Photo: Dean Gaudry (L) at a 2020 GaLTT conservation planning workshop with GaLTT members Kerry Marcus, Tom Cameron, and John Peirce. Dean attended as a representative of Nanaimo & Area Land Trust.
Article by Trish Matson
In October of 2024, RDN director Vanessa Craig and GaLTT president Hugh Skinner cut the ribbon to mark the RDN’s acquisition of a 78-acre property known as Wilkinson Woods, an addition of woodland that has now increased the size of the original 707 Community Park to 1137 acres. Recently, GaLTT past president and conservation chair Rob Brockley and I met with Dean Gaudry and his spouse Lauren Young to discuss their history with the property and their motivation for selling it to the RDN, rather than privately—a decision that was undoubtedly less financially lucrative. “There are different kinds of bank accounts in life,” Lauren tells us. “We loved that property and wouldn’t have felt good if someone had cut down all the trees and developed it.” This conservationist ethic makes sense, given Dean was a founding member of the Nanaimo & Area Land Trust (NALT) close to 30 years ago, and remains its co-chair.
In the late 1980s Dean began to feel increasingly “despondent about the environment,” recognising a growing “existential threat to the well being of the planet.” He thus felt motivated to get involved with the environmental movement in Nanaimo. As a member of the The Newcastle Pavilion Society he met community activist Barbara Hourston; the two would eventually found VITAL (Vancouver Island Transportation and Land Use), the Nanaimo Cycling Coalition and, ultimately, NALT, which, Dean notes, was involved in the earliest stages of British Columbia’s Land Trust movements.
Dean is proud of all that NALT has accomplished over the years, beginning with “Project 2000,” wherein they identified Nanaimo’s watersheds and engaged in extensive public outreach and education about watershed protection; followed by fundraising that contributed towards the acquisition of the Nanaimo River Regional Park; and then their first “stand alone project,” the creation of Linley Valley Park, which Dean calls a particularly special and “peaceful oasis in the city.” NALT then turned their attention to the 525 acres that would become Mount Benson Regional Park, for which they co-hold the conservation covenant—a property that its out-of-province owners had initially hoped to ‘skin’ and develop.
While Dean advocates for conservation, he also has a long-standing interest in forestry. In the late 70s he spent a year working in heli-logging and later started a company that did thinning and spacing. But as his environmental concerns grew, he became increasingly interested in alternatives to traditional forestry. Then, in the mid-80s, he saw a poster advertising a walk in Wildwood Ecoforest, and it was thus that he met Merv Wilkinson, in whose honour he and Lauren would later name the Gabriola property.
For decades, Merv Wilkinson practiced a sustainable forestry business on his 138 acre property south of Nanaimo, a model of forestry management antithetical to clearcutting and plantation-style monoculture. The ecoforest approach meant that every five years or so Merv would harvest only a select number of trees, chosen because of size, current market value and the needs of the surrounding forest. This sustainable mode of cutting importantly permits the maintenance of a thriving forest ecosystem.
Dean formed a friendship with Merv and became “very smitten” with the idea of being a woodlot owner—a vision that brought together his love of trees, entrepreneurial spirit and ecological ethos. Rather than understanding conservation to require ‘locking up’ and doing nothing with the land, he advocates for its care and management, which may include selective tree harvesting. He notes that the Garry Oak meadows were historically managed by the First Nations, who did regular burns and cultivated the camas lily. “Forestry is a great resource,” he emphasises; “wood is useful and beautiful—and we can actually have a sustainable way of cutting that provides for a forest with all of the side benefits.”
With this vision, Dean and Lauren spent years looking for a small forest of their own and, in 2000, found a perfect 78 acres of woodland on Gabriola. They had most of the property rezoned as ‘private managed forest,’ setting aside and clearing 5 acres with the intent of planting an orchard. Knowing they would need water, they commissioned a geotechnical assessment and determined that they could in fact build a substantial pond, approximately 3/4 of an acre and 15 feet deep, drawing on drainage above the property and groundwater. Dean spoke with some passion about the possibility of creating this feature not only as a prospective recreational area for Gabriola but also crucially as an additional source of water during the dry summer months and as a fire-fighting reservoir.
For several years Dean and Lauren worked with GaLTT with the aim of placing an unusual form of conservation covenant on the remaining 73 acres, one that would protect its ecological values in perpetuity while allowing for a small amount of sustainable harvesting. The major difficulty was finding a willing co-covenant partner with experience managing the complexities of this type of covenant.
When Dean and Lauren decided they needed to sell Wilkinson Woods, they chose to prioritise the values of community and conservation and keep it “in the public domain.” By offering a sizeable financial contribution, GaLTT was able to convince the RDN to purchase the property as parkland and thus protect and share with Gabriola the woodland Dean and Lauren had grown to love.
