I came to Haida Gwaii  to learn about an extraordinary event that occurred in 2012. A radical, ambitious and well-intentioned action taken by the leaders of a small community in an attempt to secure their financial future, the viability of their town and the future of their fishery.

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.

It may seem odd to begin a post for a project focused on ocean health by talking about trees, but my experiences in Haida Gwaii have shown me that just as ecological and socio-economic issues are deeply intertwined when it comes to coastal communities, the same is true when it comes to the extraction of natural resources.

The town’s original visionaries fell by the wayside more conventional co-operative and unionized practices. This approach, combined with business savvy and managed with Scandinavian common sense, made people feel secure while allowing them to prosper.

It's a focused and determined grassroots approach that is getting results and is a model that could be followed by coastal communities anywhere: Brand better behavior so that tourists have a more of positive impact and local businesses and politicians are willing to follow through in any way they can to make the brand a reality for the good of the community.

Born in Algeria in a small “village-slash-town” far from the sea and in a social environment that didn’t encourage women to make unconventional career choices, she became fascinated by the study of the ocean and, after a life-altering experience, the study of what makes the fishing industry – and fishing communities – tick.

Kai and Andrea are everyday adventurers. By this I mean they have led a lifetime exercising a level of personal freedom and independence that most people only ever dream of. She is German, and he Swiss, they met in Victoria during a moment when Kai was not on some ambitious international expedition as one of the dive team.

The coffee roasting thing is characteristic of a small scale, domestic DIY ethos that I have come to recognize in communities located in remote places. It’s up there with baking your own bread, growing your own produce, or beekeeping - all small insurrections against the inequities of the global supply chain.

Just about every person I spoke to in, and around, Echo Bay, including Marisa and Cecil, get the impression government would prefer no one at all live in the wilderness full time. But what makes Marisa and Cecil’s situation somewhat unique is they feel like this kind of institutionalized passive aggressiveness extends to some of the people living in the surrounding coastal communities where they need to anchor, moor or dock from time-to-time.

How hard could it be to recruit a handful of people to this admittedly remote, but beautiful, place to do valuable conservation work? But Billy insisted it was true – another sign of not just how difficult it is to keep the salmon population alive but also the communities that used to depend upon them.

The Station was founded by local scientist and conservationist Alexandra Morton but she has distanced her activist activities from it so that the work produced by the Station is independent and unbiased. According to Chris, the data produced by the Station points towards the veracity of Morton’s most controversial cause regardless.

Salmon hatcheries are a potential piece of the solution to dwindling wild salmon stocks, and they require surprisingly little investment. In his tireless efforts to keep alive the community where he was born and raised, Billy Proctor helped establish a privately funded, local salmon hatchery a few years ago.

As with every point of friction I have so-far encountered between separate groups connected to the ocean, I am struck by how defensive everyone is about their slice of what is going with regards to making a living. The sheer hardship causes conflict.

I spent a week there and found that Echo Bay is a marine and shore park located in an area of not only natural but also cultural archaeological importance that the local First Nations community regard as unceded to the white man.

I asked Rebekah how it has been for her as a woman in what most would view as a masculine dominated industry. She told me that she had never had a problem getting respect as the daughter of a fisherman and that crews accepted her role as skipper because of her competence.

“Nature provides the answer.” I was riding in the passenger seat of Jackie Hildering’s pickup as we drove from Port McNeill to Telegraph Cove, when she said this to me in the course of conversation. I asked her if I could quote her on it.

They believe that the ecology of the area and the well-being of the First Nations people to be inseparable, and they see open pen salmon farming (the raising of salmon to maturity in pens sunk into the ocean) as an abomination, a failed experiment that should have been done away with almost as soon as it began.

“Microcosm” – the mission to show how the larger issues of marine conservation are all happening right here on my own doorstep in the coastal waters of mainland BC and Eastern Vancouver Island.