Mike was born in Toronto but lived in Fredericton until he was 8, when his family relocated to Chilliwack, BC. “I am very much a part of what one would call a ‘sports family,’” he says. “All of us kids grew up playing multiple sports: hockey, baseball, soccer, football, and ultimate frisbee, but the one sport that dominated the family was basketball. Our parents supported all three of us through every sport we tried, which, of course, made all the difference in the world.”

Mike works for Electronic Arts in Vancouver, building a  social media presence for one of its largest franchises, Need for Speed. He’s got a “need for speed” of his own, too. After graduating from UVIC, he began to pick up running with a friend. “On a whim, we trained for the Vancouver Sun Run and ended up really liking it, so we decided to train for another 10km race,” he says. “Soon we graduated to half marathons, and since then I’ve been trying to continually lower my personal best time.”

(c) Michael Underell

He and his girlfriend dropped by last year’s Vancouver Triathlon on Second Beach, and as they watched participants cross the finish line, Mike thought, “Man, I want to do that!”

His training efforts were hampered by an injured knee, but after two months of physiotherapy he is now back to training at almost regular levels. “I’ll be honest – it’s been tough,” he says. “Regardless, I’m optimist about the race.” This year, he is just focused on finishing a pain-free race, and will try for a time goal next year.

Throughout the experience, his love of nature has kept him inspired. “About the same time I decided to do a triathlon, I was also mulling over the idea of how I could do better in terms of ‘giving back,’” he says. “When I came to the triathlon’s website I saw that WWF-Canada was the foundation participants could raise funds for. Soon after that, I was out on the seawall running and it was a beautiful day. The sun was out and it was reflecting off of the water. Other people were also enjoying the outdoors. I thought to myself, ‘What a shame it would be if this were all lost.’ I realized that what made my small part of the world so great was its outdoors.”

“There are many other places like this in the world and they should be preserved. To me, it seemed fitting to raise funds, through triathlon, for your terrific organization because the triathlon more or less relies on the outdoors. Without clean water we’d have no swim portion. Without breathable air we’d be hard-pressed to climb to Prospect Point four times,” he says with a smile. “I know you do so much more than that regarding global warming and endangered species, but it was for those reasons I decided to try and raise funds for WWF-Canada.”

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It’s hard to believe that over three years have passed since I embarked on the Students on Ice Arctic expedition. I am truly grateful to have had the opportunity to meet so many fabulous people, experience the majestic power of Canada’s “Great White North,” and witness the profound effects that human activity is having on this vulnerable part of the world. At the time, I was interning with Discovery Channel Canada and reporting on the students’ experiences on the trip. It wasn’t long after I stepped foot on that ship, however, I realized that I too had much to learn.

Out on the zodiac (c) Erinn Piller/WWF-Canada

Thanks to my experience, I learned about the Arctic’s unique flora and the vulnerability of its permafrost due to increasing global temperatures, I explored an old whaling station and learned about the significant role this industry played in shaping Canada’s history, and I came face to face with a magnificent polar bear and her cub feeding on a walrus.

Polar bear cub after feeding (c) Erinn Piller/WWF-Canada

One of the researchers on the journey was Steven Price, WWF-Canada’s Conservation Director. It was through my discussions with Steven that I started to learn more about the organization’s work in the Arctic and how dedicated it was to helping find a solution to climate change. Not long after returning to Toronto, a position opened up at WWF and I was lucky enough to be given the opportunity to join the WWF family.

I have now dedicated my career to helping demonstrate the urgent necessity for action on climate change and to helping give Canadians a voice on this important issue. If I ever lose sight of my direction, I think back to the Great White North, its majestic beauty, and the need to protect it for the wildlife that depend on it for survival, the communities that call it home, and for future generations to enjoy.

Iceberg (c) Erinn Piller/WWF-Canada

Check out some videos from our expedition (on Discovery Channel’s website):

A polar bear and her cub feeding on a walrus

Visiting a Northern village

Walrus Island

Arctic Murres

Erinn is currently spending a year with the WWF team in New Zealand. Read her blog posts about her adventure here.

Meet John Valliant and our wildlife trade expert Ernie Cooper today at Bay/Bloor Indigo in Toronto, 7 p.m.

Powell’s has been kind enough to hand me the mike this week. The occasion for this indulgence is The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival, which came out a few days ago. It’s a relief, really, because the suspense has been killing me. This was a three-and-a-half year trip: from the realization in Banff, Alberta, that, holy cow, this story is completely out of hand, I have to write it, to Beijing, Vladivostok, and into Primorye, the Siberian tiger’s last stronghold. And, finally, to this moment: all of us here together, packed into this little blog.

The Tiger is set in Russia, in the dead of winter, during the chaotic aftermath of perestroika. Near Russia’s far eastern border with China, a Siberian tiger is hunting, and a man is hunting, too. The man is a poacher, desperately poor, and he shoots the tiger and wounds it. The injured tiger remembers this man, follows him home, trashes his stuff, and kills his dogs. Then it lies down by the poacher’s door and waits. But that is only the beginning; things get weirder and scarier from there. As the inspector who was sent in to investigate this case said to me, “There are many people who don’t believe this actually happened. They think it’s some phantasm of my imagination. But it was real. There are the facts.”

A lot of people have asked me how I came across this story, and it was thanks to the Banff Mountain Festival where I saw a documentary called Conflict Tiger. I didn’t know much about the film going in — something about poachers and Siberian tigers — but I was hooked from the opening shot: a wide-angle panorama of snowbound forest paired with this shrill, skirling soundtrack. About 15 minutes later I felt — and this is precisely what I felt — a bolt of recognition to the forehead: sudden, exhilarating and terrifying all at once. Thematically speaking, I had visited this country before in my first book, The Golden Spruce. But that true story of humans and nature in collision didn’t have a tiger in it. The film lasted an hour, and I was riveted to my chair, squirming as quietly as I could. As soon as I got home, I called the director, Sasha Snow (his real name), and liked him immediately. We work in different media, on different continents, but it was clear that we were tuned to the same frequency. He encouraged me to go to Russia myself. Since then, we have become friends, to the point that he is now making a documentary of The Golden Spruce.

I wanted to know more about the poacher, Markov, who did not survive to be interviewed, but who left family, friends and tantalizing clues, and I wanted to know more about the tiger’s other victims.

I also wanted to know more about the inspector, Yuri Trush, the man charged with solving these reciprocal crimes against nature and who, in so doing, got caught up in them himself.

And I wanted to try to understand this tiger: its strange and spooky sentience, its frightening capacity for absorbing bullets and holding a grudge, and its apparent preference for only the most dangerous adversaries. What drives an animal like that, I wondered, across the years and miles, through Arctic cold?

Finally, I wanted to understand the desperate circumstances that set this serial tragedy in motion. So I flew and drove and rode and walked and pestered and sat and listened and read and wrote until, finally, a couple of years later, I felt confident that I had the goods, and that you would have The Tiger.

For more info, visit: thetigerbook.com

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/JohnVaillant

Twitter: JohnVAILLANT

John Vaillant is also the author of The Golden Spruce. He has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Outside, National Geographic, and Men’s Journal, among others. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, with his wife and children.

It was a beautiful day and the beach was busy.  Throughout the morning, I saw dog walkers, joggers, camp group, scavengers, volleyball players, families and tourists enjoying our waterfront.  I was thrilled to see so many people out on the beach, but dismayed by just how much litter was left behind from their activities.  The beach was covered in bottles, plastic bags, food containers and other debris.  With plenty of garbage and recycling bins available, it’s hard to understand why anyone would just leave their litter in the sand.  The beach-goers we spoke with certainly agreed, and were eager to make a difference by registering for this year’s cleanup, taking place September 18 to 26.

(c) WWF-Canada

You too can show your shoreline some love by signing up today for the Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup, presented by Loblaw Companies Limited, at shorelinecleanup.ca.  Registration closes September 10, so sign up today!

Digby Gut at sunset (c) Stacey McCarthy/WWF-Canada

Once thought to number between 10,000 and 20,000, today there are only 400 North Atlantic right whales left in the world and WWF has been involved at many levels over the past 20 years supporting, funding, or directly working on right whale research and outreach, and working at the political level to ensure that this endangered species is protected.

The biggest threats to whales are entanglements in fishing gear, and being struck by ships. Shipping lanes were moved in the Bay of Fundy in 2003, which reduced the frequency of collisions and in early 2009 fishermen from two lobster fishing areas in southwest Nova Scotia (which jointly represent the largest fishery in Canada) worked to develop Voluntary Standard Practices that would effectively reduce entanglement threats to right whales.  These practices outlined practical steps that every fisherman was encouraged to take when setting their traps and included elements such as setting limits to lengths of ropes used and identifying the best methods to set gear to ensure ropes used are as tight and low as possible. The relationships we have developed with these fishermen have been successful because we are all on the same page – no one wants to see harm come to the whales, and we all can appreciate their beauty and grace, and their home in the ocean.

Now, if you know anything at all about visiting the Maritimes, you will know that it is almost a requirement that you have a “feed” of lobster, so I used my inside connection with a local fisherman to secure 50 pounds of lobster caught in one of the areas using the new Voluntary Standard Practices. The 40 people in our group (including the kids) thoroughly enjoyed these lobsters, and for me, I think they tasted even better because I knew how they were caught and that I was involved in my own small way in their story.

Stacey's daughter Halle with lobster (c) Stacey McCarthy/WWF-Canada

Our work with these lobster fishermen has been a great model for our species conservation work, but despite our best efforts to protect these magnificent creatures, tragedy can still strike. On August 13, a right whale was spotted floating dead in the waters near Digby Gut where I had been vacationing. They were able to bring the whale in to shore and perform a necropsy (an autopsy on a whale) to determine the cause of death but the results haven’t been released yet. There was no fishing gear found on the whale, but whatever the cause, deaths still occur and we have to be even more vigilant because they are never out of danger.

The good news is that 39 babies were born last year – a significant increase over previous years. So we need to continue to protect them from these major threats. Stay tuned for more news and information about these whales, and who knows, maybe you’ll want to be part of the conservation success story too!

Lobster (c) Stacey McCarthy/WWF-Canada

Gisele lives in the Guildwood Village of Toronto’s Scarborough region with her husband and her cat. “Gardening and snapping nature pictures are two of my hobbies, and I maintain a multilingual blog, Guildwood Gardens, which is frequented by numerous people from all over the world,” she says.

“Guildwood Village is nestled along the shore of Lake Ontario, east of Toronto. After I retired, I took an interest in keeping the lakeshore clean and attractive. In 2003 I organized and conducted my first lakeshore clean-up under the auspices of the Vancouver Aquarium, and these activities have continued annually. In 2007 I was awarded the “Site Coordinator Award” by the Vancouver Aquarium for these activities. Each time this cleanup was performed, significant amounts of trash were collected and disposed of. There has been excellent participation by local citizens, students from the local schools and also from the military cadets.

It is fair to say that all citizens, from bird-and nature lovers to the person taking a relaxing walk, can benefit from a clean and pleasing shore line, and should take an interest in helping with the clean-up activities. Last, but not least, it is important to remember the impact clean shorelines have on the world’s ecosystems, including drinking water quality. We are all committed to guard these important resources. We are asking all to join us in September of 2010 to assist.”

Visit shorelinecleanup.ca to join Gisele’s team, or to find a shoreline cleanup near you!

(c) Gisela Bach

Lucy Van Oldenbarneveld of CBC Ottawa hosted a five-person “At Issues” panel this evening. I sat alongside, sharing the seats with Canadian Wildlife Service’s Garry Donaldson, arctic biologist Dr. David Gray, geographer Dr. Peter Harrison and Inuit elder David Serkoak. The issue at hand: Polar bear conservation. The audience: 80 inquisitive high school students.

The crux and unspoken truth of most impacts on the Arctic are that they are the result of activities pursued by people who come from away. They are not as a result of the way of the lives of most people of the land. Climate change in particular is largely the result of a culmination of industrial activities, warming the globe and warming the Arctic more than any other region on the planet.

In that vein, what polar bear conservation boils down to is not really the preservation of the bear in of itself, but rather the greater ecosystem that the King of the Arctic has come to represent.

The sometimes-misleading fact of the matter is that polar bear populations are currently fairly stable. And while hunting, land conservation, oil and gas exploration are all issues to consider, it’s climate change that is presenting the deepest threat of them all. The primary challenge for (polar bears/walrus/narwhal etc.) is that thousands of years of evolution have prepared them for life in the sea ice. Climate change is causing that ice cover to change rapidly, in both extent and thickness, ice that polar bears currently depend on.

If climate change goes unattended, we stand to lose 30 to 70 percent of species on this planet. Whether polar bears end up in that category or not, the threat that the polar bear represents is the potential collapse of ecosystems – the full chain of events, the full support system – and that is where the concern lies.

Based on the precautionary principle, and the projections of the IPCC, we are wandering very closely into a closing window of time that we have to significantly – and substantially – act. Acting substantially to slow the rate of human-caused climate change is the number one action we can take to lessen human impacts on wildlife in the Arctic. By working with Inuit, governments, and other necessary partners, we are moving in a direction that will shift our energy production to being from renewable energy resources.

Seeing seven of the great white polar bears this morning, I kneeled low with my chin on the zodiac – marveling, staring, squinting – watching every graceful move of this near perfect being. A cub diligently followed its mother. Another wandered towards us along the shore, just metres from us, just close enough to meet eyes.

I would render it impossible to do anything but sail away from that gaze with a feeling of duty to do all possible to live in pure compatibility of all that is encompassed by the Arctic. And I know for certain there are at least 80 other people that feel the same way.

(c) WWF

From now until the end of the year, we will meet our ecological demand by depleting resource stocks and accumulating greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

“If you spent your entire annual income in nine months, you would probably be extremely concerned,” said Global Footprint Network President Mathis Wackernagel. “The situation is no less dire when it comes to our ecological budget. Climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation, water and food shortages — these are all clear signs that we can no longer finance our consumption on credit. Nature is foreclosing.”

Learn more: http://www.footprintnetwork.org/earthovershootday

(c) NASA

What is Overshoot?

For most of human history, humanity has been able to live off of nature’s interest — consuming resources and producing carbon dioxide at a rate lower than what the planet was able to regenerate and reabsorb each year.

But approximately three decades ago, we crossed a critical threshold, and the rate of human demand for ecological services began to outpace the rate at which nature could provide them. This gap between demand and supply — known as ecological overshoot — has grown steadily each year. It now takes one year and six months to regenerate the resources that humanity requires in one year.

Addressing Carbon Key to Balancing the Budget

Climate change is perhaps the most prominent sign of our ecological overspending. Our carbon Footprint (as calculated by Global Footprint Network, the amount of land and sea area it would take to absorb all the CO2 we emit) is the biggest part of humanity’s Ecological Footprint, and is by far the fastest-growing. Our carbon Footprint has more than doubled since 1970. During that time, it has increased at a rate more than three-times faster than the next-fastest growing portion of humanity’s Footprint, built-up land. Carbon dioxide emissions now account for over half of human demand on nature. We are now emitting much more carbon dioxide than the natural ecosystems of the planet can absorb; thus it is building up in the atmosphere and contributing to climate change.

How Earth Overshoot Day is Calculated

Every year, Global Footprint Network calculates humanity’s Ecological Footprint – the amount of productive land and sea area required to produce the resources we consume and absorb our waste, including CO2 emissions – and compares that with biocapacity, the ability of ecosystems to regenerate resources. Earth Overshoot Day, a concept devised by U.K.-based new economics foundation, is calculated from 2007 data (the most recent year for which data are available) and projections based on historical rates of growth in population and consumption, as well as the historical link between world GDP and resource demand.

Last year, Earth Overshoot Day was observed on September 25, 2009. This year, overshoot day is estimated to come more than a month earlier in the year. This is not due to a sudden change in human demand, but rather to improvements in the calculation methodology that enable us to more adequately capture the extent of overshoot. (For example, our latest data show the world has less biocapacity available, primarily in the area of grazing land, than previously estimated.)

“We would expect our estimates of overshoot to be, if anything, conservative.” Wackernagel said. “We know we are far from living within the means of one planet. The good news is, much of the technology we have to begin to address this problem is available and it is open source: things like compact urban design, energy-efficient housing, ecological tax reform, removal of resource subsidies, safe and affordable family planning, bicycles, low-meat diets, and life-cycle costing.”

Learn how you can reduce your own ecological footprint through our Living Planet Community.

While climate change is a global issue, it first and foremost impacts the Arctic – and every individual on this special expedition is aware of that, whether 11 or 81 years old. It is mentioned daily without doubt, and is in the background or foreground of every location we visit here on Baffin Island and northern Nunavik.

Auyuittuq Park (c) Students on Ice

Today, we hiked 25 km deep into Auyuittuq National Park right across the Arctic Circle. From one stand point we could see nine glaciers. The thick, jagged rock faces gleamed as they reflected the sun’s light off of the glacial runoff streaming down them.  I learned later that a glacier, just this year, had gone missing from the landscape. While sitting at the base of these magnificent creations, you can’t help but become overwhelmed with a sense of gratitude and being, for and with, the greatness that surrounds you.

Zoe Caron, WWF with Alanna Mitchell, author of Sea Sick and Jeannette Menzies, circumpolar affairs, Foreign Affairs Canada (c) Students on Ice

Now, the ship is humming through a long, glassy-topped fjord as we peer over the stern in search for orca and bowhead whales. Not a second goes by that I don’t see, smell or taste a reason to work with the people of this land to protect these beautiful places with rich, unique wildlife.

In the coming days, I will be working with the students to learn about meeting with their elected representatives and expressing their support for action on the issues that matter most to them. Later, we’ll delve into the most exciting part of climate change, which is how to activate one’s passion to create change. More updates to come!

Glacier (c) Students on Ice

You don’t have to be an avid naturalist to appreciate the complexity and richness of the shoreline – patches of kelp forest, eelgrass beds, sandy and muddy bays, stretches of steep rocky shoreline, tidal pools teeming with tiny sealife, myriad algaes, salt marshes and creeks trickling out from the hemlock and cedar forests – all this and more make up the Northern BC coastal ecosystem.

We are being helped out by Cei Sullivan, a student in an Applied Coastal Ecology program at the local college and a WWF volunteer.  Getting out in the field is an opportunity to put to use her skills in GPS and data recording, while contributing to a local project.  True, there was that one day when an encounter with a bear cut the day short, and even an encounter with some coastal wolves (!!) but that just adds to the experience.

The data that we are collecting will be used by local authorities to inform decision-making at the local scale, and will also be added to the Community Mapping Network – a free, on-line and publicly accessible database containing loads of information about different habitat types throughout British Columbia.  Data is collected and compiled through a variety of projects and initiatives, relying largely on volunteers and community groups.  The information can be accessed by local planners, development proponents, property developers, educators, or community groups.

For this kind of work to successfully contribute to conservation, depends upon the ability of decision-makers to access information and put it to use… and their willingness to do so!  WWF-Canada works at the policy and management level, in addition to the on-the-ground level, to advocate for an ecosystem-based approach to management, in which both human use and ecological values are considered.  The region around Kaien Island is a microcosm of the North Coast of BC:  source of both ecological wealth and economic prosperity, and subject to the cumulative effects of human activities.  By doing this work, we are helping to create a future where decision-making respects the values of the region and the people who depend on it.

Looking for an opportunity to get to know your shoreline?  Great!  The Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup is just around the corner and it engages thousands of Canadians annually to rehabilitate their local shorelines through the removal of shoreline litter. Find out more information about how you can get involved, at shorelinecleanup.ca.