Legacy Part 17 – Phil Oates – Tree Planter & Fishing Guide
By Jason Murphy, Founder & Creative Director
If you ever want some perspective on how personally dependent you are on the global supply chain and all the problems it brings, just spend a day with someone like Phil Oates.
Phil is a resident of Moresby Island in Haida Gwaii and works several jobs, mostly as a tree planter for one of the logging companies, sometimes as an odd job man and caretaker in Sandspit. Mushroom and berry picking have also turned out to be lucrative sidelines. He was a guide at a lodge in northern Ontario, and then on Lake Athabaska, Northern Saskatchewan for a total of five years.
Like many on Haida Gwaii, Phil is someone who can turn his hand to many tasks and has done many different things on and off island – much of it working for companies that focus on extracting Canada’s natural wealth in one form or another, log-by-log, boatload-by-boatload, or barrel by barrel, and there have been plenty of times when he’s made good money doing it. He tells me how two years working in the oil sands desensitized him to environmental concerns – something he is glad to have left behind.
There were problems typical of many who live this way – months of hard work were followed by days of hard drinking – but he has quit the booze now and he tells me he has re-organized his life to feature less cash-flow, both into his wallet from employers and out of his wallet to the liquor store. He has trouble with his back too despite his relatively young age (somewhere in his thirties) thanks to his hard-working life – something that the tree planting doesn’t exactly help. He smokes weed.
A Special Kind of Wealth
It is not a luxurious life. During the couple of days that I spent time with him the only new looking thing I saw was an orange Husqvarna chainsaw fitted to a not-so-new looking Alaska Mill – a simple frame that allows a chainsaw fitted with the correct chain to be used to turn raw logs into lumber on a small scale. Lots of people have them here, including Haida totem pole carvers who use them to prepare a raw log before working on it. The other major possessions I saw were a beaten old Ford F150, a leaky riveted aluminum boat with a small outboard and some prawn traps (one of them new.)
Despite this, Phil has something most of the rest of us don’t have that gives him a special kind of wealth – his relationship to and ability to live off the land and the sea on a daily basis.
Phil is connected to Haida Gwaii, not in the cultural/mystical way that the Haida are, but in the practical, frontier style that characterizes many of the non-native people out here.
For the vast majority of us, going to the store to buy groceries is the normal thing to do. Most people go to a supermarket for most things. Some take the time and trouble to seek out specialty stores that may supply more thoughtfully, perhaps locally, sourced and packaged goods. Those of us who can afford it may buy organic, cage-free or ocean-wise when we can, some save time and carbon footprint by buying online. This is the state of the spectrum of options of where we get our food. Need something? Go to the store or go online. Do your best to do the right thing and put-up with not knowing how your food was processed, all the while trying to ignore the disquiet that comes from knowing that much of it got shipped halfway around the world to get to you, and the despair of dealing with all the packaging it arrives bundled inside.
Some of Phil’s food arrives this way too, but much of it comes straight out of the ocean or the ground. Fresh that day, direct to his plate from one of the cleanest environments anywhere in the world, no supply chain, no packaging and little carbon footprint.
He grows some in the small garden of raised beds next to the guesthouse that he keeps an eye on when the owner is away – kale and the like. Much of the rest comes from the ocean. Kelp supplies another source of nutrition. Enough crab or prawns to feed two or three people can be trapped in three or four hours.
I asked Phil if I could join him on one of his food-gathering trips around the island and he told me that he needed to go and locate a crab trap for one of the other residents of Sandspit the following day and that I could join him to take some photographs.
On the way between Sandspit and Moresby Camp – about an hour on one of Haida Gwaii’s truck-destroying logging roads – we stopped by a fishing hole and after five or six casts (maybe 7 or 8 minutes.) Phil had caught a trout for our lunch.
Phil is an adept fisherman – but the real story is the sheer abundance of this place even though it is now a shadow of its former self.
Imagine – all this beautiful food – and the only environmental impact is that of getting the truck and/or boat to and from where it lives.
Phil is connected to Haida Gwaii, not in the cultural/mystical way that the Haida are, but in the practical, frontier style that characterizes many of the non-native people out here. Phil is a modern guy, but you could easily picture someone a lot like him living in a similar way a hundred or even two hundred years ago, exercising his knowledge of the forest, the ocean and the living things in it to aid his survival and make his life more comfortable.
He is also connected to it in the sense that he sees what's happening here with regard to the way the land is treated and finds it deeply troubling.
The Results of a Desensitized Mindset – The Failure to Do The Right Thing Even When You Can.
In the hour-or-so it took us to get to the boat ramp at Moresby – an old logging camp that serves as a jumping off point for boat trips into the Gwaii Haanas National Park Preserve and Haida Heritage Site – we had the opportunity to talk about many things he sees on the island.
“Natural or not natural, why the fuck… why haven’t you cleaned it up? Why has nobody cleaned it up?”
I mentioned that I had not yet learned how to distinguish old-growth clearcuts from those that felled second growth, and at the first opportunity he pulled over into a second growth clearcut and pointed out the remnants of old growth stumps still visible from the first time trees were felled there, instantly pointing out the cadence and scale of what the old forest had been in comparison to what only just got cut down.
The second growth forest you see growing in Haida Gwaii is beautiful, and the old growth that remains is breathtaking. But the epic scale and grandeur of what has been lost can only be imagined by looking at the stumps of old growth forest revealed once more in second growth clearcuts. Stumps of trees 12 feet thick standing 18 feet apart like the columns in some 12th century cathedral.
We also witnessed a salmon creek choked by timber and mud washed downstream following a landslide (one of fifteen that have occurred this winter,) that may-or-may-not have been the result of clearcutting. The soil in Haida Gwaii is extremely fertile but is not always very deep, particularly on steep slopes – remove the trees and it gets washed right off the bedrock causing a landslide that takes remaining trees on either side with it. The problem is exacerbated when clearcutting comes too close to that same river, leaving trees on the bank vulnerable to high winds, flash-floods and slide debris as it goes by.
The logging road next to the timber choked river takes us to a bridge and a logging camp. The frustration in Phill’s voice is there to be heard.
“Maybe it could have been something natural,” he says, “But… natural or not natural, why the fuck… why haven’t you cleaned it up? Why has nobody cleaned it up?”
“Look,” he says, pointing in the direction of the logging camp and its heavy machinery – “Here’s the log-sort. These guys have all the equipment in the world, they’re running seven days a week, and this… this is our salmon stream.”
There are restrictions on how close logging can come to a stream and when specific trees must be left standing, and logging companies are obligated to employ forestry scientists to help guide operations. But Phil tells me he knows forestry scientists who have been forced to resign because of pressure to bend the rules or ignore potential violations.
Selective Harvesting on a Personal Level – How it Works.
We also talked about efforts to limit environmental impact.
The key lesson is that he takes moderately, does his best to take selectively, and wastes as little as possible. The parts of the trout we didn’t use for lunch are used as bait in the prawn traps for instance.
Phil speaks in concerned tones about the environment but is not sentimental about it. He uses it as part of his way of life and just like everything else out here, that involves taking what nature offers. Taking the life of a fish. Taking a plant that undoubtedly serves as the habitat for some other living thing. And just the act of doing this creates complications. There are rules around what you can take and how much of course, and Phil abides by those rules. Some things – like critically endangered rockfish for example – you can’t take at all. But what do you do when you catch one by accident? Catch and release works work for some species if the animal is well treated during the process, often though, the fish will die anyway.
The key lesson is that he takes moderately, does his best to take selectively, and wastes as little as possible. The parts of the trout we didn’t use for lunch are used as bait in the prawn traps for instance.
He, like most fishers, is also careful about timing. He tells me he has been concerned that many of the prawns he has been catching still have eggs in them for instance.
This cannot always be said of those who make a living from harvesting the resources of our planet. The modus operandi of the human race has been take as much as possible as fast as possible, take only the best of what is available and leave the wreckage behind us.
It is the logical result of calculating the value of things only in terms of their extracted market value and leaving out the value of leaving them alone. The value of old growth forest and marine plant life as a carbon sink alone is huge, but very few people see an economic benefit from that.
Phil used the term “Selective Harvesting” on more than two separate occasions during our conversation in reference to both the forest and the ocean – he tells me it is an idea that resonates strongly with him and it comes down to a few distinct concepts – harvesting proportional to personal use, strict limits, transparency within the local community about who is doing what, science and monitoring, and an intolerance for waste.
When I ask him about enforcement he agrees that it has its place as a deterrent but also says it is only a small part of the picture. In his view, the best way to stop the 5% who will disregard the rules even when they are backed by science is by allowing the local community to know what is going on in their territory. In his view, only the community has the strength to make exceeding limits socially unacceptable.
His view is that inevitably enforcement authorities are mostly in the business of “covering their own asses”. He doesn’t blame the individuals who work for the authorities for this – he sees it as the inevitable consequence of trying to police a situation where there is not enough information to actually know what is truly going on.
He says he has seen plenty of examples of a few people having an outsized negative impact. People gill-netting half a kilometer up a river for salmon – taking every single fish – in order to support addictions to drugs and alcohol for instance.
He tells me he has also seen plenty of good old fashioned greed. Sport fishers taking more fish than they can possibly eat before it gets freezer burn. Groups of people traveling to the islands so that they can combine their personal quotas to fill a truck with what they catch for the journey home.
And is not just fish, shrimp and crab. Herring like to deposit their roe on kelp and this is regarded as a delicacy by some locals and overseas markets. As a result, some kelp beds have been devastated. In a different story the herring fishery in the islands collapsed years ago due to commercial fishing.
With the exception of human beings, even the most ferocious predators in nature go after the weak and sick of the predated species first. In this way, predators actually improve the overall health of the population they predate.
The degree to which the human race fails to learn the lesson of overfishing seems staggering. Fishers blame other factors – marine mammals in particular – but press those who really know and they admit that overfishing has been a reality. I spoke to many in Haida Gwaii about this and will include it in a future post.
What You Harvest Matters on a Minute-To-Minute Basis – Not Just How Much
Phil also makes a point about a key difference in the way that humans behave in contrast to the rest of the natural world. A difference that is obvious when highlighted but not something I have not heard from anyone else I have spoken with on my journey for Sealives so far:
With the exception of human beings, even the most ferocious predators in nature go after the weak and sick of the predated species first. In this way, predators actually improve the overall health of the population they predate.
Humans tend to do the opposite. Our big brains and our use of tools have allowed us to become picky hunters. We only want the best of whatever species we are after and leave the weaker specimens behind.
I’ve never fully connected with this idea before but it does make you think. The impact of human harvesters in the environment is not only defined by our voracious appetite in terms of scale but also our pickiness in terms of quality, which is further amplified by market forces that reward specific standards or other very precise aspects of a particular target species – its fin or its fur for example.
What is true is that his way of life connects Phil to his food security and the life-sustaining ecosystem in the place where he lives in a profound way. I can’t help thinking that the world would be in better hands if this were true of more of us.
Unlike other predators, we leave our target species in worse shape overall, not just in terms of quantity but also the health of the stock that remains.Is it possible for us to imagine taking from nature only that which has run its course, and doing so in such a way that it will return to nature completely once we are done with it? Phil tells me how he often releases fish he catches that are in their prime while deciding to take only those who are nearing the end of their lifespan. This doesn't mean taking salmon from the rivers – he only ever takes salmon from areas well away from a river mouth – but it does mean being sensitive to which fish to leave in the ecosystem and which fish to take, regardless of species
Not all of these ideas scale of course. It is ecologically sound for one person to drive to the ocean to catch lunch rather than go to the supermarket, to selectively harvest on a fish-by-fish basis. The same cannot be said, for instance, of a city of 30 million consumers.
What is true is that his way of life connects Phil to his food security and the life-sustaining ecosystem in the place where he lives in a profound way. I can’t help thinking that the world would be in better hands if this were true of more of us.
We discuss the idea of closing down all fishing in Gwaii Haanas. Phil is open to it if that is what it takes to secure the ecosystem for the future. For him, it is the ecosystem that must be protected at all costs, not because its wrong to harvest from it but because if we lose it we lose it forever. He doesn’t think it should be necessary, but in the end, he thinks that a program of science and monitoring should be the deciding factor.
Be Informed and Adapt – Survival Basics From The Edge of The World
The day was an enjoyable one despite much rain. The traps were set between Moresby and Louise Island. Lunch was cooked over an open fire on a nearby beach.
A Dungeness Crab that had been caught the previous day was cooked in addition to the trout, and some baked beans, but in the event the crab was more than we could eat for lunch and came back to sandpit with us to be enjoyed at another time, along with the twenty or so prawns that had been trapped while we ate.
Phil accepts that the more restrictions you create the more pressure you put on the economic health of the community, but he, like others I have spoken with on Haida Gwaii are optimistic about people’s power to prosper by remaining adaptable. Its that frontier spirit again – pragmatic and grounded – an unflinching self-confidence in the locals’ talent for finding the route to a prosperous future, even if that requires a break from the past.
At least two of the big themes I have been hearing about from others up and down the coast were present in my conversation and experiences with Phil: The need for local communities to be given the power and the information to govern their own environments and the need for that information to be based on direct monitoring, data, and science.
He believes that eco-tourism featuring activities other than hunting and fishing, and jobs created to monitor the health of the environment could be part of the picture. It should also be noted that sustainable harvesting is not a new idea to the logging industry – systems have been developed to better maintain the future of managed forestry, systems that they say they are prevented from implementing as a result of existing rules and vested interests. And not all logging is done by huge corporations, locals hold small licenses in some places up and down the BC coast, and will often prefer to get their timber milled locally if they can, resulting in benefits for those communities.
At least two of the big themes I have been hearing about from others were present in my conversation and experiences with Phil: The need for local communities to be given the power and the information to govern their own environments and the need for that information to be based on direct monitoring, data, and science.
As with so many things, it appears that having an accurate, objective picture of what is going on via thorough, boots-on-the-ground data collection may be what it takes to get people with disparate backgrounds to agree on real solutions for all concerned.