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This is not a story of Tibet

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and it's not a story of the Amazon.

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I won't be taking you to the high Arctic,

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the life of the Inuit, or to the searing sands of the Sahara.

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This is actually a story of my own backyard.

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It's a land known to the Tahltan people

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and all the First Nations of British Columbia

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as the Sacred Headwaters,

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the source of the three great salmon rivers of home,

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the Skeena, the Stikine and the Nass.

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It's a valley where, in a long day, perhaps, too,

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you can follow the tracks of grizzly and wolf

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and drink from the very sources of water

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that gave rise and cradled the great civilizations

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of the Northwest Coast.

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It's such a beautiful place. It's the most stunningly wild place I've ever been.

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It's the sort of place that we, as Canadians,

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could throw England, and they'd never find it.

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John Muir, in 1879, went up just the lower third of the Stikine,

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and he was so enraptured he called it

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a Yosemite 150 miles long.

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He came back to California

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and named his dog after that river of enchantment.

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In the Lower 48, the farthest you can get away

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from a maintained road is 20 miles.

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In the Northwest Quadrant of British Columbia,

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an area of land the size of Oregon, there's one road,

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a narrow ribbon of asphalt that slips up the side

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of the Coast Mountains to the Yukon.

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I followed that road in the early 1970s,

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soon after it was built, to take a job as the first park ranger

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in Spatsizi wilderness.

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My job description was deliciously vague:

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wilderness assessment and public relations.

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In two four-month seasons I saw not a dozen people.

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There was no one to relate publicly to.

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But in the course of these wanderings,

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I came upon an old shaman's grave

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that led to an encounter with a remarkable man:

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Alex Jack, an Gitxsan elder and chief who had lived

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as a trapper and a hunter in that country for all of his life.

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And over the course of 30 years, I recorded traditional tales

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from Alex, mostly mythological accounts of Wy-ghet,

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the trickster transformer of Gitxsan lore

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who, in his folly, taught the people how to live on the land.

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And just before Alex died at the age of 96,

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he gave me a gift.

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It was a tool carved from caribou bone

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by his grandfather in 1910,

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and it turned out to be a specialized implement

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used by a trapper to skin out the eyelids of wolves.

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It was only when Alex passed away that I realized that

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the eyelids, in some sense, were my own,

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and having done so much to allow me to learn to see,

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Alex in his own way was saying goodbye.

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Well, isolation has been the great saving grace

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of this remarkable place, but today isolation could be its doom.

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You've heard so much about the developments of the tar sands,

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the controversy about the Keystone and the Enbridge pipelines,

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but these are just elements of a tsunami

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of industrial development that is sweeping across

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all of the wild country of northern Canada.

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In Tahltan territory alone, there are 41 major industrial proposals,

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some with great promise, some of great concern.

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On Todagin Mountain,

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revered by the Tahltan people as a wildlife sanctuary in the sky,

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home to the largest population of stone sheep on the planet,

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Imperial Metals --

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but the 75th-biggest mining company in all of Canada --

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has secured permits to establish an open-pit

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copper and gold mine which will process

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30,000 tons of rock a day for 30 years,

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generating hundreds of millions of tons of toxic waste

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that, by the project's design, will simply be dumped

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into the lakes of the Sacred Headwaters.

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At the Headwaters itself,

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Shell Canada has plans to extract methane gas

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from coal seams that underly a million acres,

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fracking the coal with hundreds of millions of gallons

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of toxic chemicals,

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establishing perhaps as many as 6,000 wellheads,

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and eventually a network of roads and pipelines

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and flaring wellheads, all to generate methane gas

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that most likely will go east

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to fuel the expansion of the tar sands.

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For over a decade, the Tahltan people,

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both clans, Wolf and Crow,

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have resisted this assault on their homeland.

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Men, women and children of all ages,

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elders in wheelchairs, have blockaded

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the only road access to the interior.

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For them, the Headwaters is a kitchen.

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It's a sanctuary. It's a burial ground of their ancestors.

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And those who really own it

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are the generations as yet unborn.

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The Tahltan have been able,

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with the support of all Canadians who live downstream,

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all local politicians, to resist this assault on their homeland,

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but now everything hangs in the balance.

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Decisions that will be made this year will literally determine

0:05:14.923,0:05:17.779
the fate of this country.

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The Tahltan have called for the creation

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of a tribal heritage reserve which will set aside

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the largest protected area in British Columbia.

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Our goal is not only to help them do that

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but to encourage our friends, the good people at Shell,

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not only to withdraw from the Sacred Headwaters,

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but to move forward with us and join us

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as we do the remarkable, the extraordinary:

0:05:45.893,0:05:50.244
set aside a protected area that will be for all time

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not simply the Sacred Headwaters of the Tahltan people

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but the sacred headwaters of all people in the world.

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The Tahltan need your help. We need your help.

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And if any of you would like to join us on this great adventure,

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please come and see me later today.

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Thank you very much.

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(Applause)