Thank you.
I'm actually from just over the mountains in British Columbia. I'm a systems ecologist. I've been around for 40-odd years, but I'm a little bit of a different bird, because I've also ranched for 20-odd years.
I wanted to explain something about people like Larry and me. To survive as a cattleman, you have to be a very good business person, but you also have to be a very good ecologist, because we're not ranchers, but grass managers. If you don't manage that grass, you lose the basis of your business. So people like Larry and me are kind of caught. A lot of you know that cowboys are generally bowlegged and we assume that's because of riding broncs. The fact of the matter is that we have one foot in the economic realm and the other in the natural world, and we've built this picket fence between them, and we're always trying to survive in that sort of system. I think that's a big part of the problem we face here in trying to develop a national conservation strategy.
The first point I wanted to make was that as part of the multicultural landscape in Canada we now have greennecks and rednecks in addition to first nations and all the other cultures, including the francophone culture and everything else. These people do not communicate very well from the two sides of the debate. That's one of the things we have to resolve.
There was an interesting piece on CBC a couple of days ago when this young woman described herself as an “eco-holic”, recycling and doing all these green things, and I thought that on the other end of the spectrum, there are “dollar-holics” or “stuff-holics” who create this dilemma. The problem I see for Canada is that we try to address conservation issues in what I call combat-based decision-making. We have two sides, two positions, and we throw rocks at each other and there's not a lot of room, almost no room, in the press for people like Lorne who has spent his life working in the middle ground trying to find solutions.
The reason I've had to think about this is that I've been involved in issues in our valley across the mountains. We have three issues or conservation conflicts that have gone on for 15 years in our valley. We have no real solutions in any of those situations, and I think we're up around $100 million to $150 million in expenditures on the part of government groups and people in our community trying to solve these problems. It's becoming a big problem for our community. I think it's happening across Canada.
I'll tell you a little story about how far it's gone in our valley. You may be aware of this debate over a ski resort called Jumbo. It has split our community. The other day I was talking to someone who was perceived as being for this development proposal. He happened to play guitar and he asked another friend if he could jam with him to make some music; this other fellow is a professional musician. He said that would be great. He went to his band members and said so and wanted to come and jam with them, and one of the other band members said he couldn't jam with them because he's for Jumbo. That just breaks my heart to see our communities being pulled apart by these issues in that way.
The role of a national conservation strategy, in my view, is to at least think about these dilemmas and use this national conservation strategy as a tool to bring people together. I've done some thinking about this that I'd like to share with you. One is what I call individual context. For all the computers we have in this world, our decision-making software is a million years old. It was developed when we were all living in caves. There was a very interesting piece of information in Scientific American recently. They have chemicals that allow scientists to see which neurons are operating when they put you in an MRI scanner. They put people in the machine and ask them questions and when they're under stress and have to make a difficult decision, the neural activity shifts from the people's cortex to their lower brains, their emotional selves. Under stress we respond emotionally instead of intellectually. We all have examples of how that kind of response has happened over environmental issues across Canada.
The way it plays out is really interesting. I was chairing a group during the “war of the woods” in B.C. many years ago. A deputy minister for forests came. He gave a real barnburner of a speech and said it was absolutely imperative to “recycle” the land use problems in B.C. He meant to say resolve, but he was so caught up in the emotion of the thing that he provided a brilliant Freudian slip.
So I think it would be useful for us to look at the best of modern science in neurology, psychiatry, and psychology to see what we know about the brain and how our minds and brains work. This might allow us to see if there are some tools that we could develop to allow us to make better cooperative decisions.
The other piece of the puzzle is what I call the Walt Disney version of resource and wildlife management. We have people who think that the best thing Larry can do on his ranch is to keep all the calves. But if he does that, it's going to put him out of business. We have this sort of thought process that is antithetical to proper wildlife management and to actually getting things done and happening on the landscape.
In my view, our present approach to resource issues in Canada is counterproductive, not just for people but for wildlife. I want to give you an example that is quite fascinating to me.
We have a thing called a badger, which is like a groundhog from down east, living in our valley. It's a listed species. Under present regulations, you cannot disturb the habitation of an endangered species or a listed species. It makes sense for birds, which have one nest. Badgers have a hundred to a thousand holes where they dig up gophers. You can't tell which of those they are trying to raise their young in.
What is happening in our valley is an eco-restoration program that is fundamentally shifting our landscape from scrub timber to grassland that can support gophers and badgers. We're required by the act to leave a patch of timber around every badger hole. It's costing the forest companies doing the work hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it's counterproductive for the badgers, because they're a grassland species. The problem is that nobody in the whole system, from the local biologists with the forest company to our provincial people and up through them, is willing to sit down and say this is stupid. The response has always been that we have to follow the regulations, whether they make sense or not. We have to do some work around the listed species reports to make sure they work.
Another problem we have to think about is that we've had things like wolves and grizzly bears in our system in this part of the world for a long time. We're realizing that there are secondary and tertiary impacts from these animals that are causing serious problems for the ranchers in the world and creating major conflicts.
It's interesting. I drove here over the mountains yesterday. I went for a walk in Kootenay National Park. We were talking about wolves here today. I'll be a son-of-a-gun, but I had two wolves, from me to the far end of the table, at this time yesterday. They're beautiful animals, but they have a major impact on things.
In terms of solutions, what I want to suggest is that we spend a lot of time focusing on species. We have to shift our thinking to sorting out how those species are going to survive in a grassland system, or whatever kind of system. You will see in my notes that one of the other things that's important to understand is that we have landscapes managed by the national parks. We also have really important national landscapes of national importance that are run by east slope ranchers. It's the cultural equivalent of something that maintains those landscapes. To me, that's really important.
The final thing, and I'm with Lorne here, is that the focus of how we approach this conservation problem in Canada should be to do it locally. The major problem with groups that are trying to find common ground and work together is that you cannot make these decisions without controversy. When you have controversy over these issues, the end result is that it improves the funding opportunities for the people on either pole. The government and other people say, oh, we don't want to be near controversy, and for the groups in the centre that are trying to get things done, the funding ends. We have to find a mechanism to deal with that.
There you are.
Thanks very much.