During his early teenage years,

Jeff Gibbs went on a journey that changed his life forever. 

Jeff Gibbs visited Haida Gwaii, a remote island nation in the North Pacific Ocean, where he walked through luxuriant mossy rainforests that were thousands of years old and gazed into tidal pools that were full of amazing sea creatures.  It dawned on him that there were countless life forms, including people, all interconnected.  “I rediscovered my childhood wonder for the magic and mystery of the world.  It was a life changing moment when I realized that I was part of a great web of nature that wraps around the Earth.” 

Jeff Gibbs was horrified to witness the industrial logging that formed moonscapes were the towering forests once stood and ruined the streams where the salmon once spawned.  He then met members of the Haida Nation, the indigenous people of Haida Gwaii who have lived on the archipelago for hundreds of generations. They taught him how their economy, culture and spiritual sustenance depended on a healthy sea and forest.  They explained how the logging by a foreign corporation was not only damaging what they valued, but was also unjust because it was happening against their will.  Soon thereafter, they stood on the logging roads and peacefully halted the destruction in a standoff that gained international attention. 

Jeff Gibbs realized that protecting Haida Gwaii was a human rights issue as well as an environmental one.  “I quickly developed a conviction that my society had become disconnected from the living planet, and it is the indigenous people who are often the most connected to these natural systems.  Helping to restore the harmony became my personal mission.”

This pivotal experience motivated Jeff Gibbs to form a youth group at his school in Vancouver, Canada called Teenagers’ Response to Endangered Ecosystems (TREE Club).  They created elaborate musical slide shows about their Haida Gwaii experience and toured them to packed theatres.  He then organized his friends to knock on over 5,000 households in their evenings and weekends to engage citizens in conversations about the value of Haida Gwaii and, most importantly, how to influence politicians to protect it.  Eventually, the Haida Nation’s authority was recognized, industrial logging was halted, and the rainforests were officially protected through peaceful co-operation with the Government of Canada.  While the TREE Club’s role in this victory was modest, Jeff Gibbs felt a great sense of empowerment from the experience; he believed that even the biggest dreams could come true.

                                           Amazon

As a result of this success, Jeff Gibbs was invited to Brazil to witness the first-ever gathering of indigenous groups from the northern-eastern Amazon.  They had gathered to discuss the impact of proposed dams that threaten to flood a massive area of rainforest and inundate many of tribes’ villages, rivers and food gathering areas.  It was, and continues to be, a situation that parallels to the story told in the motion picture, Avatar.  Jeff Gibbs’ remarkable experience in the Amazon rainforest made him understand that he was living in an extraordinary time on Earth; when humanity is, as journalist Andrew Revkin writes, “trying to mesh infinite aspirations with life on a finite planet.”  It was both an exhilarating and frightening realization, and he knew he had to take action.  Upon his return, he created a slide show about his journey and presented it to over 75,000 students in schools across Canada, USA, Australia and England, motivating many young people to create school-based environmental clubs.

He then founded a pioneering organization called the Environmental Youth Alliance (EYA) that linked together these youth groups through activities such as conferences and campaigns to protect the world’s rainforests.

LIFE

Next, Jeff Gibbs formed Leadership Initiative For Earth (LIFE) in order to help enable young people to develop the social, emotional, and intellectual tools needed to address the challenge of protecting the planet.  Over the next eight years, more than 1,400 young people participated in LIFE’s groundbreaking learning activities including:

•LIFEquest: In 2002, an international team of young people spent an extraordinary month creating documentary films in several languages while camping on remote islands on Canada’s Pacific coast.  The participants met and interviewed a range of local people who were taking varied approaches to creating sustainable livelihoods.  LIFEquest was a pioneer in utilizing laptop computers to edit video while in a wilderness setting, and was sponsored in part by Apple Inc.

Global Activators

Currently, Jeff Gibbs is helping to launch Global Activators, an organization that aims to give rise to a worldwide community of energetic people who are protecting the planet by hosting inspirational activities in their schools and communities, raising funds for action projects, participating in international experiences, and creating their own media.  Empowerment is a renewable resource.

Jeff Gibbs lives in Vancouver, Canada.

•LIFEboat Flotillas: a week long “environmental adventure” that brought together up to two hundred teenagers with one hundred educators on fleets of fifteen ships on Canada’s Pacific coast.  Dozens of hands-on facilitated activities en route enabled participants to learn in small groups about marine biology, green building design, enthnobotany, sustainable forestry and ocean conservation, as well as leadership skills such as teamwork and group facilitation.  At the end of each day, the ships would reunite and anchor together.  Evenings often saw everyone ashore for major presentations from internationally renowned educators including Jane Goodall and Jean-Michel Cousteau.  The LIFEboat Flotillas were major logistical undertakings, highly innovative and unique in the world.  These “journeys to a new horizon” had a profound impact on many of the people who participated.  Five sailings of the LIFEboat Flotilla took place from 1996-99, while a similar program via WWF sailed in 2008.

WWF

From 2004-2008, Jeff Gibbs brought his expertise to WWF, the global environmental organization.  His major project was helping to create the WWF International Young Volunteers Program that places participants at WWF field projects in developing nations.  Participants spend several months in remote areas working alongside local WWF staff while learning about the links between poverty, human development and protection of the planet's ecology.  Their extraordinary experiences are shared via multi-media story telling Jeff Gibbs’ role included program design, in-field planning and staff training in Madagascar, Bhutan, India, Brazil and the South Pacific.

LIFEquest: Maia Green