone, go to meetings, write letters and grant applications, raise money and find help to further land conservation on their islands? What inspired people to donate their land, give their hard-earned money to support purchase of other areas, or give away partial rights to protect their own properties through a conservation covenant? What stories did they have? What worked? What needed changing, and most importantly, what were their messages of hope and hard-won experience for the next generations to follow?
These were some of the questions that rattled around in my brain as Doane and I set our course for the island archipelago known as the Southern Gulf Islands. Gabriola Island was our first stop on the journey. Having lived on Lasqueti Island for the past twelve years, and previously on Salt Spring and Galiano Island, I was excited to revisit the southern islands.
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I’m at home on the islands in the Salish Sea. I came here as a young teenager, and it took some time to identify the natural wonders that grabbed my heart. As I lived, fished, and sailed around the islands, I marveled at their incredible beauty and learned about the life-giving seeds and berries of the arbutus, fir, hemlock, yew, Garry oak, and cedars. Salal, Oregon grape, and huckleberry soon became part of my diet, along with the cod and salmon, crab, clams, and oysters. I heard the herons, gulls, sea ducks, juncos, and warblers call.
Left: Glaucous-winged gulls are the most common gulls found around the Salish Sea, nesting on remote rocks in spring. Photo Credit: Sheila Harrington. Right: California sea lions on community float in Halkett Bay, Gambier Island. Photo Credit: Peter Scholefield.
As the years passed, I began to see loss and fragmentation. In the ’80s and early ’90s, fights were strong over clear-cut logging, slash burning, and development. Mega corporations like MacMillan Bloedel, Weldwood-Westply, and other numbered companies were ravaging forests and trashing streams, once the home of wild creatures living on these precious islands.
People were moving to the islands in droves. The forests, wildlife, and rural refuges were fast disappearing. There were a few provincial parks, at Montague Harbour and Mount Maxwell, but the majority of the land was being sold and developed. Most newcomers did not realize that their land clearing resulted in degradation and loss of sensitive ecosystems found nowhere else in the world. The land and its wildlife had no voice to object. I started to feel “solastalgia”—a form of emotional or existential grief caused by environmental change, linked to mourning what is lost.
While I was living on Salt Spring Island in the ’90s, I joined others who were promoting positive alternatives—green building, community recycling, and composting projects. Learning how to change our human practices to integrate with the cycles of life means we have to cross that boundary of separation we erect between ourselves and the natural world. We are more than kin with nature—we are part of her. To feel and experience this kinship with the natural world, we need to open to it, enter into its realm, learn its rhythms of tide, fresh and salt water, the connections between the tree and mycelium and the birds that eat the berries.
One of my many mentors, Michael Dunn from Mayne Island, encouraged me to notice the edges—between ecosystems and different habitats, and all of the living earth around. In the mid ’90s, with Michael and Briony Penn, we invited island residents to walk their lands and map the unique natural and cultural features of their own home places. We held showings of the maps on a few islands and published the methods and a sampling of them in a small book, Giving the Land a Voice: Mapping Our Home Places.
In response to a new millennium, in 2000, Judi Stevenson, Briony, and I invited people from eighteen of the larger populated islands to create artistic community maps, revealing what islanders knew about their island’s ecology. We especially wanted them to record what they cherished at this turning of a new century. We held exhibitions showing these beautiful community maps and published them with their stories in the Atlas of the Islands in the Salish Sea. People were truly inspired by the diversity and preciousness displayed in these maps, and the book sold out.
Then like a bad dream, suddenly the changes came barreling down the strait to my home island. The extensive Garry oak woodlands above Burgoyne Bay on Salt Spring were under threat of logging and development.
Like many other people featured in this book, I rose to the call of the land and its creatures—determined that it would be saved. With hundreds of other advocates of nature, we worked with the local land trust, often called conservancies, that enable people to legally protect these unique and threatened places in perpetuity. In Voices for the Islands, I’ve chronicled the story of how we succeeded in protecting most of the threatened areas on Salt Spring Island, and many other similar stories of locals banding together to protect threatened natural areas in their communities.
Most of the Islands in the Salish Sea1 are within a very small ecological niche, the critically imperiled Coastal Douglas-fir Biogeoclimatic zone (CDF ), the smallest and most at-risk ecological community in Canada.2 This bioregion is unique within Canada and home to the highest number of ecosystems and species at risk in the province, many of which are ranked as critically imperiled at a national and global scale. Sadly, less than 1 percent of the original forest in the CDF is left, with less than 10 percent of the young forested lands protected. The highest elevations of Salt Spring, the islands in Howe Sound, and the northern-most islands in the Salish Sea are in another biogeoclimatic zone—the Coastal Western Hemlock zone (CWH) a much wetter area, also threatened by logging and development. All of these islands are within the coastal region where logging first took place, one of the earlier areas to be colonized and developed. The wetlands, riparian ecosystems, and estuaries that depend on these forests have been so modified by human activities that they too, are at significant risk. Yet, something changed in the ’80s. People started to notice what was going on, and what was being lost—especially as they wanted what was being torn asunder.
The ’70s to mid ’80s were a time of rampant industrial logging in British Columbia. From Meares Island to the Indigenous-led protests in the Stein Valley and Haida Gwaii, then onto the famous record-breaking number of arrests in Clayoquot Sound, huge public protests were flaring up over industrial logging. The wilderness preservation movement arose in BC between 1975 and 1995 resulting in large parks in the Valhalla Valley, Stein Valley, Clayoquot Sound, Carmanah and Walbran Valleys, and the Tatshenshini River. But at home on the islands, logging and development were picking up the pace. And people on the islands heard that same call to action spawned from other regions of the province. These local land trusts arose out of a very activist time in BC. What could they do at home?
Starting with islands like Galiano, Pender, Denman, and Salt Spring, individuals joined together to form conservation land trusts, which could legally protect the land. They provide the legal means to purchase, covenant, and conserve land for the larger community and to protect the habitats of other species.
In early 2021, the passing of one of my mentors, John Scull, a founder of the Cowichan Community Land Trust and the Land Trust Alliance of BC, woke me to the reality that these elders’ voices would soon be silenced. I decided to visit other founders and capture their stories, their motivations and inspirations that led them to create these land trusts, before they were lost. So began my three year exploration, research, and sailing journeys to the more populated islands in the Salish Sea to meet with the founders, to learn about their successes and challenges. I also talked with many who now carry these island conservation organizations forward. This is a time of the passing of the guard.
After twelve years away from the Southern Gulf Islands, in July 2021, I began taking sailing voyages to many of the islands in the Salish Sea to interview the unsung heroes behind these conservation land trusts. As I recorded the voices of many of the initiators and people now working with these organizations, I learned about new places that had been conserved, new educational, science, and restoration projects, and new Indigenous partnerships—along with the growing threats to the biodiversity of the islands.
Excerpt from Voices for the Islands: Thirty Years of Nature Conservation on the Salish Sea by Sheila Harrington (Heritage House, 2024), reprinted with permission of publisher.
Feature Image: Sunset at Rebecca Spit (Quadra Island), from Sheila Harrington’s boat, the night before heading to Cortes Island. Photo Credit: Sheila Harrington
Notes
1 Bert Webber coined the term, Salish Sea, in the 1970s, while working on oil-spill issues in the fragile inland sea from Campbell River, Vancouver Island, to Seattle, Washington. His intention to create awareness and a technological and scientific cross-border response to the single inland sea that is impacted by pollution and shares marine and terrestrial biodiversity was politically acknowledged in 2010, when the governments of Canada, British Columbia, and Washington all adopted the name. At a gathering of Coast Salish First Peoples in Victoria in 2010, the name was endorsed many years after a 1992 inter-nation declaration of our shared waters.
2 “This Mediterranean like bioregion is unique within Canada and home to the highest number of ecosystems and species at risk in the province, many of which are ranked as critically imperiled at a national and global scale. Approximately 9 percent of the CDF is currently protected, with 49 percent of the land base impacted by forestry, agriculture and urbanisation. Today less than 1 percent of the CDF remains intact as old growth forest, with forests over 100 years old covering only 4 percent of their former extent.” (From CDFCP https://www.cdfcp.ca/)
Sheila Harrington