Whistler is perhaps best known worldwide for three things: top-notch skiing, a resort enveloped by towering green forests and an absolute ton of bears.
Having a robust environmental department at the Resort Municipality of Whistler (RMOW) that can intertwine the environment into decision-making at all levels of the planning process has been key to ensuring the community protects those unrivalled natural assets for generations to come.
For 27 years, Heather Beresford has been instrumental in those efforts, and as the RMOW’s outgoing environmental stewardship manager, she has contributed to a number of ambitious initiatives to, among other things, better manage Whistler’s bear population, lower the community’s GHG emissions, and mitigate the effects of climate change inherent to a global tourism destination.
The conversation around the environment and how we manage it has never been more critical, as climate change impacts worsen and natural disasters become increasingly frequent and deadly.
Following her retirement last month, Pique caught up with Beresford to discuss her municipal career and the recent recognition she received from the Conservation Officer Service (COS).
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How does it feel to retire?
Beresford: I have mixed feelings because I feel like I landed in my dream job. I get to contribute to my community, help protect the natural environment, connect with so many amazing people in this town that are all trying to do the same thing. Like, ‘Wow, what more can I ask for?’
I’m a tree hugger, by nature, so this has just been a perfect job for me. So I love that, but at the same time, I’m ready to ski a lot more.
What kind of policies and work at the RMOW have you been proud of over your time there?
Well, we started the environmental stewardship department from scratch. Even just creating this department, this role has been really important. Our community continually says it’s important to protect the natural environment, so we’ve been able to start doing that internally.
For specific projects, I think that the Cheakamus Community Forest is a huge one, which gives us control over what happens on the land around Whistler—and we partner with the Lil’wat and the Squamish Nations. It’s definitely challenging, but I think it’s an incredible opportunity to be able to manage our forests around Whistler.
The Bear Smart program, being able to achieve their Bear Smart community status, really helped our community minimize our conflicts with bears and reduce the number of bears that get shot every year. I know now it seems like it’s embedded in what we do, but 15, 20 years ago, we all had to start from scratch and change all our garbage cans, change all our garbage sheds, change our bylaws, all that kind of stuff. So that’s been a really important piece as well.
The climate strategy in the last few years, that’s massive. I’m sure we all have such a feeling of urgency around taking action and I’m really excited about the Big Moves Climate Action strategy, and we’ve been working really hard internally over this last year or so to get that embedded into the municipal decision-making so that everything we do has to deliver on our climate strategy targets.
Did the conversation around climate change exist when you started?
It was non-existent. In 2016, we developed the Community Energy and Climate Action Plan. So that was kind of the start of it. We spent a year with a community group. We had volunteers from different walks of life here in Whistler, and we sat down and said, ‘OK, what can we do about climate change? What are the important areas to look at and important first steps to take?’
So that’s when we got what we call the CECAP, the Community Energy and Climate Action Plan, which we evolved into being that Big Moves Climate Action Plan.
Climate change was on the periphery of my awareness for a long time, as it was with everybody else, but now we can take action.
Can you tell us more about the award you recently received from the COS?
The special recognition award is given to a group or a citizen who takes extra measures to help protect wildlife in the province, and so they wrote a little story on the award about all the things that I had been involved in getting the Bear-Smart community status and things like that.
I had no idea they were doing that. It’s a special recognition award for the work that I was involved in, but there’s many people involved in this. I certainly didn’t do this alone.
[Former Whistler Bear Smart director] Sylvia Dolson, she really got everything rolling, and then all the players that needed to be involved, including the [Resort Municipality of Whistler].
Some statistics recently came to light showing the number of bears killed in various communities across the province, with Prince George as the deadliest town for bears, at 36 deaths last year, compared to two in Whistler.
It’s not because they have more bears than us. They probably have a lot of bears, but we have a lot of bears and it’s because our community wants to do things differently and the municipality took it seriously, as did a lot of other players, like [waste management company] GFL now, but before that was Carney’s [Waste Systems], and they do 95 per cent of our waste disposal in the corridor, and they were huge partners in adopting all of their waste systems, trucks and their sites.
The Conservation Officer Service, they go above and beyond. The mountain, Whistler Blackcomb. There’s so many people involved. And that’s what this award recognized; they called us North American leaders on what we’re doing here and over the years.
I know many communities have called me. I just spoke to a group of Russians about a year ago, Russian biologists in Sochi, that were interested in what we do here because they want to do similar things at their resort there. So we’re recognized around the world for what we do here on bear management.
What do you see as the biggest challenges facing your replacement?
Luisa Burhenne is my replacement. She’s been here for the last two years as our climate action coordinator and she is very capable, very smart, very collaborative. I know she’s up to the task because it is challenging, for sure. There’s so many different players. I think that the climate file is still going to be challenging.
The municipality has a corporate plan and community plan with elements of corporate and community in it. But, you know, the RMOW is only two per cent of the emissions in our community. So getting the rest of the community to get onboard with reducing emissions, that’s going to be a big challenge.
It’s such a challenge because you need to have the infrastructure and services in place for people to make change. For example, you know, we want people out of their cars. Well, what are the alternatives?
There needs to be more bus service or whatever those solutions are. That has to be in place to help people change their behaviour, but then at the same time, you have to get people to grasp that they need to change their behaviour, and so it’s sort of a chicken-and-the-egg thing.
What would your advice be for a young person thinking about getting into environmental stewardship at the government level?
Be a systems thinker; you can’t look at anything in isolation. We heard a lot of the candidates through the election talking about mental wellness being linked to having stable housing, which is linked to having decent working conditions. Everything is all linked, and it’s the same on the environment side.
You have to think about not only natural systems, but what authority does the local government have to take action. Who are your potential partners and allies in the community?
There’s a lot of opportunity coming up. I have a 21-year-old son going out into the world and I look at a lot of young folks and it seems like it’s pretty fraught and scary out there. But in times of change and crisis, there is also a time of great opportunity.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
I firmly believe, and this is really my personal mantra, that we’re all in this together. And that’s what’s really made this job a joy: to be able to connect with likeminded people in our community and do good things for the natural environment.
