On February 1, 2016, a line of First Nations drummers in traditional regalia—elaborate headdresses, each cheek bearing two red streaks—entered from the rear of a packed hall at the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology, and beat a slow, resonant path to a podium emblazoned with the words: “Great Bear Rainforest: Partnership. Balance. Certainty.”

Trailing behind the drummers was a line of speakers representing indigenous coalitions, the lumber industry, environmental groups, and the provincial government, including British Columbia Premier Christy Clark. All were on hand to celebrate a new peace: After 20 years of negotiations, the four groups had agreed on a historic deal for land use in the Great Bear Rainforest, a 25,000-square-mile stretch of BC’s north and central coastlands—the largest intact coastal temperate rainforest on the planet.

Beaming, Clark told the crowd that the agreement was “proof of the strength of what we could do if we decide to find common purpose.” The head of a regional lumber coalition touted the achievement, crediting his fellow speakers. A representative from the environmental groups said the agreement set a high bar for ecosystem preservation. And Dallas Smith, head of a regional coalition of First Nations, thanked the other speakers for their efforts to make his community a better place to live.

This scene seemed impossible when negotiations began in 1996. At the time, the four groups were in the middle of “The War in the Woods”—a series of demonstrations involving environmental and First Nations activists blocking the path of logging equipment and chaining themselves to trees and bulldozers. The protests attracted international attention and spread beyond BC, with environmentalists demonstrating outside Canadian embassies around the world.

Even after agreeing to attempt a compromise, the talks would often stall; sometimes they threatened to cease. By 2002, the original process was in disarray, and a whole new structure with new negotiators was just about to begin.

Wally Eamer (MBA 1979) watched the negotiations stumble from the sidelines. Eamer was a longtime provincial employee, but his stake in the negotiations was also personal. He had grown up in logging communities alongside First Nations and had a deep appreciation for the natural world. Everyone he knew would feel the impact of this. He was in the midst of a spiritual conversion, too, having become a Christian in 1997, and was increasingly focused on how he could best serve.

Eamer was then working as head of the provincial conservation office—“the fish and wildlife police, basically,” he says. He was in his early 50s and in his 15th year of government work. His career was in stasis, and by 2002, he didn’t necessarily care if it went up, down, or sideways.

He had a good rapport with the provincial official who oversaw the negotiator role; he had worked for him before and shown an ability to sort out conflict. There was a mutual respect and mutual interest—and not much competition. “To be blunt, hardly anybody wanted the job, because it was widely seen as a career killer,” he says.

“I wanted a wicked problem. And this was it.”

On a temperate October day last year, Eamer, 67, with a white beard and curly white hair, is standing on the side of the road, positioned at the nexus of four forces—environmental, provincial, commercial, and spiritual.

He’s at the base of Newcastle Ridge—on the northeast coast of Vancouver Island—where, for hundreds of years, K’ómoks people would canoe two miles from their settlements across the bay, fell the hill’s massive cedars, bring them down the hill using might or gravity, and float them back across the bay, where they would be used to build canoes, dwellings, and totem poles.

A road now bisects the hill and the coast, with a busy logging facility operating just off the water. Hulking yellow vehicles relocate felled trees around a dirt lot, navigating stacks of five-foot-thick cedar logs. The hill’s slope is mostly flush green with cedar and fir, but with an oddly shaped pockmark in the middle where a patch of cedars has been logged. Their replacements have not yet reached the height of their elder peers.

Eamer was born in Nanaimo, located across the Strait of Georgia from Vancouver, the son of a logging company bookkeeper. He watched the push and pull between these sectors for years. Tensions began flaring up in the 1980s, when the BC government approved logging on an island off the western coast of Vancouver Island that was claimed by the Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations. More than 1,200 members of the nation protested on the steps of the BC legislature, and environmental groups drove metal spikes into the trees to prevent logging. The animus was a preview for The War in the Woods, which began in the summer of 1993. All told, more than 900 protesters were arrested in protests that summer, which included a concert by rock band Midnight Oil and an address by environmental activist Robert Kennedy Jr.

Eventually, what was a series of regional protests coalesced into a push to preserve all 12,000 square miles of forest in BC’s north and central coastlands—dubbed the Great Bear Rainforest by environmentalists, and previously known as the Mid Coast Timber Supply Area by logging companies. Protests, blockades, and government proclamations continued, and environmental groups led a global boycott of paper producers that worked with local logging companies. In the late 1990s, negotiations began between the logging companies and the environmental groups; the tentative agreement struck, however, angered both the provincial government and some of the First Nations, neither of which was included in the negotiations.

While Eamer arrived at the table in 2002 as the provincial negotiator with passion for the task, it wasn’t his trade. But he had natural abilities; conflict resolution was one he learned early on. His mother had died when he and his brother were young, and when Eamer turned 10, after years of having an after-school nanny, he and his brother were left to look after themselves. So when everyone would come to Eamer’s house after school to play soccer, football, or baseball—which they did almost daily—they were on his watch. And kids being kids, he often had to negotiate peace on the field. “I had to keep people from fighting,” he says, “because I couldn’t fight everyone.”

Eamer is also even-keeled, a quality that is perhaps equal parts nature and nurture. While on a volunteer mission with his family in Honduras in January 1998, Eamer was shot by bandits. He lost seven pints of blood in the four hours it took to find a surgeon. He barely made it. Ever since, they have had a family motto: If it ain’t life and death, it ain’t worth panicking about. And if it is life and death, it’s too important to panic.

He’s good in a room. He’s gregarious without being dominating. He’ll ask that you tell him to shut up if he’s being an idiot before delivering wisdom that sounds as if it came from the oracle itself. His laugh can fill a space. He asks about a friend’s family members by name. He connects quickly.

Being personable alone will not heal decades of deep wounds, but there was one bit of training he had prior to the negotiations: a half-unit course on negotiation taught by Professor Howard Raiffa during Eamer’s second year at HBS. Even though it had been more than 20 years since he sat in that class, a few things had stuck with him, including the best alternative to a negotiated agreement (BATNA)—which essentially entails outlining a fallback plan if things go awry and offering a reality check for people caught up in anger.

It was a particularly relevant lesson to be able to recall, given where things stood on his first day at the table. “‘Not on the same page’ would be a vast understatement,” he says. “They were not in the same universe.”

Eamer’s first big meeting as the provincial negotiator was a two-day session in July 2002, at Rivers Inlet, a tiny settlement about halfway up Canada’s western coast. While the First Nations played host and watched, they weren’t involved in the initial negotiations. Instead, they asked the provincial government to figure out a proposal with the other stakeholders, and then negotiate the final deal with them—showing First Nations the respect of engaging in government-to-government negotiations.

As talks began, Eamer developed a game plan of sorts. He would always start discussions with the common agreements from previous meetings and then move to the contentious material—a useful way to boost hope. With 12 other people around the table, Eamer focused his messages to be clear, simple, and true. “It had to have that lyrical, poetic element to it that makes it memorable. The core of it had to be no more than 15 seconds,” he says, “and ideally it was 10.” Ultimately, one of the biggest challenges was getting everyone to give up the very idea of certainty, Eamer adds. “If they’re clear on the answer from day one, you can be pretty bloody sure that one or many of the other 12 people around the table are not going to agree with it. It just means you’ve dug in, and you’re not listening.”

It’s a deep journey, he would say. You can’t be sure of the outcome.

Eamer’s techniques made an immediate impression on his fellow negotiators. “There are lots of people who worked for the provincial government on this, and the heroic ones were very few and far between,” says Jody Holmes, director of the Rainforest Solutions Project, the umbrella organization for the environmental groups at the table. “Their job is to stay there and not make too many waves.” But Eamer got it, she says. “He was the sane one, trying to actually find solutions.” Rick Jeffery, CEO of Coast Forest Products—a forestry coalition—remembers Eamer as a steadying influence with a low-key approach. “You hardly even knew he was there, but then when he intervened, he did it in a manner where everybody would listen,” says Jeffery.

With the long days and arduous travel, tempers would flare. Sometimes, Eamer says, it seemed like everybody was creating their own little forts, and “throwing grenades at the other little forts in the room.” Holmes would later tell the National Observer that after a particularly heated exchange, she told First Nations representative Dallas Smith—who has a prosthetic leg—“If I was a wooden leg I’d take myself off and hit you over the head right now with it, Dallas.” (Smith burst out laughing.)

One of the most contentious issues was deciding what percentage of the lands could be logged for commercial use. The starting point had been unofficially set by the environmental groups and major forest companies for the negotiations, though the government and First Nations hadn’t weighed in: Seventy percent of all the 200 types of forests in the Great Bear region would be protected from logging. As negotiations began, the parties fell along their expected lines: Forestry wanted to mitigate profit loss; the environmental groups wanted to mitigate ecosystem loss.

In a December 2003 meeting, about 18 months into the negotiations and after three particularly long days, Eamer and his team proposed a 100/70/30 model: All of the rare and endangered forest types would be protected, 70 percent of the trees would be protected in ecosystems where sustainability was less of a factor, and 30 percent of the trees would be protected in the really common ecosystems with high commercial importance.

Facilitators for forestry and the environmentalists quickly headed off-site for a private conversation. After several hours of working out a detailed plan, they brought it to the table, complete with a proposed map. Within 15 minutes, Eamer says, there was a palpable sense around the table that they may finally be looking at the answer. Within the hour, they were all certain they had a deal.

When Eamer phoned the home office with the news, his colleagues were in disbelief. “It was incredulous joy. It really was, because there was a sense that we’d never get these things done—we’d never reach a consensus.” (Eamer stresses that the success was due to a large number of people, “not because one person was a hero and everyone else followed the hero—that’s the Big Man theory, and it’s bullshit here,” he says.)

For Eamer, though, the celebration was short-lived. There was still work to be done. This hard-fought victory would be for naught if he and the province couldn’t get an agreement with the First Nations that included key elements of the December deal.

Government-to-government negotiations kicked off with the First Nations in March 2004, a few months after the first agreement was reached. The province was working with two different coalitions that represented most of the 25 First Nations. This process was different from the process between the environmental groups and the logging companies: Here, Eamer had to explain the parameters and regulations of the first agreement to the First Nations coalition, what rights it gave them, and how it would impact the territory—all the while trying to maintain the essence of the pact. “The First Nations wanted to be sure that they had a much stronger say in how their own lands are managed and their place in them,” says Eamer. “And they wanted to know how it could help them get out of the cycle of dependency that they’d become trapped in.”

Again, stakeholders at the table saw Eamer’s approach as a departure. “I’ve never met a government person as genuine as he was,” says Smith, former president of the Nanwakolas Council—one of the two First Nations groups at the table. “Not to pump his tires, but he was the turning point in the process. He made it make sense.”

By the summer of 2005, a deal was struck in principle. When the official announcement finally came in February 2006, headlines declared it historic. Announcing the deal, BC Premier Gordon Campbell told a Vancouver audience that it was “an example the world can follow.” The peace was announced with drums and dancing.

Two things were happening to Eamer simultaneously around the time of the 2006 announcement. First, he was going through religious discernment—a religious self-discovery of sorts, meant to help him decide whether he would be ordained as a deacon in the Anglican Church. He had been a Christian for nearly a decade, and had begun to feel the pull more strongly. (He ultimately became a deacon in 2008.)

And second, the Nanwakolas Council, impressed by his work at the table, offered him a job helping them implement the new agreement. While the pact was a milestone, it was still a tentative framework. A final agreement rested on successfully implementing those plans—and making sure that all the other stakeholders were holding up their ends of the bargain.

Eamer saw the two paths as parallel. “The deacon, in my tradition, is called to work with the marginalized or less powerful,” he says. “Moving from one of the power actors, the provincial government, into another power actor—but one with less resources and little authority in the last century—actually fit where my religious discernment was taking me.”

His move to the First Nations caught his environmental counterpart Jody Holmes by surprise. “One day he’s working for the province, and the next day he’s on the other side,” she says. “It was a shock.” For Smith, adding a provincial employee to his team helped his side build respect in the negotiations. “The government couldn’t hide behind policy that didn’t exist,” he says. “Now the government took us a lot more seriously.”

Eamer wasn’t leading table negotiations for the Nanwakolas Council, because he knew Smith and the other council leaders were excellent negotiators—they didn’t need him there. “I wanted them to be well-informed as they went forward,” he says. “But I wanted to be sure I didn’t take their role, because the reconciliation meant they needed to be better supported and empowered First Nations leaders, not to have a white guy try and take their place.”

Instead, Eamer focused on building actionable strategies for the First Nations. All the agreements with their highly specific requirements and detailed maps? Nanwakolas Council needed someone who could translate that stuff into action. Implementing the framework also worked as a check on the stakeholders, as it required access to funds promised to the First Nations as part of the initial agreement. When those funds didn’t show up or forestry was accused of some infraction, it would again throw the agreement into question. High-level negotiations, still marred by disputes, were ongoing. “There was still the possibility that it could fall apart,” stresses Holmes.

In the end, there were essentially two large movements in the agreement after 2006, Eamer says, both of them reducing the amount of timber supply laid out in the first framework. Then, in late 2015, “the environmental groups said, ‘We have all that we need. We’re signing off.’ ” The final deal protected 85 percent of Great Bear from logging while offering forestry companies a process for certainty of operational volumes and locations. The First Nations got increased control over the land, as well as a $240 million fund to help them build sustainable economies.

Among the powerful lessons for others, Eamer says, hope might be the most immediate. “It’s difficult to understand how to work your way through to a solution. But here’s a model of where, on a large scale, it actually worked.”

“It’s not a quick fix,” adds Holmes. There are deep repairs still necessary, she notes, both cultural and environmental. That work continues. “But it is enormously helpful to have this kind of blueprint.” The protections hammered out in the Great Bear negotiations were reportedly instrumental in building a conservation agreement for the Canadian boreal forest, a 2.2-million-mile area—equal to about 60 percent of the US landmass. Smith says that he imparted lessons from the agreements with other First Nations from Nunavut in northern Quebec to native populations in Oregon and California. “This process can be repeated,” he says.

The lessons of the agreement will have to be carried out by the next generation, Eamer says. He’s been pulling away from Nanwakolas, eager to let the younger generation of First Nations leaders take over the management and strategy. “The selfish thing would be to continue making money and spending time with people who give you a buzz,” he says. “Ultimately, honoring somebody else means that your best understanding of their best interests has to be important to you.”

Instead, he has started spending more time working on his church’s environmental committee. He is visiting friends. He is traveling, something he’d long been promising his wife. And he has just become chair of an addiction-counseling group, hoping to help them through a managerial change.

None of those, admittedly, feel as deep as his work with the First Nations. Not yet, at least.

“But again, it’s one of those deeper journeys,” he says. “You don’t know what the outcome will be.”

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