SEACC Interview for Oct. 2005 Ravencall

Southeast Alaska Conservation Council (SEACC) Interview for Oct. 2005 Ravencall
Southeast Alaska Business Spotlight
Kurt Hoelting Owner and Guide
Inside Passages

Kurt Hoelting, owner of the Petersburg based “Inside Passages”, admits that his business is not your typical Southeast guide service and he is not your typical wilderness guide. Inside Passages is a business that works with the unique power of place and combines kayaking, meditation practice, and engaged conversation in their wilderness journey product.

According to Hoelting, his clients come from all over North America and internationally to pursue a wilderness experience that not only includes kayaking and wildlife viewing, but also provides an opportunity for “personal restoration” that draws upon Buddhist and Judeo-Christian contemplative practices in an attempt to “forge a closer link between inner and outer wilderness exploration.” .

Hoelting first came to Southeast Alaska in 1969 as a college student to work on a salmon seiner out of Petersburg. Hoelting says he “fell in love with the fishing lifestyle and the amazing terrain here”. Having been raised in Seattle he found SE Alaska to be “Puget Sounds on steroids”. He recognized in the Tongass much of the ecological integrity that had been lost on the rest of the coast. After grad school Hoelting lived in the Petersburg area for 10 years, and now returns every summer to offer his way of encouraging people to look deeper into the life they experience here.

Hoelting has been a long time conservation advocate, former SEACC Board member and Southeast Business owner. We asked him to relate from a business owner point of view his thoughts on businesses in the Tongass and the relation between conservation and the business community in Southeast Alaska.

1. Who are your clientele, and why do they choose to do a trip with Inside Passages?

My clientele include environmental leaders and activists, clergy and rabbis, teachers, doctors and health care professionals. “People helpers” seem really drawn to my trips because of the personal restoration work we do.

I work with a small number of people-between 30 and 40 people each summer, and I take 10 people out at a time for one week. People come with enough time to really experience the power of this place. They are willing to spend time listening and paying attention to what is happening right in front of them. We use contemplative practice – the practice of paying attention – so that every day there is enough silence and spaciousness for the mind to receive the lessons this place has to teach. It’s not complicated and it’s not exotic. It’s basic human stuff.

2. In terms of the natural amenities in SE Alaska what do you look forward to showing your clients the most?

I enjoy immersing people in the fully-functioning ecosystems that we have in SE Alaska. I consider this to be a place where “all the members of the assembly are present at the table”. The Tongass gives people a chance to experience a “benchmark wilderness” – the kind of climax ecosystem that is basically gone from the rest of North America, especially in the lower 48. My clients can see and experience something of what was common to human experience for the last 30,000 years, where humans lived in close community with the full range of species that their home terrain was capable of supporting.

It’s also instructive to be totally off the grid, to be free from the incessant demands of our communication technologies, and to encounter weather and conditions on their own terms. Our clients do not experience this area as a “theme park”, and the challenges we deal with on the trip also help people connect personally in ways they may not have connected in the past.

3. In the mission statement of Inside Passages, “We know that we will not work to save that which we do not love. And we cannot truly love that with which we are not intimate.” I assume that your clients become very intimate with the land during their voyages. What do you think your clients take home with them from their experience?

I want people to leave knowing in their bones what it’s like to be part of a wild, and therefore whole ecosystem, so that they can begin to imagine their home places restored to a similar place of wholeness and vitality. I want this to have value back where they live, expressed in new ways of seeing into the deeper life of their own home places.

It was the Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson who said, “We will not work to save that which we do not love.” I would go further and say that we cannot really love that with which we are not intimate. Cultivating intimacy is the ground of love.

A challenge for all of us in the conservation community is to understand this for ourselves. We cannot expect people to care about environmental conservation if we aren’t able to help them answer very personally the question, “Why does it matter?” This is a question that encompasses our deepest values. It comes from the heart, and it comes from our direct experience of what matters most to us. I believe people in the conservation community need to learn to speak more effectively from this place, to say what we are for and why it matters to us, even as we work to turn around the negative legislative or public policy trends we see happening. I think, in our preoccupation with defensive strategies, we forget how important this question is.

4. You are a business owner who works in SE Alaska, but you advocate for conservation issues globally as well as here in the Tongass. Do you feel that business owners in SE Alaska should advocate for the environment, and what do you feel are some reasons why they should?

When Earthjustice recently sent me a letter about the 9th Circuit Court decision on the 1997 TLMP plan. I was amazed to learn that the Forest Service’s own economists concluded that a tree in the Tongass is worth 30 times more standing than cut. (2003 Tongass Roadless Supplement Environmental Impact Statement at 3-300.) The people in SE Alaska should work for conservation because of the cumulative economic benefits of tourism, recreation, hunting, fishing, etc. Salmon fishermen have known for a long time the benefits of conservation. The Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game has used a conservation-based management strategy with the Alaska salmon fisheries almost since statehood, and the resulting recovery of the salmon runs is staggering. Salmon have a “return on investment” every two or three years, while a single forest rotation in the Tongass is more like a century. Tourism in the Tongass is growing exponentially, and it depends on healthy ecosystems. Any business that is connected to tourism, to fishing, and even the timber industry if it wants to survive into the future, will be serving itself to be concerned with conservation. It’s basic self-interest.

5. Do you feel that the SE Alaska community can find a balance between having a vibrant and diverse economy with opportunities for jobs and job security and have a healthy and balanced ecosystem?

There really is no separation between the two. That’s the point to be emphasized. We should refuse to be pulled into thinking that we have to choose between the two. The more ways we can illuminate the real connections the better. The conservatives have successfully framed the issue as “jobs against environment”. We need to spend less energy refuting that absurd claim, and articulating a more realistic frame that includes both. We need to take bold leadership on this. The new frames we offer need to be larger and more inclusive than either the environmental or development communities have used before.

6. Your clients have been great SEACC supporters thanks to your support- how have you encouraged them to join us in our work?

On my trips I talk about natural history quite a bit, but I hardly mention politics. I don’t ply my clients with statistics. I spend almost no time in lobbying mode. I simply get people out there, give them the space to connect in their own way, arrive at their own conclusions. At the end of the trip I tell them that what they have experienced is possible in large measure because the folks at SEACC have been working to make sure that the wilderness values and habitat on the Tongass are protected. I invite them to support the good work of SEACC. By then they are usually eager and ready to become active supporters of the work SEACC is doing, because their support now comes from deep within their own experience.