Land's End is a photographic project that explores the inherent potential of  BC's coastal communities for the long-term sustainability. A series of portraits of people who live in these villages and towns forms part of this work in progress, and a selection of these images was exhibited in Gallery WM in Amsterdam in December 2000.

In February 1999, the Globe and Mail reported that "the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans withheld a major study of economically devastated West Coast fishing communities and then released a sanitized version, omitting criticism contained in the original report."

During the summer of 1999 and then 2000, I spent several months in some of the communities mentioned in the Department of Fisheries study. I was working on two photo-stories for the Vancouver Sun, and I was photographing fisherman for the Mitchener Foundation project. At this time I met and photographed Jim, a salvage logger in Quatsino Sound, Gordon Komoto, a third generation Canadian fisherman of Japanese heritage in Ucluelet and Flora Rufus, a Kwakiutl of Alert Bay.

When I photographed Rick Telford, a former logger and now somewhat reluctant tourist guide, we climbed Radar Hill overlooking Clayoquot Sound and looked down at one of the finest old growth forests on the planet. "No matter the protests. This forest will be eventually logged, one way or the other," Rick said, "The wood down there is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. If we'd like to get the same economic value from tourism we would need to charge a hundred dollars for a post card."

A few days later, I photographed Flora Rufus in her mother's ceremonial dress among time-weathered totems carved by her nephew Mungo Martin. The Alert Bay burial ground, where we took the pictures, was the perfect place to reflect on the Kwakiutl’s relation to the land and their concept of the ownership of the land and its resources.

As Lewis Hyde wrote in his book The Gift: "The American Indian tribes that have become famous for the potlatch—the Kwakiutl, Tlingit, Haida, and others—once occupied the Pacific coast of North America from Cape Mendocino in California to Prince William Sound in Alaska. All of these tribes depended upon the ocean to provide their primary sustenance. Like the Maori or the Jews of the Old Testament, the North Pacific tribes developed a relationship to the natural abundance of their environment based upon a cycle of gifts.

It was the Indian belief that all animals lived as they themselves lived—in tribes—and that the salmon, in particular, dwelt in a huge lodge beneath the sea. According to this mythology, the salmon go about in human form while they are at home in their lodge, but once a year they change their bodies into fish bodies, dress themselves in robes of salmon skin, swim to the mouths of the rivers, and voluntarily sacrifice themselves that their land brothers may have food for the winter.” 

The ethos of salmon peoples and myths reflecting their values defined the relationship between humans and nature on the BC coast since time immemorial. In the 19th century a transition took place, and all those things that had been considered gifts became commodities.

In 1883, the new value system was already changing the fisheries. In that year, as predicted, the sockeye runs were outstanding. "Day after day, anxious crowds gathered on the banks of the Fraser estuary to watch boatloads of unprocessed salmon being chucked overboard after the canneries had reached their physical limits. Much fish was wasted in the canning process, too. There was time to can only the thickest part of the fish; the rest of the carcass joined the entrails and the floating, rotting mass of rejected salmon already in the river." [Dianne Newell, Tangled Webs of History]

Bill Proctor, the old fisherman and logger,  described with a degree of irony some of the measures taken in more recent times to protect the fish: "From the 1930s into the early ‘60s, the Department of Fisheries placed a bounty on all predators, to encourage people to exterminate them. They considered this an effective conservation measure for fish and deer. Fisheries even rigged a boat with a big knife on the bow, to cut in half every shark they encountered. Basking sharks fell prey easily to this vessel, as they lay on the surface. Unfortunately, their deaths did nothing to increase fish stocks because basking sharks eat plankton. Soon the huge creatures disappeared, and they have never returned. Another Fisheries vessel, Babine Post, had a machine gun mounted on the bow to strafe seals and sea lions."

In his book, Heart of the Raincoast, Bill brings up dozens of first hand observations similar to the above.

"What has happened?" David Suzuki asks in the foreword to The Plundered Seas. "At the heart of the global eco-crisis of which the ocean fisheries are a part is a profound change in the way we perceive the world." He goes on explaining that, "Parts of nature become "commodities" or "resources" that could be exploited to the maximum.”