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february 2016 BCBusiness 41 bcbusiness.ca invested about a third of their Mitra windfall into the foundation and its work. By now, Peterson estimates that gure is between 80 and 90 per cent. At •irst, Peterson and Munck used Tula to fund initiatives across a variety of organizations, including the B.C. chapter of the Nature Conservancy of Canada, the Environmental Law Centre at the Uni- versity of Victoria, online news site the Tyee, the Centre for Microbial Research at UBC, and their telemedicine healthcare initiative in Guatemala called TulaSalud. Then, in 2009, they made their biggest investment yet: a science research centre on B.C.'s remote central coast. In late August of that year, the couple found themselves vacationing at a luxe •ishing lodge on Calvert Island called the Hakai Beach Resort. They were already committed donors to the Nature Conservancy of Canada, helping to secure tracts of coastal land, but they wanted to be more invested and establish a more continuous and better outtted presence on the coast. When they heard that the resort was about to be sold, they saw in its swanky bones the beginnings of a science eld station and made a cash o'er. Two weeks later, it was theirs—and the Hakai Institute (Hakai means "wide passage" in the Heiltsuk language) was born. It was ve times the scale of what Peterson had in mind but a thousand times as good: "I remember sitting there with Christina and saying, 'Well, if we do this it will monopolize our entire lives.' And it has." To travel to calvert island, located roughly 100 kilometres north of Port Hardy, is to survey B.C.'s remote riches. As one ¢ies north from Campbell River, the forests appear a green patchwork of logging stands, but then as Vancouver Island peels away from the mainland, the green gives way to wild islets scat- tered across the sea like crumbs. Further north still and the woods become boggier and soppier, the coastline weathered by the incessant waters of Hecate Strait. This is the heart of the Great Bear Rainforest, and the unceded traditional territories of the Wuikinuxv and Heiltsuk First Nations. On a brisk and overcast day in late September, Peterson tours Russ Lea, former CEO of America's National Ecological Observa- tory Network (NEON), across the Hakai Institute's various facilities. Day one of Lea's trip was spent on Quadra Island, where Peterson has amal- gamated four island proper- ties into a 30-acre secondary science campus. For this, day two, Peterson has chartered a seaplane to take Lea up to Calvert Island, where the 215-acre insti- tute lies. Ninety minutes into the ¢ight, Peterson points to a velveted green island limned by white breakwater on the hori- zon: "That's Calvert straight ahead." The Hakai Institute launched with a mission to build and run a long-term coastal and marine ecological obser- vatory on the central coast. Peterson, who professes a love for science since boyhood, saw a fruitful and untapped frontier of discovery in the bog¬y forests and corrugated shorelines of Calvert. He had this sense that if he could just get scientists out onto the landscape, they would inevitably make incredible dis- coveries. He wanted Hakai to become an REMOTE RESEARCH (From left) The dock and wet lab at the flagship research station at Calvert Island; Eric Peterson out on the boat with researchers; installing remote sensor net- work infrastructure on Calvert Island

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