Muskwa-Kechika Conservation Initiative, Northern Rockies of BC, Canada.

My people have always been loggers, hunters, and trappers, those who have made a living from the land. I grew up on the North American frontier, when the axe and power-saw, knife and gun were the tools one needed to wrest a life from the wilderness. And it was wilderness then- from our pioneer shack on the Pine River in northern British Columbia, a vast unroaded expanse stretched north and south for hundreds of miles in either direction. But all that was to change, in a very short time. I and my family have helped to “tame” that frontier, and today most of the area south of the Peace River has been roaded, mined and logged.
I grew up reading about wild places and wild times, soaking up the stories of writers like Jack London and RM Patterson. I didn’t realize that I too was living a life of adventure on the frontier. When I was in my twenties, I realized that life was short, so each summer I headed out into the mountains for a couple of months, with a dozen or more head of horses, exploring some of the wildest country on the continent. Many of these expeditions took me into the wild expanses of the Northern Rockies, where grizzly bear, Stone’s sheep, wolves, and caribou still thrived. In 1985 I bought a trapline in the heart of the area, and since then have spent much of my time living in the mountains, getting to know the ways of the natural world. Gradually I felt a transformation taking hold. As I went about my life on the trapline, reveling in the wild life and the wildlife that I found there, I began to realize that this magnificent wilderness was under threat from the same industrial activities that had supported me and my family. Someone had to do something to protect it while there was still time, and, since no one else was stepping up, it seemed that someone was me.
So, in 1992 I began a campaign to protect B.C.’s Northern Rockies. At the same time, George Smith, of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, had begun a similar effort, and we soon joined forces. Working through BC’s consensus land use planning processes, we were rewarded, after nearly a decade, with the creation of the Muskwa-Kechika Management Area, one of the largest legislated designations of wilderness in the past century. This innovative management system includes provincial Parks, off limits to industrial activity, and Special Management Areas where temporary industrial activity is allowed, provided it protects wilderness and wildlife in the long term. An advisory board that included all sectorswith an interest in the landbase, and on which I still serve, was created, as was a special fund.
My life has followed a trajectory from logger, trapper, and hunting guide, to conservationist with a strong ethic of respect for the land and I believe that this is the course that the global society is, or should, also be on.