Great Bear Rainforest

But we actually spent a lot of time and we were working on a big film about wolves that took us almost to the full time I was with him.

So from start to finish, we were filming in both BC, both in the Great Bear Rainforest and in the Rockies.

So you didn't really have any like set plans or like you wanted to be in production or film or anything.

You just, it was sort of through opportunities, people you met, contacts, you kind of got off in this journey going into like the film industry.

Greenpeace has been involved in any number of campaigns over the years, starting with Wales and sea lions and the baby sea lions or seals coats that were being shipped into the United States.

They, along with Rainforest Action Network, went after Home Depot to try and save the Great Bear Rainforest in British Columbia successfully.

And Forest Ethics, also along with Dogwood Alliance and a number of other groups, went after Victoria's Secret, Staples, Office Depot to try to protect the forests of Canada, the last remaining intact Boreal force of Canada.

You had a number of groups going after Dell and Apple and Hewlett Packard, including Greenpeace in that case.

Anything over that, you have to buy offsets.

So you have to go and either pay somebody $15 a ton for, say, a forest conservation project, like the Darkwoods Project in BC, which is run by the Nature Conservancy, or like the Great Bear Rainforest.

We all thought that we were putting money into a park to save a rare bear.

Well, they actually are now buying and selling carbon credits on this park.

Which is exactly what we are dissecting today.

We are exploring the interconnected and just frankly brutal but breathtaking ecosystems of Katmai National Park and British Columbia's Great Bear Rainforest.

Mm-hmm.

And we're going to be looking at this world through the lens of three majestic bears that completely dominate this territory.

Because if we move south from the freezing northern peaks to the dense islands of British Columbia, we find a bear that isn't clinging to the ice but has completely hacked the lighting of the rainforest.

Yes.

So we are shifting our focus from the geological isolation of the Alaskan peaks to the dense genetic isolation of the Great Bear Rainforest, specifically an area known as Princess Royal Island

IslandYeah.

I don't know, is this near...

Great Bear Rainforest.

Is that where they have the fat bear contest every year? I don't think this is near anything, Andrew.

This is just Smithers British Columbia is smack dab in the middle of British Columbia.

It's a big part of our trips as well, so I love having coffee on our expeditions.

And, and I've always worked with roasters, and that sort of goes back to a, a company back in Squamish when Jen and I were living there called Galileo Coffee, and, um, they had actually done a roast to help support our Stand Up for Great Bear initiative, which was sort of trying to bring awareness and protection to the Great Bear Rainforest through a paddle journey that I did back in 2010.

You know, and since that time, we've tried to raise funds to give back to the Great Bear and, and in a small way, part of it was through coffee sales that was done by Galileo Coffee there in Britannia.

And so I'd always worked with coffee roasters.

The, the, that's a little bit of a loss of control, and it's no reflection on them at all.

But that's where that conflict came.

And then I, I drove out west and, and took a one-year guiding program, and within that year I was hired up in the Great Bear Rainforest, and that path just started to lay out for me and everything just started to, to line up.

Everything f- almost for the, maybe for the first time, maybe not the first time in my life, but close to the first time in my life I felt everything was lining up the way it should because I had control on the decision.