The most important story you'll never hear (or what it takes to shake hands)

It was the early days of the Protected Area Strategy (PAS), a community-driven initiative, championed by WWF, to create a network of culturally and naturally significant protected areas in the Northwest Territory in advance of industrial development.  Monte was the President of WWF at the time and Bill was our senior advisor working in the NWT.  So the two of them were invited personally by the local chief to come out and discuss a few ideas with the community.
They stepped off a tiny 12-seater onto a gravel airstrip and were told by Chief Archie Catholic, who came to greet them, that the elders and the band council weren’t ready to see them yet.  Why don’t they take a walk, do some fishing, come back in a little while.  Eighteen hours later, they were invited into the community hall where everyone was waiting for them.  On the walls, taped side by side by side, were gigantic maps etched with old pencil lines.  You could see one dark circle drawn around what Monte estimated had to be at least eight million hectares of land.
This is it, he and Bill were told, this is Thaydene Nene—land of the ancestors.  So how much of it are you interested in protecting, Bill and Monte wanted to know.  The answer:  all of it.

Tipi and tents set up in a traditional Dene First Nations meeting place near Lutselk’e, Northwest Territories, Canada (c) Monte Hummel/WWF-Canada
That was the beginning of a six-year process that involved complicated negotiations with the federal government as well as half a dozen other Dene communities around Great Slave Lake.  It resulted in the biggest protected area in Canadian history – 10 million hectares, including a significant new National Park.  To date, it’s one of the hallmark successes of the PAS – which so far has helped reserve more than 20 million hectares for conservation.
What makes this such a great story is that you can leap from the intriguing beginning to the exciting ending in the space of just a few minutes.  But of course as Monte and I and—most of all—Bill know, the real meat took place in the middle.  And, believe me, it’s not the stuff they make movies out of:  Long meetings where everyone gets to speak… twice.  Letters with multiple signatures.  Quiet discussions.  Loud discussions.   In other words, the blood and guts of building a meaningful relationship of trust between groups and individuals who are more commonly viewed as adversaries.
This is what we mean by “community engagement.”  And if I’ve learned one thing in my thirty-odd year career in conservation it’s that you cannot succeed without it.
For young people in the field now, this might sound strange, but there was a time when there were actually two schools of thought on the job of conservationists.  The first was that our role is to focus on and protect the wild.  WWF’s Endangered Spaces Campaign followed that line with great success.  However, there was another view that posited we should be working in “used and managed landscapes” –where people actually live.  It seems obvious now, but it was a turning point—for WWF and for our field—when we came to the conclusion that, to protect the environment and the planet, we had to do both.

At WWF, this is now in our bones. Today, the understanding of what it takes to do that work well, galvanized through the PAS, is driving our strategy and our actions in the Arctic.  Our vast North is not an empty frontier.  It’s a homeland.  In order to protect it, we need a vision and course that is in harmony with the aspirations and needs of the people who live there.  But it’s not only about having the right perspective and strategy.  It’s also about ensuring we have the right people out there, doing the work.
Just like Bill Carpenter brought his persistence, his focus on detail and his amazing resourcefulness to the PAS, we have Martin von Mirbach leading the charge in the Arctic.  He brings the curiosity, the sophistication, and the patience necessary to sit across the table from local decision-makers and truly discover a commonality.  That’s the key and it really is, in some ways, that simple.  Our success in the Arctic depends completely on our ability to bridge the divide between North and South, between rural and urban, in order to build trust and uncover that shared goal.  This hard and often slow work isn’t the stuff that great stories are made of.  But without it, we wouldn’t have great stories to tell.