by Laura Loucks (CBT Research Director) and Nicole Gerbrandt (West Coast NEST Education Coordinator)
Bending the Curve tells the story of how a team of community change-makers on Vancouver Island’s West Coast are building the education economy. Historically, many of these communities depended on extractive resources such as forestry and fishing. While these sectors provided well-paying jobs for local residents, many of the harvesting practices and policies threatened the integrity of ecological systems and breached the Nuu-chah-nulth principles of Iisaak (respect for all things) and Hish T’kish T’awalk (everything is connected). After a decade of unprecedented environmental protests against unsustainable logging practices in the old growth coastal temperate rainforests of Clayoquot Sound, tourism emerged as the predominant economic sector in the mid-1990's.
Several decades later, numerous warning signs indicate tourism has exceeded the capacity of local communities to support the estimated one million tourists who now visit the region annually. The steady rise in visitors is strongly correlated with an increased demand on emergency medical services and potable water in the summer, increased incidents of human-wildlife conflict and reduced availability of affordable housing (2016 Vital Signs).
Bending the curve shows what's happening in this important pivot-in-time in which a new collaborative vision to build education tourism and the sharing economy is taking root in the Clayoquot Sound UNESCO Biosphere Region. The West Coast N.E.S.T (Nature, Education, Sustainability, Transformation) is a new website platform designed as a hub for marketing and communicating over 300 learning opportunities offered in the West Coast region during the year.The film documents the individual efforts of a team of change makers who are integral to fostering the horizontal and vertical networks required to lift communities (both indigenous and non-indigenous) up and out of path dependent trajectories embedded in the past.
The purpose of the film is to document one creative solution, in this case, Education Tourism, as an opportunity to bend an unsustainable growth curve towards a new kind of economic vision that aims to host visitors who want learn something about living in the coastal rainforest from local people and contribute to the stewardship of the region as if it was their home.
Ecosystem: Coastal , Big Issues: Education , Big Issues: Land use , Solutions: Empowerment , Solutions: Local/Traditional knowledge
