Crosscut: Why should people pay attention to mountain caribou and the Caribou Rainforest?

Moskowitz: I had two visions for this book. One was to highlight a truly magnificent and often overlooked ecosystem. The Caribou Rainforest is a globally unique ecosystem that people have not really attended to. And then the second piece is highlighting the rainforest as a conservation parable: It is such an interesting case study of the challenges and opportunities we face, as far as conservation and social justice in the 21st century.

Your book is about caribou, but ultimately about the rainforest and ecosystems like it. Of all the animals in the rainforest, why center the story on caribou?

So the focus on caribou is two-fold. One is that, that was just the pattern that's been laid out before me. So much of the conservation efforts in the region have hung on caribou habitat conservation. So they’re like the spotted owl of this old-growth forest. So already, just pragmatically, they are that species. But on more of a storytelling note, it was actually caribou that got me interested in the story [of the rainforest] to begin with.

A few years ago, I had a month to kill, because I had an expedition cancel. And I was like, well, I'm gonna spend a month looking for mountain caribou. I had written about them in my two previous books, but had never actually seen or photographed one. So I was like, oh, I'm gonna go up to this place and go look for mountain caribou and get some photos of them and maybe make for an interesting photo essay.

And so they were kind of the access point for me to this story.

But also, I think they're a good choice because they're charismatic. They're something that draws attention. They're culturally very relevant. And one of the things that really stood out to me is listening to the indigenous people. Multiple different indigenous groups describe how caribou were a source of safety for their traditional economy. Like, "If times were hard, we knew we could go to the mountains and get caribou and feed ourselves. So the caribou took care of us." And then they see this flip, where it's like, "Wow, now we need to take care of the caribou." So the caribou were the protectors of the people, and now the people need a reciprocal relationship. Now the people need to care for these animals. So this goes hand in hand.

What was the spark that turned that thought into a book?

When I went and spent a month up [in the rainforest], I realized, a) they're super hard to find. And b), we're absolutely in the middle of liquidating this amazing ecosystem. Literally, I drive up the road to go into prime caribou habitat, and I would see their habitat coming down the road on logging trucks.

And I was like, wait a second, this is a protected species’ habitat. This is the 21st century, and we're logging old-growth forests, which is kind of mind boggling to begin with.

Plus, there's treaty obligations that we have to indigenous peoples, and some land hasn't been officially ceded from the indigenous people to the province of British Columbia, and it's like, the layers of irony just keep getting added to the story.

So after a month up there, I was like, there's a tragedy unfolding here on some level. There's no way I can't tell this story, and I need to spend more time kind of fleshing this out. Because nobody else is paying attention to the fact that we're turning old growth trees into toilet paper in the 21st century. So it's like, I can't turn my back on this story.

What’s struck you about the ways you’ve heard people talk about the relocation?

People just want to talk about caribou. There are stories about, "Oh, there's six animals left. What does this mean?" Or how the caribou are going to be removed, so it's like the end of the species. That's just the entry point into the real story here, the story that really matters to us, to humans.

Those remaining animals, they're important and intrinsically valuable for their own sake and they represent a point of cultural connection for the indigenous people of that place, and have just immeasurable value in that way and for society at large, but that is just the tip of the iceberg and it's a conversation that begins and ends with the fate of a few caribou in a remote part of the Northwest.

That we're logging old growth forests in endangered species habitat in the 21st century is even more mind-boggling.

Many reports are discussing the impact of carnivore predation on caribou as the issue, but you’ve written extensively about how maybe there are more wolves around to predate because of things like logging, and everything coming back to resource extraction.

So this comes down to again an issue of accounting. The fact is that wolves and black bears and mountain lions kill caribou; in the short term, with a small population of caribou, predation pressure might do them in. But if you end your story there, you're not telling the real story: The presence of those predators and the vulnerability of the caribou to those predators comes back to people and human choices and human-modified landscapes.

Whenever I talk about predation and the effects of predation on caribou, I cannot talk about that without putting it in the context of habitat changes, and refuge habitat destruction. And if you don't include that context, you are not telling a factually correct story, in my opinion.

Are there other narratives about the relocation that have concerned you?

Yes, the idea that we shouldn't be doing any predator control. [Ed. note: Canadian wildlife officials have destroyed 20 wolves since 2014 in an effort to decrease predation.] A lot of conservation groups have been like, "You need to stop. There's no value in killing wolves and we shouldn't be doing that. Protecting caribou is just an excuse for people wanting to kill predators, which we've been doing for a long, long time." And that also is an incorrect narrative because the reality of it is, even if we did do everything possible to restore these landscapes, it's going to be a century before the intact forest comes back. And the caribou won't be here in a century if we don't do some active management between now and then.

Which comes back to this narrative of: "Take our hands off of it. Don't touch it." It's like we crossed that bridge a long time ago and we can't just take our hands off the wheel now. The story does not do well with simplified explanations. You come up with stories that sound good, but they're not right.

There's a 20th century idea of conservation, that you could preserve a wilderness, that you can set aside a place that would just be nature, and let nature take its course. We now understand ecosystems as being connected on a planetary level, and that humans have impacted every place on the planet. So, the answer to this problem is not just make another park, right? You can't protect this place by putting a wall around it.



