Living off the land
Ian and Karen McAllister don't recall actually deciding to raise their young family in the heart of Canada's Great Bear Rainforest. If you ask the B.C. couple about how they came to live in this incredible part of our country, they'll tell you that the more than 400-kilometre-long tract of rugged coastline chose them.
"We were pulled in by the wilderness. We just kept going farther north into wilder places and we finally found the unbelievable," says Ian, who settled with Karen on Denny Island (population about 80) near Bella Bella (population 1,400) more than a decade ago. "We found a huge, intact coastline teeming with ecological richness. It seemed like paradise at the time, and it still does now," adds the 40-year-old father of two, who grew up in Victoria.
Karen, who grew up in Calgary, says that of all of the things she wanted for her kids, the most important was "to live in a place of natural abundance." She adds, "I didn't want to tell them stories about 'I remember when you could walk across the rivers, they were so chockablock full of salmon.' I wanted them to have these memories themselves."
The McAllister children, Callum, 7, and Lucy, 4, are living a life most kids only ever read about. Mom and Dad – longtime advocates for the preservation of Canada's temperate rainforests – hunt and fish for some of the food they eat. Living off the land means expenses are kept at a minimum, which allows Ian and Karen to pursue their passions. The couple's non-profit organization, Pacific Wild, is dedicated to ensuring that the Great Bear Rainforest remains "one of the planet's greatest cradles of biodiversity," says Karen, who adds that they supplement their income with writing, photography, film-making and other environment-related projects.
