by  Andrew Findlay

Ian McAllister and I  drop anchor and lower the Zodiac, then aim for where a tea-coloured torrent spills into the azure waters of the bay. Misty drizzle falls from a sky as grey as the granite ramparts looming above the inlet. Ancient red cedars, like foreboding old men, exchange whispers of wind. As we nudge ashore on alluvial flats and tether the dinghy to a chunk of driftwood, that avian trickster of First Nations legend, the raven, squawks disapprovingly from a nearby cedar-snag perch. We are the only humans at the head of this forgotten inlet in B.C.’s Fiordland Conservancy. But the vast coastal wilderness hums with life, and it’s here we’ll begin our search for that most elusive of wild creatures, the wolf.

courtesy Ian McAllister/pacificwild.org

Our gumboots make loud sucking sounds in the mud along the shoreline, where McAllister, the man Time magazine named one of the “Environmental Leaders for the 21st Century” in the late ’90s, kneels to examine a pugmark – signs of a wolf. But the prints are poorly defined, like smudged pencil markings, suggesting the tide has come and gone since the animal sauntered this way. A few steps further, crammed into a square-foot patch of rich earth: the mingled prints of another wolf and a deer – predator and prey. Clambering up the bank, we enter a field of knee-deep Lyngby’s sedge, cow parsnip and brilliant purple lupines, with a circle of trampled grass where a grizzly has flopped to rest. Bears are opportunistic omnivores that carve chaotic swaths through the estuary as they meander, digging for chocolate lilies and “rice root,” the latter coveted for its starchy bulbs. Wolves are strictly carnivorous and far more economical in their movements, treading purposeful, straight tracks through the grass between rainforest and water’s edge. Two hours slip by. “I’m getting antsy. I haven’t seen wolves for awhile,” says McAllister, his ginger hair damp from the rain, brow creased in lines of concentration – or frustration.

We pause next to the creek, imagining life as a wolf in these wild inlets, where the predator must kill or scavenge daily to survive, armed only with a cunning intellect, speed, agility and jaws that crush with a force of up to 680 kilograms. In a similar spot, McAllister once observed a black-tailed deer grazing within 50 metres of a wolf pack, hidden in the tall grass, that had gone days without a kill. Still, the wolves made no move. Clearly they’d calculated opportunity versus cost and the latter was too high.

I spot movement. “There’s a grizzly!”

McAllister raises his binoculars. “That’s not one grizzly, that’s two, and I think they’re mating.”

I practically tear the binoculars from his hands. Sure enough there are two: a massive boar and a much smaller sow engaged in an unexpected display of spring fever. The bears part and the female walks away, peering coyly at her ursine suitor over a shoulder rippling with muscle. They circle each other in slow, almost choreographed movements, a courtship that continues for a quarter of an hour until the bears suddenly disappear into unseen reaches of the estuary. We too head for the timber, where the acrid smell of carrion drifts on a light breeze, to follow a well-trod wildlife trail running parallel to a stream. McAllister crouches where the path narrows between two tightly spaced hemlocks and pinches a tuft of silver-grey hair – snagged by the rough bark of the trees – between his fingers. We’re travelling a wolf highway. I envision a silent pack of wild canines cantering single file, heading upstream to a den sequestered in the old growth. Walking on, muted light and flickering shadows trick my mind into perceiving movement everywhere. The woods are eerily silent, and I sense why, for many cultures, they represent the dark, the foreboding and the unknown. Somewhere in this wild world, there are wolves.

courtesy Ian McAllister/pacificwild.org

Two days earlier in late June, the two of us had set sail aboard McAllister’s trimaran, Habitat, from Bella Bella on Campbell Island. Ahead of us, a loose eight-day itinerary: to explore and search for wolves among McAllister’s favourite inlets and islands of the Great Bear Rainforest.

An author,  photographer and determined conservationist, the 39-year-old McAllister and his wife Karen have been exploring the B.C. coast for the last two decades, tussling with loggers, government and sport hunters and playing a pioneering role in preserving one of the world’s most ecologically significant temperate rainforests – which 20 years ago was in imminent danger of wholesale industrial logging. The result, his 1997 award-winning work of photojournalism The Great Bear Rainforest: Canada‘s Forgotten Coast, has been credited as the centrepiece for Greenpeace International’s North American forest campaign; Robert Kennedy Jr. wrote the foreword. Yet when he first explored the Great Bear Rainforest, in the early 1990s, McAllister gave little thought to its wolf populations. But that all changed just over a decade ago, when he stumbled across a wolf den, a litter of grey pups bouncing around its entrance, looking confused yet curious. Surprisingly, the adults retreated into the trees and howled anxiously, disturbed by the human intrusion but unwilling to attack.  “If a bear, cougar or any other species had infiltrated a den site it would have been efficiently attacked and likely killed,“ says McAllister. “So the question that immediately came to mind, and that I continue to ponder, is when and where did these wolves learn to not consider humans as prey?” And in the years following, the more he encountered wolves on the coast, the more he was intrigued.

Meanwhile, groundbreaking research by biologists Paul Paquet and Chris Darimont was revealing that the genetic diversity of the grey wolves inhabiting B.C.’s central coast is far greater than that of their interior and northern brethren. So much so that McAllister, along with Darimont and Paquet, became convinced that the wolves are genetically distinct, and that the  biological richness of the temperate rainforest drives this diversity. In a relatively small geographic area, for example, “you can find island-hopping wolf packs eating seals and shellfish, and then just 20 km away,” says McAllister, “another pack subsisting on salmon or tiny sitka deer.”

But something far less tangible than wolf genetics also fascinated McAllister: the fact that B.C.’s coastal canines seem to have no collective memory of the persecution experienced by wolves elsewhere in the province, including indiscriminate shootings by ranchers to protect livestock and by hunters to protect game, as well as government- sanctioned culls aimed at recovering such threatened species as the mountain caribou and Vancouver Island marmot. He read every wolf study he could find, diligently  recorded his own sightings and observations and found inspiration in the writings of author Barry Lopez, who, in Of Wolves and Men, suggests that we know far less about the reality of the wolf and far more about “what we imagine the wolf to be.” And finally, in 2007, after a decade of research, McAllister published his own critically acclaimed work, The Last Wild Wolves.

Yet McAllister’s journey into the world of B.C.’s marine wolves is far from over. Though many environmentalists hailed it as a victory when the provincial government signed its Great Bear Rainforest Agreements in 2006, creating some 55 new land conservancies on the coast, McAllister remains a cautious voice. He believes the agreement falls short of adequately protecting a coastline so rich in biodiversity that American and Canadian philanthropic foundations have directed upward of $60 million toward conservation and sustainable economic opportunities for B.C.’s coastal First Nations. Why? The level of protection afforded wildlife in a conservancy is questionable, he says. Oil supertankers could soon ply the treacherous waters of the Inside Passage. High-grade logging of old-growth cedar continues in valleys and on islands still unprotected. Salmon farms in pristine central coast channels such as Sheep Passage are raising fears of sea-lice infestations among migrating wild salmon smolts. And industrial wind farms are being proposed for wild outer-coast islands that few British Columbians have heard of, but on which McAllister has spent weeks in solitary exploration, where wolves roam windswept beaches, feasting on barnacles and squid.

The diesel engine drones quietly as we leave the bay at dusk and retrace our route back down the inlet, most likely observed by wolves that choose not to be seen by us. McAllister takes the helm and stares fixedly ahead with the air of a man accustomed to spending weeks in the wilds, alone. I go below deck to brew coffee and thumb through sea charts of B.C.’s labyrinthine coast. The persistent, light drizzle  gives way to broken clouds and sunshine, and as the boat chugs slowly up Princess Royal Channel, I can see the trees onshore slipping by. But when we enter McKay Reach, the wind howls down Douglas Channel and wraps around Gribbell Island, transforming the sea from glassy smooth to something rough and recalcitrant. The boat rocks and rolls. Barely an hour later, rounding the northern tip of Princess Royal Island, the ocean is again placid.

The two-way radio crackles. Biologist Janie Wray and partner Hermann Meuter have been studying the whales of Camaaño Sound and recording their sweet voices and subtle communications for the past half-dozen years. Still, Wray’s voice over the radio is full of excitement: humpback whales are feeding near Ashdown Island in Whale Passage. We hurry – as much as is possible in a sailboat with a top motoring speed of six knots per hour – and, 30 minutes later, witness four humpbacks circling languorously, churning the water almost within arm’s reach of Wray’s powerboat. The great mammals exhale – puffs of breath that sound as if they are being forced through a giant snorkel – then dive, their barnacle-encrusted tail flukes slipping silently beneath the surface. Seconds later, one leviathan re-emerges in a burst of bubbling water, great baleen plates exposed, scooping up mouthfuls of krill and other small fish – some of which spill frantically from its jaws. Scientists call this bubble-net feeding: the deft corralling of schools of fish no longer than my baby finger – by a mammal that weighs more than 35 tonnes. It is astonishing to behold.

An hour later we are bucking the tide north up Principe Channel, flanked by two huge, uninhabited isles. Banks Island, to the west, is a brooding expanse of low, rounded hills and weathered trees contorted into bonsai. To the east rise the rugged snowy mountains of Pitt Island, a topography reminiscent of the mainland Coast Range.

“Check this out!” shouts McAllister, pointing off the Habitat’s bow. Killer whales are approaching from the north, a pod of seven led by a massive bull, its elegant dorsal fin proudly protruding two metres above the water line. The pod nears the boat, then divides, and three whales pass rapidly on the portside, four on the starboard, like commuters on a water highway – in pursuit of salmon, perhaps. These “wolves of the sea” are as adept at hunting beneath the waves as wolves are on land.

Two days later, we anchor in a secluded bay near the Tsimshian settlement of Kitkatla. Again the sky is a steely grey, the tide low, the scent of the sea pungent. On shore: a few decaying wooden houses that, along with some rusting farm implements, trucks and a system of dykes, are all that remain of one homesteader’s 1970s utopia.

McAllister is anxious to be ashore in this place where he has spotted wolves many times. Soon we are balancing on stones covered in rockweed, which pops underfoot like bubble wrap, then shadowing a crystalline stream deep into the rainforest past groves of centuries-old trees, their branches laden with witch’s hair and wolf lichen. Canine prints are everywhere; wolves have recently splashed across the stream bed and padded along its silky sandbars. Fresh scat containing bones marks a trail through shin-deep moss of an almost luminescent green. The forest is as peaceful as a monastery, yet I am convinced we are being watched. We lose track of time, until the fading light reminds us that evening is approaching and we are compelled to turn back. Reluctantly, I again resign myself to not seeing a wolf this day, though we have sensed their presence as viscerally as a salmon senses its natal river.

The next morning, the last of our journey, the sun warms the deck where I lie sprawled against the wheelhouse, savouring a coffee. McAllister picks up the binoculars and scans the tidal flats around the bay, then sets them down on the deck. A minute later, alerted by the croak of a raven, he scopes the bay again with keen eyes.

“I see a wolf – a female I think.” He points to a narrow isthmus of sand between brackish pools less than a half-kilometre distant.

It takes a few seconds to locate the  wild  wolf through the binoculars. Without movement she would be perfectly camouflaged against the palette of rocks and sand. She is smaller than the average domestic husky, and lean. Her coat – save for a patch of dark grey on each haunch and an artful white stripe down her nose – is a uniform tan colour, with the healthy sheen of an animal that has only recently shed its winter pelage. I hold my breath as she trots along the beach, charcoal snout pointed our way, until she plops down on a sandy flat. She stays there for half an hour, basking in the sun and observing us with canine curiosity. Then, as unexpectedly as she arrived, she saunters back toward the head of the bay and vanishes ghostlike into the darkness of the forest.

Getting There Yourself:

• Pick a reputable tour operator (all have been given the thumbs up by Ian McAllister):

Ocean Adventures
Maple Leaf Adventures
Mothership Adventures
Ocean Light II Adventures
Great Bear Adventure Tours
Bluewater Adventures
Tide Rip Grizzly Tours
Northern Lights Expeditions

• GEAR Check the above operator websites for requirements.
• UPDATES on Great Bear Rainforest conservation efforts: savethe greatbear.org; raincoast.org; pacificwild.org
• TO LEARN MORE about B.C.’s rainforest wolves and how to protect them: pacificwild.org
• CRITICAL READING The Last Wild Wolves: Ghosts of the Great Bear Rainforest (Greystone Books, 2007; $40/softcover 2009; $29.95);  The Great Bear Rainforest: Canada’s Forgotten Coast (Harbour Publishing, 1997; $40); The Wolf Almanac, by Robert H. Busch (Lyons Press, 2007; $19.95).
• ON SCREEN The BBC video Earth’s Great Events: The Great Salmon Run; National  Geographic’s Last Stand of the Great Bear and Search for the Coast Wolf; Ian McAllister’s “The Last Wild Wolves” video series on YouTube.

Lead image courtesy Ian McAllister/pacificwild.org

What’s Geocaching?

Good question. According to the BC Geocaching Association, geocaching is an outdoor recreational sport in which geocachers hunt for treasures hidden around the world using only a GPS device. It certainly sounds like one of the more adventurous ways to explore the world!

In fact, in B.C. there are more than 11,000 treasures, or caches, awaiting discovery, with geocachers accountable for cache maintenance and responsible recreation in provincial parks and protected areas. For example, B.C.geocachers usually bring along cleanup materials (such as film canisters and plastic bags) to collect garbage in and around the areas they explore while searching out caches. And while geocachers typically head out either on their own or in small groups, several times a year a big event is organized, such as the CITO.

CITO: Recreation with a Cause

This June, the 4-Wheel Drive Association of BC hosted a CITO event at Stave Lake, with 65 volunteers (4WD enthusiasts and geocachers) spending a full day removing 4,000-plus kg of garbage and scrap metal (see here.for the full press release).

CITO crew, Stave Lake, B.C. – one of the most polluted recreational areas in the province (photo courtesy Kris Wheeler)

Given that Stave Lake is one of the most polluted recreational areas in B.C., “We have to take ownership of it,” says Wheeler. Which is why a number of local geocaching and four-wheel drive groups have adopted specific parks and lakes to clean and maintain.

Check out this video, shot and edited by Kris. It’s an inspiring little piece that illustrates the incredible impact a small group of caring and dedicated people can have. Its closing sentiment, “Make a difference: never pass a piece of trash, pick it up no matter where you are” is definitely a mantra to live by.

Lead photo courtesy Kris Wheeler

Pollan’s views moved me,  poignantly,  because I was personally struggling with this exact same issue. I was in the thick of my MBA studies and feeling discouraged because most of what I was learning about finance and strategy was in direct conflict with the subject matter in my classes on sustainability. Then, a few months later, the global economy was deeply shaken and (thankfully) the thinking in these fields, and most other areas of economic study, began to align. Today there is no argument: we need a new way of doing things, including a new way of approaching food in North America.

This June, sustainable food enthusiasts were treated to an engaging talk by Michael Pollan himself. The sustainable food guru was at Vancouver’s UBC Farm in B.C. to promote his latest book In Defense of Food and discuss North America’s cultural disconnect with the foods they eat. He calls ours a cultural eating disorder: an obsession with health that doesn’t actually lead to better health. For example, Pollan notes that since the ’80s launch of the States’ fat-free campaign (and subsequent fat-free obsession), Americans have never suffered more from obesity, diabetes and heart disease. Our health care systems have also been crippled by the fallout from these chronic medical conditions.

At Vancouver's UBC Farm: sustainable food enthusiasts line up to hear Michael Pollan's take on the issues.

It’s About What, How and Why We Eat

Culturally, says Pollan, we also need to reconsider what we purchase to eat and where we make those purchases. Do we know where our food comes from? Do we know how our food was processed before it became a meal on our plates? These are complex questions that go well beyond choosing local or organic – both are good choices, but one can be better than the other, depending on what you’re eating and where you live. Unfortunately, as consumers, we like things to be made as simple as possible for us; we don’t like making tough decisions, particularly when we are presented with limited information.

Each day we have at least three opportunities to vote with our forks. And every time we choose to eat from a sustainable food system (whether it’s fair trade coffee beans or herbs grown on Neil’s balcony), we’re adding to the groundswell of consumer demand for change. What does our demand support? Well, I have noticed that Choices Market recently opened a new store in Kelowna and that Overwaitea Foods has committed to a sustainable seafood policy. Then there’s the fact that more and more restaurants are getting onside with locally farmed and raised produce and products. (And all this despite an economic recession.)

Yet let’s not forget to reflect on the importance of why we eat. Yes, we eat primarily to satisfy our functional need for essential nutrients (another ‘symptom’ of our cultural eating disorder, according to Pollan), but we also eat to celebrate community, family and the soul. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the Food Network has seen a significant increase in viewer popularity in the last few years. It seems everyone is getting re-acquainted with their kitchens and cookbooks. And in the process we’re also getting reacquainted with  the value of sharing meals: how doing so nurtures relationships and community spirit. Culturally speaking, I can’t think of a better reason to eat.

Lead photo courtesy of Mark Andrew Boyer/ OrganicNation.tv

Of course, for car manufacturers (the Detroit Three included), pursuing alternative fuel technologies is not only about entering a greener market but about survival. And one venture-backed firm in California has a particularly intriguing concept for capitalizing on all the electric vehicle buzz. In fact, Better Place proposes making the world a “better place” by changing the way we think about fueling-up. Based on the cellular phone business model, its consumers would just purchase mobility devices (well, cars) and operating minutes (the charging of batteries) separately.

Revolutionary? Or maybe the idea is just the touch of innovation we need to spur us into creating the kind of urban village we have so far only imagined. Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson certainly seems into it, lately tweeting about an EV future in this city.

Meanwhile, Better Place has already developed partnerships with Israel and Nissan-Renault to install 100,000 charging posts throughout Canada. Obviously, Israel is onto something, perhaps because it comes from a state surrounded by petrostates, one that would do well to build a transportation sector independent of foreign oil. Indeed, California, in particular the Bay Area, has already negotiated a deal with Better Place, with Ontario now following suit. Maybe now is the time for British Columbians to also take a serious look at our existing mobility options – and rethink our oil dependency.

B.C. has always wanted to show the world a thing or two about hosting an Olympics in the “best place on earth” (cue Super, Natural British Columbia theme music). But last month VANOC upped the ante considerably by pushing the Olympic green envelope.

During the 8th annual World Conference on Sport and the Environment, held in Vancouver this March, VANOC announced plans to offset its entire estimated 300,000-tonne carbon footprint – an ambitious target given that this encompasses emissions associated with the 27 days of Olympic and Paralympic games, emissions created since the Games were awarded to Vancouver in 2003 and the travel emissions from athletes and spectators. What’s more, VANOC plans to source most of its offsets from B.C.-based projects that enhance community sustainability.

Still, though it sounds hefty, 300,000 tonnes pales in comparison to the total emissions expected from other upcoming major global events, including the 2010 FIFA World Cup. That event is projected to spew almost 3 million tonnes. And though VANOC’s lofty goals do set something of a precedent for Olympic and Paralympic organizing committees (which in the past have set only offset targets for the duration of the games themselves), I do wonder where on earth (or in B.C.) these 300,000 tonnes of offsets are going to come from. The province may be rich in natural resources that could replace conventional energy sources (not to mention intellectual capabilities). But is that be enough to capture the Olympic footprint?

June 9, 2009 Update: VANOC recently announced its partnership with BC-based offset company, Offsetters. The carbon offset portfolio will be sourced from clean technology projects.