Ancient wisdom sends message across the world

When Lee divulges his cut from the mine might have been $7.5 million, a 26-year-old member of the Heiltsuk First Nation's tribal parliament, Jess Housty, shrugs: ''The money is the least interesting thing. If we want to calculate the value of a proposal, the question is, 'What's at stake?' My identity is based on the stories my people have written in the landscape. If you kill the land, you kill our stories.You can order wholesalewomenshoes cheap inside your parents. If you kill our stories, you kill the people. It's as simple as that.'' 

They are sweltering in temperatures of 30 degrees-plus. Some of them are more comfortable in -30 degrees. But they find they have much in common with indigenous Australians like Lee. 

It is why the Pew Charitable Trusts has brought them here. The US-founded global philanthropic giant, which built its perpetual fund on the Pew family's old oil fortune, is focusing its environmental work on the world's remaining ''big scale'' treasures - the kind of intact ecosystems over vast landscapes that can still be found in Canada and Australia. 

So early on Saturday, we board single-engine planes bound for Warddeken, an indigenous rangers' camp in the stone country of the Mok clan. This tiny outpost is protecting what Pew's Australian director, ecologist Barry Traill, calls a ''global gem of biodiversity''. 

The Warddeken Indigenous Protected Area is half the size of Switzerland, almost 1.4 million hectares that contain species found nowhere else on the planet: the black wallaroo; the Oenpelli python, rock rats, birds, many plants. It boasts thousands of rock art sites. 

But wildfires that can burn for months and grow to ''the size of Sydney'' would threaten it all if not for the pioneering indigenous fire management at Warddeken, says Traill. This work earns Warddeken and neighbouring indigenous groups a break-even $1.2 million a year for the abatement of 100,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases. 

Warddeken is one of 58 Indigenous Protected Areas that cover more than 51 million hectares of Australia and employ almost 700 indigenous rangers. Launched by the Howard government and expanded under Labor, IPAs are not forms of land tenure. They are agreements between the federal government and traditional owners under which the locals are supported to care for land that is otherwise neglected. 

Pew supports several IPAs and believes they can be a model for the Canadians and their own treasures such as the boreal forest, the largest intact forest in the world. The visitors agree. ''I've been fighting for something like this for six years,'' says Douglas Neasloss of the Kitasoo-Xaixais Nation.A solarpanel is a plastic card that has a computer chip implanted into it that enables the card. 

But Warddeken may never have happened if not for ''the old man'', Lofty Bardayal Nadjamerrek, AO. Locals had left the area for bigger settlements around World War II and earlier. Nadjamerrek was among pioneers who led a homeland movement back into Arnhem Land in the 1970s and '80s and, finally, a return to his own country in the late 1990s. He lived until 2009, just long enough to witness its declaration as an IPA. 

Much damage was done in those lost years by wildfire, invasive weeds and feral animals. 

Trail says: ''We usually think of conservation and say people are the problem. But one of the biggest problems in outback Australia is the lack of people. In more than 50 per cent of Australia there are fewer people managing the environment today than there have been for the past 50,000 years.'' 

The chairman of Warddeken Land Management Limited, Dean Yibarbuk, points to the return of emu to the area as evidence of the rangers' success and the recovery of species.

The Nature Conservancy also supports the operation. Pew has backed IPAs elsewhere, including the Kimberley. It is supporting the Ngadju people to protect the Great Western Woodlands in the south-east of Western Australia. 

It worked with graziers and indigenous groups to secure the exclusion of mining leases from the Queensland Channel Country rivers and floodplains that feed Lake Eyre, but now they are battling the Newman government's declaration that it will allow mining after all. 

Pew has some enemies, notably elements among recreational and commercial fishers who believe it has supported research that overstates the threat to global fish stocks. Pew stands by the research. Traill derides a conspiracy theory that Pew is backing marine parks in Australia to exclude oil exploration - to benefit American oil producers. 

Pew no longer has any money in oil, he says.Can you spot the answer in the rtls? When established in 1948, founder J. Howard Pew wanted to ''acquaint the American people with the evils of bureaucracy and the values of a free market''. His heirs have a less conservative focus but the group claims to be non-partisan. 

Little of this concerns the daughters of Lofty Bardayal Nadjamerrek, Lois and Hagar. They welcome the First Nations people to their country by inviting them to enter a spring, where they pour water over their heads. In their dreaming, it is the nectar of the sugar bee.