Galiano Island, photographed by Adam Huggins
Summary
What does it mean to live on an island? Is it to be independent from, or inexorably dependent on the rest of the world? And when the ecosystem's physical limitations are so clearly circumscribed, do people behave more "environmentally"?
In this episode, we visit Adam's home island of Galiano, and find out just how big its ecological footprint really is.
Show Notes
Explore the full One Island, One Earth report (and interactive map)
This episode features the voices of Levi Wilson, Adam Huggins, Michelle Thompson, Dr. William Rees, and Dr. Beate Ratter, and was produced by Wil Henry and Mendel Skulski.
Music by Thumbug, SHIITAKE, Modern Biology, Velems, and Sunfish Moon Light.
Special thanks to Terra Tailleur, Nicholas Friedman, Sleight of Hand Sound, the Galiano Conservancy Association, and to the Sitka Foundation for supporting our fourth season.
And for their part in the One Island, One Earth project, Adam would like to thank the Vancouver Foundation, Vancity, the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions, the Global Footprint Network, the BCIT Centre for Ecocities, CHRM Consulting, all of the GCA’s partner organizations on and off Galiano Island, and the many, many people who shared information, filled out surveys, sat down for interviews, and provided feedback.
✨ And as always, this episode was made possible with the support of our amazing patrons. 🌱
Citations
Franz, J., Papyrakis, E. (2011) Online Calculators of Ecological Footprint: Do They Promote or Dissuade Sustainable Behaviour?. Sustainable Development, 19 (6): 391-401.
Galiano Conservancy Association (2022) Galiano Ecological Footprint and Consumption-based Emissions Inventory Technical Memo
Galiano Conservancy Association (2022) One Island, One Earth An Ecological Footprint and Fingerprint for Galiano Island
Hopton, M., Berland, A. (2015) Calculating Puerto Rico’s Ecological Footprint (1970–2010) Using Freely Available Data. Sustainability, (7): 9326-9343.
Huggins, A. (2022) The story of Coastal Douglas-fir forests: Living within rather than apart from the places that sustain us. Raincoast Conservation Foundation, The Story of CDF Interview Series.
Ratter, B., Petzold, J. (2012) From Ecological Footprint To Ecological Fingerprint. Sustainable development on Helgoland. One Island to Another – a Celebration of Island Connections (Karin Topsø Larsen ed.): 191 - 214.
Ratter, B. (2018) Geography of Small Islands: Outposts of Globalisation. Springer Nature.
Rees, W. (1992) Ecological Footprint and Appropriated Carrying Capacity: What Urban Economics Leaves out. Environment and Urbanization, 4, 121-130.
Rees, W. (2020) Ecological economics for humanity’s plague phase. Ecological Economics, (169).
Rees, W. (2020) The fractal biology of plague and the future of civilization. The Journal of Population and Sustainability, 5 (1):15–30.
Rees, W. (2021) Growth through contraction: Conceiving an eco-economy. Real-World Economics Review, no. 96
Wackernagel, M., Rees, W. (1996) Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth. New Society Publishers
Wackernagel, M., Beyers, B. (2019) Ecological Footprint: Managing Our Biocapacity Budget. New Society Publishers.
Wambersie, L., Zokai, G., Lin, D. (2022) Galiano Island Biocapacity Methodology Report
This episode includes audio recorded by BoilingSand, jobro, CGEffex, jrhodesza, schneidi67, kyles, Breviceps, and istudeny, accessed through the Freesound Project, and protected by Creative Commons attribution licenses.
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Future Ecologies is recorded and produced on the unceded, shared, and asserted territories of the WSÁNEĆ, Penelakut, Hwlitsum, and Lelum Sar Augh Ta Naogh, and other Hul'qumi'num speaking peoples, otherwise known as Galiano Island, British columbia, as well as the unceded, shared, and asserted territories of the Musqueam (xwməθkwəy̓əm) Squamish (Skwxwú7mesh), and Tsleil-Waututh (Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh) Nations - otherwise known as Vancouver, British Columbia.
Transcription
Introduction Voiceover 00:00
You are listening to Season Four of Future Ecologies
Levi Wilson 00:05
What I've been told is that the main source, the main lifeblood, the main thing for connecting us was the waterways — was the ocean, was the different straits. And so the whole island was accessed through our canoes. You don't park your canoe here, travel up the island to the other end, get on another canoe and come back to your canoe. And so this idea of one continuous part of the island, and having one name for that whole strip, just it didn't make sense. It wasn't necessary. It wasn't necessarily helpful.
Levi Wilson 00:45
Places like Galiano didn't traditionally have one name for the whole island, it was the waterways that had whole names. And then each spot on the island was given to different families, or under their their rights and responsibilities for care and use of that area at different times of the year. Each Bay, each inlet, each point of the island had its own name, and each name was tied to a different family, a different house, a different community, and through the names and how the names are attached to people's names was how you understood the place. But growing up, the water was a barrier. Traditionally, that wasn't the way it should be. The water should be the connection.
Wilson Henry 01:32
Welcome back. I'm Wil and I'll be your host for this episode. The voice you just heard is Levi Wilson.
Levi Wilson 01:39
[Hul’qi’minum introduction] Levi Wilson. And I'm a member of the Gitga'at first nation, with strong family connections to the Lamalcha peoples of what's now known as Penelakut Island. I lived most of my life on Galiano
Wilson Henry 01:55
Galiano — that long, narrow stretch of land in the Salish Sea, sandwiched between Vancouver and Vancouver Island. It's one of many islands here, part of an archipelago known as the Southern Gulf Islands, or, as it continues across the invisible threshold to the United States, the San Juans. Today, just under 1400 people live here. And people have lived here for a long time.
Levi Wilson 02:20
People have been everywhere on this coast since forever. Since time immemorial is the phrase — time immemorial, meaning time out of mind, time beyond what we can conceive. People have been here and have shaped so many different parts of our environment around us. Things that we take for granted now, are actually constructed.
Levi Wilson 02:44
We're meeting today at a place in English known as Montague Harbor, that I've since come to know as Sum’new’, which means the encircling place or the enclosed place, or something related to that. It is what some people would call a midden I call it a manufactured landscape. It is a site where, I assume, many, many generations of my ancestors have helped cultivate the landscape to promote growth of life, promote safety, in the inner harbor to make this place better over 1000s and 1000s of years.
Levi Wilson 03:21
You can see here where the original part of the land was. And then above it have been centuries and centuries and centuries of deposits of various shells, other refuse that people call — that archaeologists in particular call midden. But it's not just a dumping ground. This wasn't just "we have all this garbage, and we need somewhere to put it". It was "we have all this stuff that can help us turn this environment into something that's more practical, more powerful, more plentiful for everybody that's coming later".
Levi Wilson 03:53
It's that type of mentality that shifts from "what do I need to do to get rid of the stuff that I have now", to "how can I help all of the future generations". All the people that dumped stuff here that that created this landscape that put these layers and layers and layers across the entirety of what's now the park would never have benefited from what they were creating. It took centuries after they finished dumping for to actually turn it into the type of kind of for environment that is needed. And so it's that long term, long care thought that goes into it that that has made this place ancestrally so powerful, special and important.
Levi Wilson 04:44
When we say we claim it, we don't have full claim to every square inch of the island. That is colonial way of thinking that is not the traditional way of thinking, you know, throw a blanket over everything and say that that's yours. You have different rights and responsibilities in different places, it's part of the seasonal round. And that seasonal round overlaps, where even at different times of the year different peoples will have connection. That's why — that's why a place like Galliano can have 37 different first nations that have some form of claim. And it gets really complicated if you only view the island as one whole thing separate from the other islands around it.
Wilson Henry 05:31
So we're going to talk about what it means to be an island — to be separated and to be connected. To do that, we're going to take a snapshot of how people live here and see what we can learn from the footprints we make, and the fingerprints we leave behind
Wilson Henry 05:48
From Future Ecologies, this is an island unto itself.
Introduction Voiceover 06:02
Broadcasting from the unseeded shared and asserted territories of the Penelakut, Hwlitsum, and Lelum Sar Augh Ta Naogh, and other Hul'qumi'num speaking peoples. This is Future Ecologies — exploring the shape of our world through ecology, design and sound.
Wilson Henry 06:31
I won't be hosting this alone, by the way. Mendel is here too.
Mendel Skulski 06:35
Hey. Wait... where's Adam?
Wilson Henry 06:38
Well, Adam is on the other side of the microphone, this episode. He's going to be a subject, not a host.
Mendel Skulski 06:44
Okay. Why is that?
Wilson Henry 06:48
Well, Adam is a bit close to the story. Let's just say.
Mendel Skulski 06:53
He's part of it.
Wilson Henry 06:55
Yeah.
Mendel Skulski 06:55
We get to talk about it.
Wilson Henry 06:57
Yeah.
Mendel Skulski 06:58
What is it? What's the story?
Wilson Henry 07:00
Well, it's a story about these little microcosms that we call islands.
Adam Huggins 07:05
Islands have been the kinds of places where people have learned things about the world that they couldn't learn other ways. I think the most famous example is with Darwin, and his finches on the Galapagos.
Wilson Henry 07:18
It was those finches and their diversity of beak shapes, for different foods on different islands, that played a key role in Darwin's theory of natural selection.
Adam Huggins 07:27
I didn't grow up on an island, I grew up in suburbia. Galiano feels a lot less isolated than the suburban communities that I grew up in, in many ways. It's connected to all of the other islands in the archipelago we live in and all the other communities around it.
Wilson Henry 07:40
And this, of course, is Adam.
Adam Huggins 07:43
Listeners may recognize my voice. I am the restoration coordinator for the Galileo conservancy when I'm not doing Future Ecologies, and I guess I'm responsible for this, this project [laughs]
Mendel Skulski 07:56
Very mysterious. What... what is this project?
Wilson Henry 07:59
Well, it's called the One Island, One Earth project.
Mendel Skulski 08:02
Very catchy.
Wilson Henry 08:03
Yeah. And it's about measuring the ecological footprint of Galiano Island,
Mendel Skulski 08:08
Okay. Is this the point where I find out what an ecological footprint is?
Wilson Henry 08:13
It is! Okay. So, an ecological footprint is the amount of resource-producing land that is needed to support a person, a community, a nation activity, whatever. It's an area of land that represents what they consume, in terms of food and materials, and also what is needed to sequester the carbon dioxide waste that they produce. An ecological footprint is measured in global hectares.
Mendel Skulski 08:41
What is a global hectare?! ...what is a hectare?
Wilson Henry 08:45
Okay, so a hectare is a square. That's 100 meters by 100 meters.
Mendel Skulski 08:50
Oh, it's metric.
Wilson Henry 08:51
Yeah.
Mendel Skulski 08:52
So what is a global hectare?
Wilson Henry 08:55
A global hectare is equivalent to a hectare of land with the average biological productivity in a given year. That is of primary producers — plants, in other words.
Mendel Skulski 09:05
Okay, so a hectare is just like, an area.
Wilson Henry 09:09
Yeah.
Mendel Skulski 09:10
10,000 square meters.
Wilson Henry 09:12
Yeah.
Mendel Skulski 09:12
But a global hectare is a hectare with some plants on it.
Wilson Henry 09:18
Yeah.
Mendel Skulski 09:19
And the amount of plants is somewhere, kind of in the exact middle between, like, the Gobi desert and the Amazon.
Wilson Henry 09:28
Kinda.
Mendel Skulski 09:29
Kinda.
Wilson Henry 09:30
Yeah.
Mendel Skulski 09:30
It's like the average productive hectare.
Wilson Henry 09:34
Exactly. So you know, if you're trying to measure your ecological footprint and planted hectares, you wouldn't really be able to find an answer, because it would very much depend on where the hectare was. So using the unit of global hectares kind of removes that problem.
Mendel Skulski 09:49
Gotcha.
Wilson Henry 09:49
So your footprint is the consumptive side of the equation: How much of this average productive area we use on an annual basis to support our lifestyles. The other side of this equation is called Biocapacity.
Mendel Skulski 10:03
We're getting a lot of definitions right off the top.
Wilson Henry 10:07
Oh, yeah.
Mendel Skulski 10:08
What is biocapacity?
Wilson Henry 10:11
So, the most succinct way to put it is that it's the ability of any given area on Earth to produce resources that us humans need to live our lives and also to assimilate our carbon dioxide waste.
Mendel Skulski 10:25
Just us humans.
Wilson Henry 10:26
Yeah, that's actually one of the explicit limitations of the ecological footprinting process. It's only concerned with human needs.
Mendel Skulski 10:34
Okay...
Wilson Henry 10:35
So to understand biocapacity, we can kind of use a money metaphor.
Mendel Skulski 10:39
Alright?
Wilson Henry 10:40
Imagine an area of land is your bank account?
Mendel Skulski 10:43
Sure.
Wilson Henry 10:43
And then what grows and reproduces on that land every year is the interest.
Mendel Skulski 10:48
...Got it.
Wilson Henry 10:49
So you could live without depleting any savings, just by gathering that interest and living off that interest every year. But if you withdraw more than you're making on interest every year, eventually, you're gonna run out. So the biocapacity is the interest. It's what regrows every year. And your ecological footprint is how much you take out of the bank account.
Mendel Skulski 11:12
Okay, cool. This is making sense.
Wilson Henry 11:15
Great. So dealing with these numbers, global hectares of biocapacity, global hectares of ecological footprint, it can start to feel a bit abstract.
Mendel Skulski 11:25
Right? I mean, I, I have no idea how many global hectares I'm consuming, let alone how many should be consuming,
Wilson Henry 11:34
You're not alone. So to make it a little easier to comprehend, you can convert your footprint to Earth equivalents. Or in other words, how many Planet Earths we would need if everyone lived the same way as you or your community.
Mendel Skulski 11:48
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that, that is probably more than one Earth for most of us.
Wilson Henry 11:54
Oh, yeah. Certainly, most of us listening to this podcast right now.
Mendel Skulski 11:58
So what is a fair share? How many global hectares can my footprint be if I'm shooting for, you know exactly one earth?
Wilson Henry 12:07
Well, if you take the biocapacity of the entire Earth, which counts all the land and the continental shelves, and divide it by the number of people living on the planet, you get just over 1.5 global hectares per person, at least as of 2021.
Mendel Skulski 12:22
Oh, interesting. There's just kind of a nice mnemonic there, right? Like, we're aiming for less than 1.5 degrees of warming, relative to pre industrial levels. And we should also be aiming for 1.5 global hectares per person.
Wilson Henry 12:37
Yeah, well, maximum. And on that note, we're currently at 1.2 degrees.
Mendel Skulski 12:43
Yeah, I guess we're all on one big, finite island. But this whole thing sounds a lot like a concept that I that I have heard of, and that is carrying capacity. Right? Like we're talking about how many people Planet Earth can support. Isn't this kind of the same thing?
Michelle Thompson 13:04
Carrying capacity is a tool that is more commonly used for animal populations — knowing how much space they need, and those types of things. Applying that to humans is, I want to say, impossible. Our consumption patterns are so different and so far from each other. Think of what I would use day to day, compared to millionaire day to day. We can't just create a carrying capacity based on that.
Wilson Henry 13:30
This is Michelle Thompson
Michelle Thompson 13:31
And I'm currently the One Island One Earth coordinator at the Galiano Conservancy.
Wilson Henry 13:37
The goal of the One Island One Earth project is to do a first of its kind ecological footprinting and biocapacity survey for Galiano. Adam started the project, got the funding, and is kind of the spokesperson. But Michelle basically did all the work on the One Island One Earth Project [suppressed laughter]
Mendel Skulski 13:55
[Laughing] I'm familiar with this relationship. Just kidding. Just kidding. Adam is a big overachiever.
Adam Huggins 14:02
The other point about carrying capacity is it's looking at a given population of animals within a specific area and all of the resources available to them in that area. The thing about people is that we don't rely on the resources just in our local areas. In fact, oftentimes, we hardly rely on any of the resources in our local areas. Galiano Island is an example of a community where people who lived here up until very recently derived a lot of their basic needs from the lands and waters here. And now, derive very little of them, right? Maybe more so than than your average city dweller, but that's a big change. And so you can essentially have as many people as you want, almost living in an area if you're importing all of their basic needs from elsewhere.
Mendel Skulski 14:49
Right... okay, so you're you're outsourcing your biocapacity. When you're not using the things that are local, you're bringing them in.
Wilson Henry 14:58
Totally. And those things that you bring in still show up under ecological footprint, right? So ecological footprint and carrying capacity aren't the same thing. But even though they're different, it was that question — of "do humans even have a carrying capacity" that gave rise to the concept of the ecological footprint in the first place.
Wilson Henry 15:18
Well, it all started with having come to UBC as a wet-behind-the-ears ecologist, I thought I had a lot of answers as to the nature of the growing human dilemma that we, you know, we call the environmental crisis.
Wilson Henry 15:33
This is Dr. William Rees, professor emeritus of Community and Regional Planning at the University of British Columbia.
Wilson Henry 15:41
But although I taught and was even the director of the planning school for a number of years, I'm a population ecologist. The ecological footprint analysis was one of the things that I originated and co-developed with a variety of my students. That's it, that's all you need to know about that.
Mendel Skulski 15:59
No wait! I want to know more. Why did they decide to invent the footprint,
Wilson Henry 16:04
I kept running up against colleagues who were economists. So for example, at one point, I had given a seminar on the concept of human carrying capacity: the idea that at any given standard of living the earth, or any territory, such as Galliano island can support only so many people. And I was taken aside after that talk by a very senior Canadian resource economist. And what he was arguing was that economics had abolished the concept of carrying capacity. Because after all, human ingenuity could substitute for nature.
Mendel Skulski 16:41
Right. This is that whole technocratic kind of argument that we... we adapt, and we overcome, and we escape those animal limitations.
Wilson Henry 16:52
Totally. But William and his students didn't see it that way. So they used footprinting as a way to make a simple point.
Wilson Henry 17:01
On Earth today, there are about 12 and a half billion hectares of biologically or ecologically productive land. The human ecological footprint is 20 billion hectares. So we're using the earth as if it were about 75% larger than it actually is. But even a child would ask how can you use something that isn't there?
Mendel Skulski 17:23
Oh, it's me... the child. Yeah, okay.
Wilson Henry 17:29
And the answer is because we're depleting accumulated assets, so that as we destroy the soils, as we wreck the tropical forests, as we pollute the oceans as the dead zones increased, Earth is in effect, shrinking. The availability of really useful productive assets is getting smaller, even as the total demand by the human population, and growing incomes is getting larger.
Wilson Henry 17:54
So just because we can't measure carrying capacity for humans in the way that we do for other animals, doesn't mean that we don't depend on, or have a measurable impact on our environment. We might escape resource limitations at a local or even regional level, but we can't outrun them forever, at the planetary level.
Wilson Henry 18:16
So that's the ecological footprint in a nutshell. But remember, this episode is also about islands.
Beate Ratter 18:24
These little pieces of land surrounded by water, which you can describe as being isolated, but through the water being connected to each other. And I think this in-between, which is not the one and not the other is just fascinating.
Wilson Henry 18:41
This is Dr. Beata Ratter.
Beate Ratter 18:42
Yeah, I'm Professor of integrated Geography at the University of Hamburg in Germany. And I'm dedicated to research coastal areas and small islands.
Wilson Henry 18:54
So, Mendel...
Mendel Skulski 18:56
Wil.
Wilson Henry 18:57
When you think of an island, what comes to mind?
Mendel Skulski 19:01
Oh, you know, an island is like, a hill in the middle of the ocean. Out here, you need to get to it by a ferry — if you can get to it at all, without your own means. Yeah, they're, they're kind of separated and in so many different ways. They're separated socially. They're separated physically, they're separated economically. And I think there are just inevitable tensions of being outside the economic nexus, which is the mainland. But also I think that's the reason why many people seek it out. So yeah, that's that's what I think of when I think of islands.
Wilson Henry 19:42
Well, Beata has another idea.
Beate Ratter 19:46
I think you can have two pictures in your mind: a specific Island, which is this definition, a piece of land surrounded by water, and you think that it's definite and it's exact, and there is a boundary. But if you look closer, there is no real boundary. And there is no real limitation because each island population is specifically identified through the connection to other islands or to the mainland.
Mendel Skulski 20:16
Oh, I mean, that's so much like what Levi was saying at the beginning, right? Like, the water is this connective tissue. And it's not, not so much just these little nuclear conceptions of a piece of land all by itself.
Wilson Henry 20:31
Yeah.
Mendel Skulski 20:32
I really appreciate that framing.
Wilson Henry 20:34
Well get ready, because in her recent book, Beata makes the case that in a way, an island is really a kind of mental construct.
Beate Ratter 20:43
For example, an oasis in the desert can be an island. And in the original definition, it's not surrounded by water, it's surrounded by sand. But it's still this concept of islandness. The same comes true for villages in high mountains. So they are not surrounded by waters, but villages in the high mountains are some way isolated from other places, but they need to be connected to other places in order to survive. So the mental construct means that it's a definition which happens in your mind, and which is not a geographical definition of an island.
Mendel Skulski 21:22
We create islandness. Islands don't just exist... out there.
Wilson Henry 21:31
Yep.
Mendel Skulski 21:32
That's amazing.
Wilson Henry 21:33
We're standing on a mental construct right now. And Beata loves to challenge other stereotypes about islands. For one, the idea that people who live there are somehow special, the so called "Noble Islanders".
Beate Ratter 21:50
There is no Noble Islander, they're just as normal people. They are not behaving better or worse than Mainlanders. But small communities, either on islands or on the mainland, have bonds and have close bonds. So yes, if you ask me, there is isolation, but it's relative. And it's not definitely all small islands are isolated. If you think in the Pacific region, for example, the people in former times they learned to travel by sea, and they connected the whole area. It's this understanding of we are a sea of islands. And I think that explains it very much that you do not necessarily be isolated or feel isolated, if you have the means to be connected. And if you have your lifestyle to be connected to other places.
Wilson Henry 22:49
Besides her knowledge of islands, I'm introducing you to Beate because of an ecological footprinting project she did in 2009.
Beate Ratter 22:57
So I was dreaming of doing such an ecological footprint calculation on a Island.
Mendel Skulski 23:03
Sounds familiar.
Wilson Henry 23:04
Yeah. Except this was the first time anyone had done such a thing. Because it's not exactly a trivial exercise. The raw data that you need isn't just laying around. So Beate chose her Island carefully. A tiny German community in the North Sea, called Helgoland.
Beate Ratter 23:22
Many people dream of going once in their life to Helgoland — based on its history, and based on its location
Wilson Henry 23:30
Helgoland has a kind of mythic, rugged history in German culture. Today, it's actually got almost the same population as Galiano: around 1200 people, but it's much much denser since the whole island is less than two square kilometers. For centuries, it was known as a pirates hideaway. As a territory, it was officially possessed by Denmark, Britain, and then eventually Germany, and usually put towards tactical military ends. Then, towards the end of World War Two, the island was effectively flattened by bombing campaigns.
Mendel Skulski 24:06
Oh, scary.
Wilson Henry 24:06
Yeah. And that's actually part of the reason why Helgoland was an interesting place for Beate to make the first ecological footprint of an island. It's culturally German, but all the infrastructure is basically brand new. I mean, in European terms — new as of 1950. And that's not the only thing that made it a little more straightforward to study
Beate Ratter 24:28
Helgoland is so small, that you have no car traffic in Hagar land, you walk around or you take a bicycle, you do not need a car, then we are in temperate climate, you do not need an air condition.
Wilson Henry 24:41
And that's not all. Basically, no food is grown on Helgoland. Everything the islanders eat is imported. Their drinking water came from a desalination plant, and their electricity was from a diesel generator.
Mendel Skulski 24:54
Right. Okay, so it's about as close to a closed system as you could hope for
Wilson Henry 24:59
Exactly. Although the economy of Helgoland is largely driven by tourism, so once again, isolated but connected.
Mendel Skulski 25:07
All right, so we've got this perfect little demonstration plot for studying the footprint of islands. What did she find? Was Helgoland, like, a tiny bastion of sustainability?
Beate Ratter 25:21
The footprint in the end, as we calculated was 6.8 hectares per capita, which is beyond Berlin, way beyond the world,
Wilson Henry 25:32
That's 1.1 global hectares more than the average German citizen. In 2009. The people of Helgoland were living like we had almost four Earths of biocapacity.
Mendel Skulski 25:43
Wow. And that's assuming that all of it is for people.
Wilson Henry 25:46
Yeah...
Mendel Skulski 25:46
That we are entitled to the the total bio capacity of the Earth.
Wilson Henry 25:50
Yeah. And at that time, the world average ecological footprint was 2.7 global hectares per person, or just over one and a half Earths
Mendel Skulski 26:00
Islands... Not so idyllic, after all.
Wilson Henry 26:04
No, but it's a data point, right? A snapshot in time. Because if you want to live more sustainably tomorrow, it's important to look at how you're living right now. And where you can improve. And so really, this study is the reason why we're talking about islands at all.
Adam Huggins 26:21
Yeah, it was looking at Dr. Beate Ratter's work on the little island of Helgoland in Germany that sparked it for us here.
Mendel Skulski 26:28
Okay so, Adam got inspired and borrowed the concept for this island.
Wilson Henry 26:33
That's right.
Mendel Skulski 26:33
And here we are.
Wilson Henry 26:34
Here we are.
Mendel Skulski 26:35
So Helgoland 6.8 global hectares, and the world average is 2.7.
Wilson Henry 26:42
In 2009, yeah.
Mendel Skulski 26:43
Okay. So, thanks to Adam, Michelle, their collaborators. We have an idea where Galiano sits. Where does Galiano sit? What's... what's the number?
Wilson Henry 26:54
[Long pause] We'll get to that...
Mendel Skulski 26:55
No!
Wilson Henry 26:56
Right after the break.
Mendel Skulski 26:57
No!!
Wilson Henry 27:32
Welcome back, I'm Wil, this is Mendel, and you're listening to Future Ecologies. Today we're talking about ecological footprints, we're talking about islands, and we're talking about the ecological footprint of Galiano Island.
Mendel Skulski 27:47
The numbers! Come on, give me the results. Is this hippie-dippie island paradise just an illusion?
Adam Huggins 27:54
You asked for numbers I'm gonna give you some numbers.
Wilson Henry 27:57
Future Ecologies regular, Adam Huggins, wearing his day job hat at the Galiano Conservancy. Drumroll please.
Adam Huggins 28:06
We learned that if every human community in the world had the same footprint as the Galiano Island community does, we'd need the equivalent of 4.3 Earth's to support us all.
Mendel Skulski 28:22
Yikes.
Adam Huggins 28:23
If we're speaking the language of global hectares, the Galiano Island community requires an average of 6.8 global hectares per person in 2021. That is the exact same amount of global hectares that Helgoland required about a decade ago.
Mendel Skulski 28:37
Hmm, that's a pretty wild coincidence.
Wilson Henry 28:41
It is. And it should be said that since then, the community of Helgoland has made great strides to reduce their footprint and live more sustainably. But for Galiano, the story gets worse. Not only is this a big footprint, it's bigger than what the island could even hypothetically provide.
Mendel Skulski 28:58
Like, even if it were that mythical island unto itself, it still wouldn't be enough.
Wilson Henry 29:05
Yeah.
Adam Huggins 29:06
Our footprint is smaller than the average Canadian footprint, but larger than the footprint of nearby urban communities like Vancouver and Victoria, and significantly larger than what would be consistent with an equitable and sustainable footprint at a planetary scale. And even for the scale of the island.
Mendel Skulski 29:32
Wait, just a second. Before the break, you said that the Helgoland footprint was the equivalent of four Earths right?
Wilson Henry 29:39
Yeah.
Mendel Skulski 29:40
How can Galiano's be 4.3 Earth's if it's exactly the same number of global hectares?
Wilson Henry 29:46
Well, you have to remember that these are always snapshots in time. To get that Earth equivalent number you take the global hectare per capita of a community and you divide it by the global hectares that are available for every human being on the planet.
Adam Huggins 30:00
And you know that number changes, because the human population of the planet is growing. And so if you had the same amount of biocapacity and a growing population, you still have less per person over time.
Wilson Henry 30:11
So every year, a single global hectare becomes more valuable in a sense — as your fair share of the Earth's biocapacity shrinks.
Adam Huggins 30:18
And that's because of human population growth. But it's also because of environmental degradation. Right? When you're overspending the Earth's resources. when you're in overshoot, you're by definition, drawing down that, you know, biocapital. You're liquidating ecosystems, and you're reducing the planet's ability to support us.
Mendel Skulski 30:40
Eeesh... overshoot... that kind of says it all.
Wilson Henry 30:43
Yeah, it's actually a technical term in the world of ecological footprints. There's even a day: Earth Overshoot Day — when the planet as a whole consumes more than its biocapacity for the year.
Mendel Skulski 30:56
Uhhh... when is that?
Wilson Henry 30:58
We'll be there soon, actually, probably before this episode comes out. I think this year, it's expected to be at the end of July.
Mendel Skulski 31:06
But this question of overpopulation is pretty fraught, right? Like, if you start talking about making policy around birth rates, it's... it's easy to see why that's like.... fascistic.
Wilson Henry 31:21
Oh, absolutely. I mean, the question quickly becomes "who shouldn't be here?" As in "who shouldn't be alive?" And I don't think anybody should have the power to answer that.
Mendel Skulski 31:32
Ne neither. At least... outside of a one-womb radius?
Wilson Henry 31:39
Yes, we are pro bodily autonomy and pro choice here.
Mendel Skulski 31:43
Yes.
Wilson Henry 31:43
But when it comes to measuring footprints, the math is pretty clear.
Wilson Henry 31:48
The ecological footprint of a population is the product of two things: the size of that population multiplied by the average per capita consumption. So in simple arithmetic, they're equivalent. Nobody wants to talk about population growth. It's a taboo subject still.
Wilson Henry 32:06
Once again, this is Dr. William Reese, who co-invented this whole eco footprint thing. And to be clear, he's not advocating for any kind of coercive population control. But in his opinion, we can't just avoid the problem. Of course, population makes a much bigger difference, where the per capita footprint is already high, which basically tracks with wealth.
Wilson Henry 32:28
Reducing the population of Canada by 10, would be the equivalent of reducing the population in India by say, 60, or some such number. Because the fewer rich people there are the far better off the planet is in relative terms.
Wilson Henry 32:49
But stopping short of eating the rich —
Mendel Skulski 32:52
Oh... okay.
Wilson Henry 32:53
— I would say we don't have that many levers to pull, or at least, that I think we want to pull, to reduce population in any kind of coordinated way. Instead, I think we need to put our focus on what we can change in this generation,
Mendel Skulski 33:08
Such as? Like, how can we bring that per capita footprint down?
Wilson Henry 33:12
Well, that's exactly the point of doing the measurement: to see where you can make the biggest impact in your community. So let's break down the 4.3 Earths that go into Galiano's footprint.
Adam Huggins 33:24
Right off the bat, about 1.4 of those Earths is just the Galiano Island population's fair share of the footprint of the Canadian government. So that is like the provinces and the federal government, all the services that they provide health care, military, police, the administrative state, all that kind of stuff has a footprint that's already larger than one planet, if you look at it at a population scale.
Mendel Skulski 33:50
Yikes. Okay, so Galliano is already in overshoot, before we even get to the island, just from the services of the state.
Wilson Henry 33:59
Yeah.
Mendel Skulski 34:00
That's not exactly something local communities have any control over though. And it's like 40% of Galliano's whole footprint.
Wilson Henry 34:09
Yeah, that definitely falls into the 'big systems change' bucket. But if you look at it in another way, there are almost two thirds that can be changed just by the way people live their lives. And that brings me to another famous use of the word footprint.
Wilson Henry 34:24
So, Mendel...
Mendel Skulski 34:25
Wil.
Wilson Henry 34:26
What do you think of when you hear the words "carbon footprint"?
Mendel Skulski 34:29
I think it's a good rhetorical device to make us feel individually responsible for things that are systemic.
Wilson Henry 34:39
Do you know where that term comes from?
Mendel Skulski 34:41
I don't, actually. Which... which came first the ecological footprint or the carbon footprint?
Wilson Henry 34:46
The ecological footprint came first in 1992. William Rees intended it as a way of looking at whole communities, and includes carbon as I mentioned. The personal carbon footprint was invented in 2005 by none other than British Petroleum.
Mendel Skulski 35:04
BP?
Wilson Henry 35:05
Yeah.
Mendel Skulski 35:05
Biggest marine oil spill in the history of the world BP?
Wilson Henry 35:10
Yeah, that was Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.
Mendel Skulski 35:14
Yeah, well, that tracks.
Wilson Henry 35:17
But just a few years earlier, they had coined this term carbon footprint as a part of a public relations campaign, which, like you were saying before, puts the responsibility to reduce carbon waste on the individual and masks the responsibility of this large oil company. While making it seem like they care about this kind of thing, right?
Mendel Skulski 35:34
Yeah. We made it measurable. And we made it your problem.
Wilson Henry 35:39
Exactly. So you can use footprint measurements in lots of different ways: you can use them to feel individual guilt, blame or shame — you know, like when billionaires use their private jets to commute across town. But they're just as useful, I think, in showing things that people could do collectively. It really just depends on the framing. So let's get back to Galliano and see what can affect the biggest change.
Adam Huggins 36:04
It's stuff like our transportation, transportation is by far and away the biggest chunk of the community level footprint, right? The footprint minus the government services,
Wilson Henry 36:12
Just looking at the 2.6 Earth's in that community level footprint, transportation accounts for 40% of it — almost half.
Mendel Skulski 36:21
Okay, so people drive, people fly, and people use the ferry, right? Which should be the priority?
Wilson Henry 36:28
It's actually a pretty even split. Each of those counts for about 1/3 of the transportation footprint.
Adam Huggins 36:33
And there's nuance in there, too. We found that Galiano islanders drive a lot less than people from the surrounding urban communities, but we're ferry dependent. And so the ferries add just a huge chunk on there. So of course, electrifying the ferries would be a huge deal.
Wilson Henry 36:48
And interestingly, while they drive less, Galiano folks are flying almost twice as much as the BC average.
Mendel Skulski 36:55
Okay, so electrify everything and fly a lot less. Easy.
Wilson Henry 37:00
[Laughs] Yes, everyone should definitely do that. With the climate crisis as urgent as it is, anytime you can replace fossil fuels with electricity, it's a good thing.
Adam Huggins 37:10
If people are weighing whether they should electrify their heating, if they're on fossil fuels, versus whether they should install solar panels. Well, if you can afford to do both, great. But if you can only afford to do one, electrify your heating first, right? We worry about the electrification first, and then the source of that renewable energy second,
Wilson Henry 37:27
But this is also a great example of the limits of an ecological footprint analysis. Here's Michelle Thompson again.
37:33
How we get our electricity here in BC is, from an ecological footprint perspective (I'm going to do air quotes) "cleaner" than if we were to live in Alberta, because it's a lot more heavy on on fossil fuel usage for things like electric heating, and all that type of stuff. But what it doesn't account for is the damage that dams do in those communities. The disruption of those areas, species that it affects is not measured within this.
Wilson Henry 38:00
Dams and hydropower are low carbon, so they look great on ecological footprint, but they have lots of other consequences.
Mendel Skulski 38:07
Can I plug our two-part series on dams from season one?
Wilson Henry 38:11
Are those the ones where you pretended to be fish?
Mendel Skulski 38:14
[Laughs] Those are episodes 9 and 10. But yeah, dams are bad for salmon. They're bad for estuaries. They're bad for rivers, in general.
Wilson Henry 38:25
Totally. So these numbers can tell us something's important things, but they can't tell us everything. Another big limitation of the ecological footprint is how it considers drinking water. This footprint calculation only counts the infrastructure, the building materials and like the literal area used up.
Adam Huggins 38:42
But for a small rural community where people have individual wells on individual properties, the materials involved in that are are not very significant. And so it looks like we have no footprint for our water. But we are using a lot of water as a community on an island that is quite droughty. So we have this conundrum where you know, the ecological footprint says you should densify your community because you're taking up too much space per person. And on the other hand, we have a lot of communities here where they're already using too much water. And you know, thankfully, there are technologies such as rainwater harvesting, that can help address that. But you know, there are other considerations that the ecological footprint is blind to that we have to make as a community.
Wilson Henry 39:29
Every Island is unique after all. So how can you take this kind of rigid framework and make it right for where you live?
Mendel Skulski 39:37
I have no idea.
Wilson Henry 39:39
By doing what Beate Ratter calls an ecological fingerprint.
Mendel Skulski 39:43
Nice. How do you measure a fingerprint?
Beate Ratter 39:46
You do not measure. You describe.
Wilson Henry 39:50
An ecological fingerprint is exactly what it sounds like. It's the identity of that place. The story, the attitudes and values. And unlike the footprint, there isn't a recipe.
Adam Huggins 40:03
There was really no roadmap for it. But we decided that it would be a combination of, of course, surveys of the community — asking questions, basic questions — but also interviewing old timers, elders, indigenous people who've been around a really long time and can remember a lot of the changes that have occurred here. We interviewed people who remember the very first electrification events on the island before there was any public utility or anything like that, you know, somebody bought a generator that was too large for their own needs, and said to their neighbors, "Well, I'll sell you some power. Let's string up some lines." And they would just go out, and they built a utility that way. This is back when they were heating the one room schoolhouse with oil drums. We found people who can remember much farther back than that,
Wilson Henry 40:49
That interview with Levi Wilson from the top — It's just one of 23 different interviews that capture the fingerprint of the island. And unsurprisingly, the story of Galiano depends on who you ask. Like anywhere. It's varied and complex, but one event stands out in defining the shape of the island as it is today.
Mendel Skulski 41:09
What happened?
Wilson Henry 41:10
Well, to make a really, really long story short, in the 1970s, this massive forestry company, Macmillan Bloedel
Mendel Skulski 41:18
Like, Bloedel conservatory? Where Adam and I visited that stinky flower.
Wilson Henry 41:23
The very same. At that time, MacMillan Bloedel. Literally owned more than half of the land base of Galiano Island.
Mendel Skulski 41:30
Half!?
Wilson Henry 41:31
Yeah. And they had a lot of goodwill from the community. Not only were there jobs in this regional forestry economy, the company was also bankrolling all sorts of local resources, like the fire department.
Mendel Skulski 41:42
And kind of like the Conservatory in Vancouver.
Wilson Henry 41:45
Yeah, you could say that. But then in the late 70s, they decided to liquidate all their forestry holdings on the island,
Mendel Skulski 41:54
Liquidate?
Wilson Henry 41:55
As in harvest all at once — clear cut.
Mendel Skulski 41:58
Oh, how did that go down?
Wilson Henry 42:01
Not great. But for a few different reasons. Environmentalists were obviously not happy about it. But more significantly, there was backlash from folks who simply thought that clear cutting was bad long term timber management. It wasn't that they were against forestry. Not at all. They just didn't want the industry to boom and then inevitably bust. So the community really soured on MacMillan Bloedel. There was an attempt to come to a compromise, allowing logging to proceed without resorting to clear cuts, but it didn't pan out. Huge tracts of the island were logged.
Wilson Henry 42:39
Now keep in mind that these forests, although they had been owned by Macmillan Bloedel, they were effectively public spaces. Lots of people would make use of them to harvest firewood or nettles or mushrooms. But after the forests were cleared, the land was sold for private development, and public access was a thing of the past.
Mendel Skulski 42:58
That sounds heartbreaking.
Wilson Henry 43:01
Yeah, for many people it was. It turned out that MacMillan Bloedel had been planning to develop their holdings into a Whistler Blackcomb-style resort on Galiano, which would be like a big deal and kind of adding insult to injury.
Mendel Skulski 43:15
No kidding.
Wilson Henry 43:17
But the islanders got organized, they protected some of the most valuable areas, and passed local bylaws to block the development. It got really ugly. There was even a SLAPP lawsuit that went all the way to the Supreme Court of BC. But it worked.
Mendel Skulski 43:32
Right, yeah, I don't see a huge Blackcomb resort anywhere around here.
Wilson Henry 43:37
No. So all that was left for MacMillan Bloedel to do was sell their land and leave. But here's where things get complicated: when they sold, they did so with the explicit pretense that the land could be developed by the new owners.
Mendel Skulski 43:52
Oh, so the people who bought the land were stuck because of those new bylaws.
Wilson Henry 43:58
Exactly. And so for a long time, the island community was pretty much split along those lines. You had folks who were frustrated that they couldn't do what they wanted with the land they bought, folks who were gun-shy about any kind of development whatsoever, plus everyone who was displaced by the rapidly shifting resource economy when forestry flamed out. This deadlock is a big part of the reason why Galiano is as spread out and rural as it is today. Which, as we know now, has a major impact on its literal footprint: the amount of land that each resident takes up.
Mendel Skulski 44:36
So that's the fingerprint of Galiano.
Wilson Henry 44:39
That's a small but significant part of it. And it will definitely inform what kinds of footprint reducing strategies might work best here, because this was not only a formative moment, politically, but it also marked a real shift in the islanders way of life.
Adam Huggins 44:55
The people who've lived here — until very recently, but extending back to time immemorial — they fished for sustenance and for trade. They hunted deer and other species, including grouse and black ducks. And they relied on the forest: the resources that were in the forest, and in more recent times for timber. Right? It's really fishing, hunting and forestry of various kinds that have been the mainstays of Galiano Island.
Wilson Henry 45:25
Some people do still participate in those activities in a small way, but they're no longer the lifeblood of Galiano as they had been for millennia. Instead, like so many of the Gulf Islands, the economy has become much more centered on tourism.
Mendel Skulski 45:39
Oh, interesting. You're... you're basically saying that this whole forestry conflict with MacMillan Bloedel, and the threat of development. This was sort of the moment that galvanized people away from relying on what the island provides. There's all this local biocapacity, but no one is using it anymore.
Wilson Henry 45:59
Yeah, well, it is being used. Most of Galiano island's biocapacity is currently engaged in sequestering all the greenhouse gases that we produce as a species. But it is possible to preserve all that carbon storage and still rely more directly on the islands ecosystems. And one of the key recommendations of the footprint analysis is exactly that. The relocalization of the economy.
Beate Ratter 46:24
Two key words: circular economy, and regional economy. So think of what you can produce locally, and steer the economy locally, as well on the island, yeah? If you have to import timber to do construction, on a place where you have timber production possibilities, this is ridiculous. It's absolutely not at all about clear cutting. It's the sustainable management of a forest which is ecologically sound, and where you have different age groups of trees, and you harvest the timber you need for the construction site. And you need some Mother trees — some old old trees, so it's not that beyond a certain age it's got to be cut. No, it's the management of a diversified forest.
Wilson Henry 47:17
So we definitely should electrify the ferries, and electrify our homes and our cars. But I don't think we should ignore the fact that there is a real precedent for a very different kind of sustainable transportation.
Adam Huggins 47:32
It's called the canoe. And there is an incredible, rich culture of canoes in this region, with Coast Salish and Hul'qumi'num speaking peoples. That is a beautiful example of what today we would call circular economy. Right, that trees are stewarded for generations until they are large enough to create the kinds of large canoes that are needed for that kind of transportation to be viable. And then those canoes have their life and then eventually they return to the ecosystem, right? It's a beautiful example of circular economy, and extremely efficient in terms of transportation. There's no emissions associated with that. And then you transform the waterways from what they are currently for most of us — which is a barrier between islands that prevents us from getting to visit our neighbors over on the island next door — into the actual channels of transportation.
Wilson Henry 48:20
I'm not suggesting that this is a solution for tomorrow. Our civic infrastructure simply isn't designed around canoe travel, and the last monumental cedars were logged off the island decades ago. But look around you: look at the middens; look at the Camas meadows; at these manufactured landscapes; at the work of generation after generation, not just protecting, but shaping and giving life to the land and sea. Let it remind you that we don't have to do everything. We just have to do our part.
Wilson Henry 49:04
So, circling back to the question we started this episode off with: what can we learn from the footprint and the fingerprint of an island? Well, in a way, Island communities like this one are amazing illustrations of the paradox of living on Earth circa 2022. Nearly every aspect of life on and off islands is dependent on these complex interconnected global supply chains and relationships. And at the same time, we're pretty isolated from one another — each living in our own bubbles.
Wilson Henry 49:40
If an island is a state of mind, then maybe those of us who live on the mainland should try it on once in a while — to remind us that no one else is going to do the hard work for us if we want to live more sustainably. But it's also on us to discover how those changes can make our lives better, in ways that at first might be hard to imagine. We just have to look around at our community at its opportunities and challenges and get to work.
Wilson Henry 50:09
If you do happen to live on Galiano, or somewhere like it, you might want to consider the reverse: that no Island is an island unto itself. Rather than sitting in isolation and going it alone, we have to reforge those connections; to stop defining ourselves as an island, but instead as a sea.
Mendel Skulski 50:35
Thank you, Wil.
Wilson Henry 50:49
Future Ecologies is an independent production. And although Adam is both part of this podcast and the Galiano Conservancy Association, this episode was not funded by the GCA or any of the grants for the footprint study.
Mendel Skulski 51:03
So if you liked it, please support us. This podcast is possible because of our community on Patreon. Join us at futureecologies.net/patrons or hit the link in the show notes, where you'll also find a link to the entire footprint and fingerprint analysis for Galiano Island — all 211 pages of it. Or, if you prefer, condensed into an emoji-laden, interactive map.
Wilson Henry 51:31
This episode was produced by myself, Wil Henry
Mendel Skulski 51:34
And me, Mendel Skulski. Wil was our intern for this episode, and now that they've graduated from J school, they're looking for a real job. They were an absolute pleasure to work with, so please, hire them.
Wilson Henry 51:49
In this episode, you heard the voices of Levi Wilson, Adam Huggins, Michelle Thompson, William Rees and Beate Ratter.
Mendel Skulski 51:57
And music by Thunberg, SHIITAKE, Modern Biology, Velems, and Sunfish Moon Light.
Wilson Henry 52:08
We also want to thank Terra Tailleur,
Mendel Skulski 52:10
Sleight of Hand Sound,
Wilson Henry 52:11
Nicholas Friedman,
Wilson Henry 52:12
The Sitka Foundation,
Wilson Henry 52:14
and the Galiano Conservancy Association.
Adam Huggins 52:16
And if I may, I'd like to thank the Vancouver Foundation, Vancity, the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions, the Global Footprint Network, the BCIT Centre for Ecocities, CHRM Consulting, all of our partner organizations on and off Galiano Island, and the many, many people who shared information with us, filled out our surveys, sat down for interviews, and provided feedback. Thank you.
Mendel Skulski 52:41
As usual, we have a ton of citations. You can find those and lots more on our website: futureecologies.net
Mendel Skulski 52:53
That's it for this one.
Wilson Henry 52:54
Thanks for listening