By Heather Millar, for the Fall 2007 issue of Environment: Yale magazine.

Spencer Beebe ’74 has spent years deeply rooted in local time and space. After working abroad for more than a decade with The Nature Conservancy and Conservation International, which he co-founded, Beebe came home, hoping to use lessons learned in the rainforests of Brazil and elsewhere to help save the coastal forests of his native Pacific Northwest. Ecotrust, the nonprofit Beebe founded in 1991, promotes what he calls a “conservation economy,” founding banks and partnerships that create economic growth while discouraging sprawl, preserving biodiversity and working toward social goals like better opportunities for Native Americans. Beebe limited his focus to what he dubbed Salmon Nation, the coastal watersheds of the Pacific Northwest, where chinook and other salmon species have spawned for millennia. Yet Ecotrust quickly went international, and may now be poised to go global.

Within three years of its founding, the original Ecotrust, based in Portland, Ore., spawned Ecotrust Canada, a Vancouver-based sister group. The Canadian group naturally adopted Ecotrust’s core activities of protecting salmon habitat, promoting sustainable forestry and assisting native communities in the temperate rainforest of British Columbia.

But the Ecotrust model – integrating indigenous culture, economic development and ecology on a regional scale, using interdisciplinary teams and local financing – has begun to travel far beyond its native realm of temperate rainforest, abalone and yearly salmon runs. The Australian Conservation Foundation has concluded that the approach could be adapted to work in that country’s far north, and is in the final stages of laying the groundwork for an Ecotrust Australia. In addition, organizers in places as far-flung as Mexico and the Carpathian region of Eastern Europe have begun to study Ecotrust, with an eye to adapting to its methods – such as creating financing coalitions to fund native ownership of sustainable businesses – to local problems such as poverty and deforestation. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of conservation organizers around the world have begun to study the way Ecotrust disseminates information about conservation methods to native communities on the Internet and through an Ecotrust-sponsored website.

“We try to increase access to information, technology and capital. How do we take those core globalization forces and put them back in the hands of local people? That’s what we’re all about,” explains Beebe, who serves as president of Ecotrust and vice chair of Ecotrust Canada.

Those ideas – searching for common goals that can bring together banks, environmental groups, local leaders and politicians to boost growth that is sustainable rather than extractive – resonated with Rosemary Hill, a vice president of the Australian Conservation Foundation, when she first heard about Ecotrust in 2003. She had traveled to a roundtable in the Kimberley region, in Western Australia, where scholars and policy makers were meeting to discuss northern Australia’s economic and ecological challenges: crushing poverty in aboriginal communities; lackluster industrial development; conflict between those in favor of promoting mining ventures that could create jobs and those who fear that more mines could destroy ecosystems; and how to resolve aboriginal claims to land ownership and demands for reparations.

“How do we take those core globalization forces and put them back in the hands of local people? That’s what we’re all about.”
Spencer Beebe

“Here in northern Australia, we already knew what to argue about. Ecotrust seems to create a space where people can come together and come up with positive solutions,” explains Hill, who has long worked in the biologically diverse region that stretches from Queensland across the top of the continent. “What I heard was that Ecotrust was getting the government, philanthropic and banking sectors, as well as the general public, to rethink sustainable development, especially among indigenous communities. They could point to concrete examples of sustainable development, as well as social and ecological equity.”

Ecotrust and Ecotrust Canada seem fired by the notion that what society needs to do to solve its environmental and social woes is not one thing, but hundreds of things, including promoting green architecture – diversifying local economies so that they’re not dependent on one resource such as timber and increasing resource efficiency. Over the years, both Ecotrusts have been whirling dervishes of activity: co-managing forestry companies with First Nations (Canada’s term for aboriginal peoples); helping to found Shorebank Pacific, touted as the first environmental bank; funding environmental startup companies and local fishing enterprises; promoting everything from green building to “slow food” to cultural mapping of native cultures and resources.

Sometimes, Ecotrust takes the lead in these projects. Often, Ecotrust staff members broker information, capital and connections. They use mentoring, banking, planning and mapping services to help others add to the “triple bottom line” – the social, economic and environmental capital – of Salmon Nation. Since 1999, Ecotrust Canada has made more than $10 million in loans to sustainable business, one-third of them indigenousowned, like the micro-hydro power project run by the Hupacasath people along China Creek near the city of Port Alberni. Not every project has been an unmitigated success, but even those skeptical of Ecotrust and Ecotrust Canada allow that they have focused on what’s local, sustainable and good for the community.

“It’s a very practical approach to what is often a philosophical or theoretical conversation,” explains Greg Kehm, who as Ecotrust Canada’s information services manager has worked on projects such as developing a land use plan that emphasizes the traditional values of the Heiltsuk people of British Columbia and using geographic information systems (GIS) to help the Tsleil-Waututh people gain Forest Stewardship Council certification for its logging operations.

Northern Australia, where Hill has made her life’s work, needs all those tools and more. The region stretches from the Great Barrier Reef and the Cape York Peninsula in the east to the Gulf of Carpenteria, the Top End and the Kimberley. It takes in spectacular vistas: rainforests, savannas, mangroves, wetlands and pristine coasts. More languages and cultures thrive in this region than perhaps anywhere in the world, save Papua New Guinea, Hill says. While the climate and soil vary too erratically for agriculture, there’s mineral wealth aplenty: silica and bauxite, uranium and copper. Yet the people who live in the isolated communities that dot this expanse live very hard lives.

“We think that our coasts here in British Columbia are remote and scattered, a long way from markets with poor networks and infrastructure. All of the above is true, but you can magnify those things by a factor of 10 in northern Australia,” says Ian Gill, a native Australian who now serves as president of Ecotrust Canada. “There, the communities are even more remote, and connecting to markets is even more difficult.”

Hill explains that the region hasn’t been successful for industrial development or agriculture. “There’s overwhelming poverty, substance abuse and welfare dependency. The life expectancy of indigenous peoples is 20 years less than for nonindigenous people,” she says. “There’s a lot of dialogue about mining here, but not about conservation of culture or about sustainable economies, which is what the people who live here are interested in. This is what we found that Ecotrust had done very successfully: linking up indigenous and nonindigenous sectors; bringing together banking people and environmental people; getting longterm business support; offering services like banking, credit, planning, mentoring and cultural mapping. They have started to create a local economy that connects to a global market.”

In 1998, Ecotrust began working with the Tsleil-Waututh, a Salish First Nation with coastal ancestral lands just north of Vancouver. The 400-member nation wanted to advance its culture and desired greater stewardship of the land, but was unsure how to proceed. The title to their ancestral lands, which once spanned 190,000 hectares, had become largely unenforceable. Ecotrust experts worked with native leaders, first helping them with mapping of traditional lands and then with land use planning.

The Tsleil-Waututh signed an agreement to co-manage Indian Arm Provincial Park with the provincial authorities. Not long after this, Ecotrust’s expertise in finance and forestry helped the nation to purchase 320 hectares of forestland at the head of Indian Arm. Ecotrust also helped draw up plans to manage the land sustainably and to gain Forest Stewardship Council certification for the nation’s operations there. Ecotrust has similar collaborations with 25 First Nation communities along the British Columbia coast.

“We were impressed that Ecotrust has delivered sustainable business outcomes with real jobs for people in situations where welfare dependency and the collapse of rural industries are rife,” says Hill. “That seems to be their approach – the principles we identified – community development and preservation of indigenous culture and rights. This combination seems to unleash the power of the people themselves to solve their own problems.”

In October 2005, Gill and a Tsleil- Waututh chief traveled to Australia to be featured speakers at the same Kimberley meeting where Hill of the Australian Conservation Foundation had first heard of Ecotrust two years earlier. The following year, Hill and two aboriginal leaders traveled to the Pacific Northwest. In Vancouver and Portland, they met with planners, GIS experts, researchers and bankers to learn more about the practicalities of turning Ecotrust’s many plans and projects into reality.

“Native communities need legitimate data. That’s one of the fundamental things we do: help them get information so that the native communities can walk into a permitting hearing and make their case with data that bureaucracies will understand. That doesn’t mean the natives always win, but up to now they’ve always lost,” Gill explains. “There are real parallels between Canada and Australia: They’re both Commonwealth countries. They have a similar history of colonization of native peoples and of resource extraction from native lands. In the last generation, indigenous leadership in both countries has insisted on greater rights and some compensation for lands they view as stolen. But the real parallel is this: they are both remote communities with large indigenous populations, sitting on resource wealth and vastly outgunned by the capital and political weight of people who want those resources.”

To try to restructure that dynamic, the Australian Conservation Foundation, the Kimberly Land Council and Balkanu Cape York Development Corporation (an indigenous business group) formed a steering committee in 2006 to explore 28 environment:YALE The School of Forestry & Environmental Studies how an organization similar to Ecotrust Canada might promote sustainable development in northern Australia’s indigenous communities. At the end of that year, a report from the Kimberley Roundtable found that mining and irrigated agriculture, the ventures prevalent in the north, continued to damage both the north’s environment and its local culture. The report called for the development of arts, tourism and land management industries instead.

“They have started to create a local economy that connects to a global market.”
Rosemary Hill

Meanwhile, Hill conducted a formal feasibility study of the Ecotrust concept. She released a summary of her findings in May to Land & Water Australia, a research and development corporation within the Australian government, concluding that a “cultural and conservation” economy could work in the north. She recommended that an Ecotrust Australia be formed to promote a “quadruple bottom line,” adding a fourth goal, aboriginal justice, to the original three goals of augmenting social, economic and environmental capital. She also called for a restructuring of Australian tax and business laws – rewarding philanthropic giving and setting up a loan-guarantee fund, for instance – to help an Ecotrust group get started down under. The full report will be made public at the end of 2007.

“We do want to start an Ecotrust Australia that would bring forward a more sustainable economy in the north,” Hill says, explaining that the goal would be economic growth without the environmental damage and social upheaval that is now prevalent. “We’re talking with people now. Hopefully, we’ll have something to say in the next few months.”

Meanwhile, representatives from World Wildlife Fund International’s Danube Carpathian Programme visited both North American Ecotrust offices, exploring the possibility of applying Salmon Nation methods to their region of Eastern Europe. An environmental nongovernmental organization near Cancun – Comunidad y Biodiversidad – has started working with Ecotrust to develop along similar lines. And while Ecotrust Canada has restricted its activities to the West Coast, it’s beginning to get inquiries from groups in the country’s boreal region. Ecotrust Canada’s “Aboriginal Mapping Network” – a bestpractices and GIS resource – logs 40,000 visits each month. In just the last 12 months, the mapping network has signed up 1,000 registered users from every continent.

“It’s at an interesting stage. Are we content to do what we do in our region, or do we take this global opportunity? If bioregions are the correct scale, how do we relate to other bioregions?” asks Astrid Scholz, Ecotrust’s vice president of knowledge systems.

Ecotrust Canada’s President Ian Gill asks, “Is there a development model here that bridges what have always been seen as the contradictory goals of economic development and conservation? And is there a way to triangulate that into the rights of indigenous peoples? I think there is, and it’s something the world needs.”