“We all need to be having cross boundary conversations and collaborations because this is how that’s going to work. This is not how we currently do things. We all stay in our silo, in our lane, because there’s no incentive for us to work together.” – Veronica Woodruff

When highways wash out, tourism stops. This reality reminds us that travel doesn’t exist in isolation—it’s part of the ecosystem. What if we treated it that way?

Veronica Woodruff, an environmental professional, trained biologist, and experienced project manager, has spent much of her career helping communities develop sustainability projects. She offers a fresh perspective from outside the travel industry, challenging us to rethink how travel and nature are interconnected.

Initially skeptical of tourism’s ability to influence climate action or aid environmental restoration, Veronica left the industry disillusioned. But after gaining a deeper understanding of DMOs as well-funded, well-connected groups capable of mobilizing resources, her perspective began to shift. She now sees potential for tourism to drive meaningful change.

“I just think the tourism industry has an opportunity right now to consider how it’s going to work in the future around these challenges that all of our communities are seeing,” says Veronica, pointing to extreme weather events as a growing threat to both communities and tourism.

She’s helped make real progress through collaboration. In Pemberton, for example, partnerships with environmental groups like the Pemberton Wildlife Association and Stewardship Pemberton have informed sustainable decisions for the town’s Trails Management Plan, a vital framework in a destination known for mountain biking. These efforts highlight how cooperation across sectors can create more resilient, sustainable communities. By recognizing tourism as part of the ecosystem and fostering partnerships, the industry can become a driving force in addressing environmental issues. 

In this episode, you’ll also learn:

• How our lives are deeply intertwined with ecosystems and natural cycles.
• Why restoration efforts are key to building long-term sustainability.
• The impact of receding glaciers on both tourism and the environment.
• The effects of extreme weather on communities and the travel industry.

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Show notes

Joffre Lakes Park — A provincial park east of Pemberton with three glacier-fed lakes. 

Lil’wat Nation — A progressive First Nations community located 7 km north of Pemberton, BC.

Pemberton Wildlife Association — A not-for-profit organization dedicated to promoting conservation, preservation, and enhancement of wildlife and outdoor recreational resources.

Stewardship Pemberton — An environmental non-profit and charity that is dedicated to the local environment and community.

Episode transcript

Veronica Woodruff: How does this money for tourism work when we have our highways washed away? There was something, there was a disconnect there. The tourism industry has an opportunity right now to consider how it’s going to work in the future around these challenges that all of our communities are seeing.

David Archer: Welcome back to Travel Beyond where we partner with leading destinations to bring you inspiring solutions to the greatest challenges facing communities and the planet. I’m David Archer from Destination Think, recording as always from Haida Gwaii, the territory of the Haida Nation off the north coast of British Columbia in Canada.

On this show, we look at the role of travel and choose to highlight destinations that are global leaders. We talk to the change-makers who are addressing regenerative travel through action in their communities and often from the bottom up. And we’re always looking for the best examples of efforts to regenerate economies, communities, and ecosystems.

Those solution stories that we’re looking for and you can reach me if you have a story to share at david at destinationthink.com and you can also check out 100 travel innovations for some examples of what I’m talking about. These are bite sized stories of solutions led by the travel industry that we’ve published on a new site and you can find those at innovate.destinationthink.com. Well, if we’re truly going to make a dent in humanity’s greatest challenges, we need to share solutions with one another. And this story is all about one of the driving principles behind Travel Beyond, which is to do just that. And to build collaboration within the travel industry and, well, and beyond.

And sometimes an outside perspective can help bring clarity to that. What does the tourism industry look like from the outside to someone who’s working on sustainability projects? And can we really make a difference working in travel? Well, today’s guest has been on a journey away from tourism and then back again.

Veronica Woodruff is an environmental professional, a trained biologist, and a project manager who has devoted a good chunk of her career to helping communities bring their sustainability projects to reality. She’s based in Pemberton, British Columbia, a town close to Whistler, which you might know as one of Canada’s most popular resort destinations.

Pemberton is located on the Lillooet River, which is the site of one of the largest landslides in Canadian history, which occurred in 2010 at Mount Meager. The Mount Meager slide also poses flood risks for her community, and Veronica has been heavily involved in restoration projects here and elsewhere during the past 20 years.

And in this chat with Rodney Payne, recorded earlier this year, we’ll learn about some of those positive examples. We’ll also hear Veronica’s perspective as someone who has collaborated with the tourism industry from the outside. She sees a huge opportunity for tourism leaders and organizations to use their positions to mobilize communities in restoring the environment.

And as she alluded to in that opening clip in reference to BC’s flooding in 2021, you don’t have tourism when the highways wash out. So the time is ripe for cooperation between sectors. And Veronica is one of those people who can show us how it’s done. So get ready to learn from this fascinating conversation and hear about solutions happening today.

And along the way, maybe also consider what might be possible if we treated travel as part of the ecosystem. Here are Rodney Payne and Veronica Woodruff.

Veronica Woodruff: My name is Veronica Woodruff. What I do isn’t as simple as a single title. I am a bit of a nature nerd. I am a professional ecologist, and I also work with communities to, um, make their projects a reality. 

Rodney Payne: You used to work at a very iconic bar called Dusty’s. 

Veronica Woodruff: Yeah, that’s true. 

Rodney Payne: Do you have any favourite memories from there?

Veronica Woodruff: Oh, so many, so many. You work at a place like an apres ski bar in Whistler, you have many, many memories over a decade. So yeah, it’s a, it was a fun time. I, I think everybody should do a stint in service. Yeah. 

Rodney Payne: Are you worried about the climate and biodiversity crisis? 

Veronica Woodruff: Yes. Uh, I’m worried because the data is bad.

I see things in my own backyard, but then I also look more globally and The things that we have seen over the last year and beyond that things aren’t aren’t Making a lot of sense anymore. So yes, I’m worried. 

Rodney Payne: How worried do you think we should be? 

Veronica Woodruff: Like we collectively as a human society on earth. I think we should all be worried.

Rodney Payne: Do you see the people around you? acting in a rational way in this moment? 

Veronica Woodruff: I think it’s not fair to say rational. I think we have a culture currently that doesn’t allow for the conversations about how we might be doing something wrong or how we could do something better. We don’t fit that into our everyday conversations very well because we’re all quite busy.

We have important things happening at all times and then to bring something in that could potentially, you know, influence your children, your grandchildren, uh, you know, it’s not happening in your backyard this minute. It’s just a hard thing for a human to consider in their day to day when it’s, you’ve already got a lot of things on the go.

So that’s a long way of saying, I think we should start prioritizing this culturally and as a society, yes. 

Rodney Payne: It’s ironic that you just said, it’s not happening in your backyard this minute, because actually it is happening in your backyard this minute. Can you tell me? About what’s just outside the window and where we were yesterday.

Veronica Woodruff: Yeah, I live on the banks of the Lillooet River within Lil’wat Nation traditional territory. So, uh, and the Lillooet River is An incredible system, which is part of the Fraser River. So a big important river system in BC and the Lillooet is influenced by a whole range of mountain processes And, uh, including Canada’s largest landslide, which occurred in 2010, and that has been impacting our flood risk.

So, uh, we have a incredible amount of deposition. So all the sand and silt that came off the mountain is now moving down the river and is settling. at the bottom of the river, which pushes the water levels up and over the dikes. The flood protection that currently protects my house. So I can stand on my deck and watch the progression of a flood in years like 2016 or 2021 or 2024.

Rodney Payne: What caused that landslide? 

Veronica Woodruff: That particular landslide was caused by uh, by extended period of hot weather in the Alpine, it was on Mount Meager and it’s a glacial topped, uh, volcano. And as we’re seeing warmer and warmer temperatures, especially in those higher elevations, that Uh, those glaciers are receding, so one of the bigger instabilities, So this area of, um, the mountains been described as a mountain made of ball bearings because of the last time it erupted 2400 years ago, uh, cooled quickly.

So there is a lot of big slopes that are going to come from the top of the mountain and end up in the valley. So that particular slide in 2010 was warm in the Alpine, water was running down and a huge Area of the mountaintop slid. So 50 million cubic meters of sediment. This resulted in a run out of 12 kilometres.

So an enormous impact to the valley. And so this is upstream about 50 kilometres. The river where the landslide happened, um, on the Lillooet River is the same one that flows by my house here. 

Rodney Payne: As we see more of those types of sort of strange weather events, hot weather in the alpine environment. Are you seeing other similar landslides around?

Veronica Woodruff: Uh, oh yeah. You’ve, since, we’ve seen some big ones recently, so Joffre, um, up at Joffre Lakes on the Duffy Lake Road. So that landslide, that’s that melting permafrost. So this was again a glaciated mountain, those glaciers have receded now enough, uh, but underneath the rock there are, um, there’s permanent ice under there and that permafrost or permanent ice is starting to melt as well.

And so when that ice that’s holding those mountaintops together starts to melt, they start to fall. So we saw Joffre, uh, Extal Creek, along the Skeena, uh, was a recent one, or Elliot Lake along the, um, central coast. So those are some three quite large slides, uh, that have impacted habitat and, um, certainly recreation.

Rodney Payne: What sort of time frame are we looking at for sort of losing our glaciers? 

Veronica Woodruff: Yeah, that’s a good question. I don’t have the research in front of me to give you an exact answer, but all the glaciers. have been receding. Um, you know, you can look, I’m, sitting in sea to sky. So you look at Wedgemount Glacier, Whistler Blackcomb, the changes that the ski hoves had to made with removing T bars because the glaciers receded so much.

They just announced this week that they aren’t hosting summer programs for the first time because the glacier is not strong enough to host skiing. Uh, for the first time I moved to Whistler in 95. And so this is, this is what’s happening. Glaciers are receding. 

Rodney Payne: And why does that matter? 

Veronica Woodruff: The rate of recession is accelerated, so of course we have seen, uh, different ice ages, we’ve seen ice accumulation, periods of extreme cold and extreme hot, but this has been really accelerating over the last hundred years, and kind of double timing in the last 50.

So it’s just that rate of changing landscapes. Uh, we haven’t seen that before. It’s so rapidly warming and it matters because why? Because we’re all connected. Like I’m connected by this river, the Lillooet and 50 kilometres upstream. Here we’ve had this landslide and now the landslide debris is affecting my home and my community, uh, because it’s increasing our flood risk.

The other thing is, um, this isn’t just a conduit for water, but of all the salmon that live in it. Salmon are one of those keystone species that there are, I think there’s 140 invertebrates in BC that have been identified that have altered their life cycle to align with a salmon spawn, because they know there is a lot of food for their offspring, uh, to eat.

When you lose that, the other thing is trees. There, you can trace those marine nutrients that those salmons are, that salmon is brought into a river, the bear drags the salmon carcass out of the river and munches on it, leaves it at the base of the tree. You can trace those marine nutrients throughout the entire ecosystem.

So losing something that is connecting all of these webs of life that may or may not be visible to you and I, it’s just so much more complex. 

Rodney Payne: So if our glaciers melt? 

Veronica Woodruff: That’s a great question. I think we undervalue how tightly wound we are with an ecosystem. So whether that’s the salmon, the trees, the water, I think that we are going to have a real hard time surviving without those working systems.

I don’t think we are going to find a tech solution to ecosystem services. 

Rodney Payne: What do you mean when you say we’re a piece of the ecosystem? 

Veronica Woodruff: There is no other way to say humans don’t exist outside the influence of air, water, land. We are profoundly connected to ecosystems. And, you know, I think it’s our human nature to be like, Oh, we’re godlike and we figured all this stuff out and all these dumb animals around us.

But that’s not the reality. It’s almost the opposite. And so I think we do lack that understanding, uh, on a society level of how much we are connected to, into a natural cycle. 

Rodney Payne: When you say it’s almost the opposite, do you think it’s almost sort of a juvenile or immature perspective on our role in the environment?

Veronica Woodruff: I don’t know. I think it’s the way that we think. I think we have fooled ourselves in thinking that, um, you know, it’s all going to be okay, or this is the way it’s always been, or it’s not that bad, or, you know, I’m much too busy. Like, I just think we almost don’t have the processing to, to really understand the scale of what’s happening.

Rodney Payne: Do you remember how you and I first met? 

Veronica Woodruff: Yeah, I think because it’s Pemberton is such a small town. Uh, we met because, uh, you know, someone said, Oh, you should talk to Rodney. And someone had said to you, Oh, you should talk to Veronica. And we met at Blackbird. And I think we were talking about, I knew you were interested in climate action.

And you were working in tourism. And I had just met you. decided I was never going to work in tourism again. Um, so I think that’s how we kicked off. 

Rodney Payne: Why were you moving away from tourism? 

Veronica Woodruff: I felt like there wasn’t any way to influence climate action in the tourism sector. So all I could see, like sure, there’s great things that can be done, um, by local businesses or DMOs or even municipalities.

But when you are, look at the true cost of tourism, so like scope three emissions, like how much are the emissions on flights? And, you know, Whistler is a big, it’s a big machine. We see there’s a lot of visitors there and a lot of good has come from that. But there’s also a lot of impact, so on trails, on species, on emissions.

So I, I had a hard time figuring out how tourism was going to be any kind of driver of change. And I thought I could be more influential in other sectors. 

Rodney Payne: So where did that lead you? What did you, what did you choose to focus your time on? 

Veronica Woodruff: That’s a great question. I, I chose to focus my time on the things that I have been building my career on.

So restoration, and in order to achieve restoration goals, building partnerships. I have bartending for 10 years to thank for being social enough to be able to connect with people. And so we get, it’s that building of partnerships that I’ve been able to accomplish so many amazing restoration projects for a wide range of species over the last 20 years of career.

Rodney Payne: What are some of the highlights? Can you give me a list of some of the different restoration projects you’ve been? Involved in or working on now. 

Veronica Woodruff: Sure. Yeah. Um, we’ve done a number of salmon projects throughout Pemberton with the Pemberton Wildlife Association and it’s through to Pemberton. It’s interesting to see those evolve over time.

Um, probably my favourite one was working with tailed frogs on a tailed frogs dream reconstruction project. So that was really neat because they’re such interesting species, you know, tailed frogs, they live as tadpoles for five years in these fast moving flowing mountain streams, which is so weird because they just have their mouths stuck to rocks for five years.

It’s a weird process. So yeah, tailed frogs are pretty cool. Uh, and then sharptail snakes. So one of Canada’s rare snakes. So we did some restoration work to protect hibernacula. So the basically snake hotels where they spend their winters hibernating, uh, and giving birth. We had, um, some mountain bike trails that We’re bisecting some of the important habitats.

So we deactivated trails, we built new workarounds, and, um, that was another really great one. And then, of course, working on Mount Meagher, on the, the ecosystem restoration on the landslide debris. So how are we going to start to grow vegetation on this incredible scar in the valley bottom? So that’s what I’ve been focusing on more recently.

That’s probably my, the top of the list. 

Rodney Payne: Do you really think that we as humans can do enough good to make a difference in nature? 

Veronica Woodruff: Oh yeah, I do think, I actually think this is something that is a real opportunity for everyone to learn a little bit more about their backyard. I think there’s a lot of fear in some places, you know, like to go into a forest or, um, or even in the backyard, whether it’s a spider or a snake or one of those.

It’s totally human fears that are valid, uh, also, you know, the research that says that we can identify pretty much all of these hundred logos, yet we can’t figure out what five different species of trees are. This is again, like part of our connection, like you really should know what the names of those trees that live in your yard are, and we have an opportunity.

To do that, to start to develop those connections to nature and that can bring our You know hearts and minds into a space where we can start to have those conversations about okay Like well if nature’s suffering, wait a minute, this means I’m going to be suffering if I’m not already 

Rodney Payne: What examples can you give me to convince me that we can actually have a positive impact?

Veronica Woodruff: What examples can I give you? 

Rodney Payne: I think until I met you I found it You It’s hard to believe that we could actually really meddle in a positive way. 

Veronica Woodruff: Right. Yeah, we are not nature. So we can only have an influence, uh, as best we can. But you know, the famous quote of like, the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago.

And the second best time is today. I think about, so last year we were able to plant about 120, 000 trees at the landslide site, and I think about those 120, 000 trees. I have probably planted about maybe 20, 000 trees around town in the last 20 years, and it’s really fun to go and see the forests that we’ve planted with different students, different classrooms, the Nature Centre kids, and see how the forests are evolving over my life now.

There’s visual ways that you can. really be impacting ecosystems. 

Rodney Payne: Do you think if we really redirected our attention as a species globally towards giving nature a helping hand and getting out of the way where we need to, do you think we can really make a big difference? 

Veronica Woodruff: Yes, I have no doubt that we can make a difference if we focused on allowing nature to thrive.

I believe that in my heart and soul. I think the challenge is making that happen, like justifying the trade offs. 

Rodney Payne: What’s stopping us? 

Veronica Woodruff: Money, and greed, and our structure of our current society. 

Rodney Payne: We’re close to one of the most popular tourism destinations in Canada. There’s a lot of money in this valley. Do you get frustrated by where that goes?

Veronica Woodruff: Mmmm. No, I don’t think I internalize any of that. Actually, that’s not true. I think sometimes it’s hard where you go someplace where you have gone for 20 years and you show up there and The forest has been altered so profoundly, or some space that was sacred in some ways. And this is just my experience in 20 years.

I think about someone, like a Lil’wat elder, who has grown up on this land, and then shown up to this place where they’ve learned from over time. Like, so, my way of dealing with that, it’s really a mourning, and then I kind of move on. I, I can’t, focus on the loss too, too deeply, or I think you can, I could be drawn into some kind of like serious depression.

So I try to just focus where I can influence and, uh, mourn and move on. And especially if it’s something I can influence, if it’s a management issue around, say, a dirt bike or a bike, or there’s no risk in reaching out to those communities and saying, Hey, what happened here? How can we do that better? 

Rodney Payne: You mentioned that. You sort of focused your career on environmental issues. Do you still think that tourism is really quite disconnected from the problems? 

Veronica Woodruff: Yes, I do think that. To be honest, I never connected tourism to It really felt like a sector, that tourism is a sector that was doing things over there. It was working outside of the work that I was doing in restoration or, um, even any kind of environmental work, environmental education.

There was just no overlap. Of course, there was, you know, some, like, cursory, like, Oh, someone wants to look at salmon. Can you take them there? Like, sure. You know, but there wasn’t, like, I was going to participate in the tourism machinery. and that was going to help with this other part of my life. Getting to know tourism a little bit better and with the way that those organizations are set up, they are incredibly well funded, they are well connected with all the right people, and I think they genuinely want to do the right things for the destinations.

So I’ve changed my mind a little bit on wanting to work with tourism as someone who can maybe bring a different perspective to the table. 

Rodney Payne: Have you had any examples of where that collaboration has worked really well? 

Veronica Woodruff: Absolutely. Uh, so an example of a place where collaboration worked really well from a tourism standpoint in Pemberton, uh, has been with the, mountain bike trails.

So mountain bike, mountain biking in this town is exploding. It’s always been a mountain bike town, you know, well, since I’ve been here. And most recently, uh, we had a trails management plan completed that the regional district, Lil’wat Nation and Parks and Trails BC put together, uh, with input from the trails organizations.

And now they’ve put together a working group to make sure that. the management of those trails is happening according to the management plan. So I, I am at the table. So we have this now, uh, representative from these nature based organizations. So the Pemberton Wildlife Association and Stewardship Pemberton that can have input on what’s happening on the trails.

And I think this is unique in some ways. Like usually those environmental organizations aren’t brought in on management decisions on the land, not because they’re omitted. I think it’s just people hasn’t, haven’t thought that these two pursuits might be conflicting. So it’s been really interesting to have this collaborative working group talking, uh, regularly and working together on some of the issues.

I was going to say we should talk about that highways washing out and you don’t have tourism when there’s no highway. 

Rodney Payne: Yeah, let’s talk about that. A lot of these things we’re talking about in the abstract, glaciers melting, you know, that might affect our rivers and food supply in 10 years, but that’s 10 years away.

You know tourism well enough to know the impacts of weather on tourism, the impacts of more extreme weather events. How do you think about that? 

Veronica Woodruff: Yeah, that’s interesting because when the atmospheric rivers hit B. C. and all the highways got washed out, Highway 3 and Highway 5, and you know, Princeton was flooded and Merritt, and around the same time, B.C. Tourism announced a fund that came out, 60 million for tourism. And I was so, um, I looked at that 60 million for tourism and I thought, God, no one’s gonna go to those places if the highway doesn’t exist. Why are we investing in that right now? Why aren’t we investing in highways or even the landslides that came down there was a ton of like incredible stories of people that smelled wood and then their car was washed off the highway and so all of those Fraser Canyon slides that came down and thankfully, you know, people did lose their lives in the Duffy Lake and in other areas.

And, um, but many people didn’t and could tell the story of how it happened. So now we’ve got these landslide scars there, you know, 60 million you could have bought. Alder and other early successional species and seeded those areas while it was still muddy and get plants growing for the next year because all of those things are intersecting our salmon spawning rivers.

Um, so I was feeling a bit like, how does this money for tourism work when we have our highways washed away? There was something, there was a disconnect there. I did talk to a provincial person in the know, and you know, they’re like, it’s just such a tiny part of the budget. When you look at all the rebuilding and all the things that have to happen, like that 60 million is a rounding error, like all of the things that are going to go into rebuilding the highways are just, that money will come.

So they, I don’t know if that made me feel better, but really, I just think the tourism industry has an opportunity right now to consider how it’s going to work in the future around these challenges that all of our communities are seeing. 

Rodney Payne: When you spend so much time thinking about environmental restoration and the way you’re showing that that can solve big problems for communities, do you think we’re missing the opportunity there?

Veronica Woodruff: Yeah, a hundred percent. I think we’re missing that opportunity in a lot of areas. And, you know, some of it is like, well, that’s the way we’ve always done it. You know, this is the way forestry works, or this is the way mining reclamation works. And it’s, innovation is hard to, you know, slide into really ingrained practices.

Um, especially when they’re tied to regulation or, you know, for industries that are just well established. So I think there’s so many opportunities when you look at like a tech world where it’s like, you know, move fast, break shit. When you think about that in relation to a well ingrained industry, like mining or forestry that has a government body oversight.

There’s no moving fast and there’s no breaking things there. And so maybe we need to integrate a little bit of that kind of thinking about being able to change our response times to add innovation into the things that we’re doing in restoration, in ecosystem restoration space.

David Archer: This has been Travel Beyond presented by Destination Think. And you just heard Rodney Payne speaking with Veronica Woodruff. For more resources and show notes, visit our website at DestinationThink. com. This episode was produced and has theme music composed by me, David Archer. Sarah Raymond de Booy is my co producer.

Lindsay Payne, Jamie Sterling, and Cory Price provided production support. If you like what you hear, please take a moment to give us a 5 star rating to help more people find our show. We’re going to have Veronica back with us again in a future episode, where she’ll give us some insights into what leadership as part of an organization means today and what you can do about it.

We’ll be back next time. Talk to you again soon.