AT THE BEGINNING OF AUGUST 1987, MORE THAN TWO THOUSAND people hiked over a mountain pass to camp at the head of the Stein River Valley in British Columbia. They were there for a festival celebrating another of this planet’s special places.
At the Stein Festival, I met a forester who had accused me on radio of being “too emotional” and having “little factual information” to back up my support for the preservation of the Stein. (I have never figured out what is wrong with being emotional about something that matters—I am emotional and I do not apologize for it.) But when I challenged his claim that foresters know enough to replace the likes of the trees they would cut down, he replied, “We’re almost there. We’ve learned a lot and we’ll soon know everything we need.” He was confident his children could look forward to logging the kind of trees he wanted to harvest in the Stein.
Scientists have learned a lot in the past half-century. Many of their insights are truly mind-boggling—models of atoms and subatomic particles, black holes, DNA, and the immune system. These investigations have been accompanied by the invention of technological tools to disrupt and alter much of the natural world. Our manipulations are often extremely powerful and yield immediate results, yet they are crude approximations of what exists in nature. A mechanical heart is quite a technical achievement, but this simple pump does not come anywhere near duplicating the real thing. Unfortunately, people like that forester have equated our power to effect short-term changes in nature with long-term control and progress. This is sheer arrogance.
Canadian support of science has always lagged behind that of other industrialized countries, and forestry, not being a high-profile area, has always suffered a severe shortage of funds and top students. How can we believe we comprehend the diversity of organisms and the complexity of their interactions when our analytical techniques and expertise are so limited?
I spent twenty-five years of my life practicing science. My area of genetics has been a high-profile field that has attracted top scholars and funds for decades. My entire career was spent focused on one of the estimated thirty million species on this planet—a common fruit fly. This fruit fly has been studied by geneticists since 1909 and for over seventy years has been at the center in the study of heredity. Tens of billions of dollars have been invested to pay the salaries of thousands of geneticists who have devoted their lifetimes to studying the fruit fly. Four scientists who studied fruit flies have already won the Nobel Prize, and no doubt there will be more in the near future.
The results of all this effort have been impressive. It is possible to create all kinds of mutant strains affecting the fly’s behavior, anatomy, and viability. We can take a single cell from a fly and clone it to create another fly. We can extract pieces of DNA, alter them, and reinsert them into flies. We can make flies with wings growing out of their eyes, legs growing out of their mouths or antennae, four wings instead of two, twelve legs instead of six. We have gained tremendous insights and manipulative powers.
But you know something? After using hundreds of thousands of person-years of research, billions of dollars of grant money, and all the latest equipment to study this one species, we still don’t know how common fruit flies survive the winter. We still can’t understand how a fly’s egg is transformed first into a larva, then a pupa, and then an adult, something every fly manages easily. There is a species of fruit fly so closely related to the one I’ve studied that only a handful of specialists in the world can tell them apart, but the flies have no problem. It turns out that we have very little understanding of the basic biology of this one species, and it is only one of tens of thousands of species of fruit flies! If we know so little after all that, how can we possibly think that we have accumulated enough knowledge to enable us to manage complex ecosystems like the Stein Valley? As a scientist, I have been overwhelmed not with the power of our knowledge but with how little we know.
We have become so intoxicated with our clever experiments and increasing knowledge that we forget to see the intricate interactions and nearly infinite complexity that exist in the living world. Instead, smug in our faith in the knowledge of scientists, we perpetuate the notion that we already know enough to cut down the last areas of wilderness. Those “scientists” and “experts” who speak so confidently about the logging industry’s ability to mimic the virgin stands that are being cut down reveal that they literally cannot see the forest for the trees.
Update
In the late 1980s, the Lytton Indian band had begun to hold annual Stein Valley Festivals to celebrate the place called Stagyn, meaning “hidden place,” by the First Nations. Participants included musicians such as Gordon Lightfoot, John Denver, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and Bruce Cockburn, and attendance grew to tens of thousands. In 1995, the British Columbia government established Stein Valley Nlaka’pamux Provincial Park, jointly managed by the Lytton First Nation and B.C. Parks. Encompassing 107,191 hectares (almost 265,000 acres), the magical place would be protected for future generations in perpetuity.
In the mid-1990s, the David Suzuki Foundation began to establish relationships with the First Nations communities in remote areas along British Columbia’s north and central coasts, including Haida Gwaii. Together, the foundation and the First Nations formed Turning Point, an organization of First Nations working together and supporting each other to protect their traditional lands. In April 2001, the B.C. government signed a historic document with the Turning Point First Nations, entering into agreements to negotiate the future of the land. Forest companies, environmental groups, ecotourism companies, and local municipalities added their support. The David Suzuki Foundation, at the request of Turning Point, put together a document on ecoforestry called “A Cut Above,” which outlined nine critical principles underlying sustainable use of forests. It is now time to see whether all the goodwill and support will result in First Nations control over their lands and their use in an ecologically sustainable way