The Living Forest Trust (formerly the Trust for Sustainable Forestry) is a registered Canadian charity in British Columbia that integrates forest conservation, watershed protection, and community‑scale living under one ecological management plan.

Our mission is to restore balance between people and the natural world—placing residents within ecosystems as caring stewards, not intruders. We build communities that live with forests, not apart from them, where conservation, culture, and livelihood coexist in regenerative harmony.

It began on Cortes Island…

On a small island off the coast of British Columbia, a group of visionaries gathered around a shared question: Could humans live within the forest without destroying it?

At a time when clear‑cutting threatened nearly every private forest on the coast, they imagined something different — a living model where people could build homes, raise families, and work with the land while ensuring the forest itself would never again be lost.

From that seed grew the Trust for Sustainable Forestry, founded by a coalition of planners, artists, and foresters — among them Ann Mortifee, Doug Makaroff, and Barry Gates. Together, they pioneered a new framework for conservation that joined ecological zoning, covenant protection, and community living under one plan.

Their first project, Everwoods, became the proof of concept — a 160‑acre forest community on Cortes Island where clustered homes were surrounded by permanently protected forest. The lessons learned there — balancing livelihood and protection, private ownership and public good — became the foundation for something larger.

Today, that experiment has evolved into the Living Forest Trust: a movement to bring forest‑integrated communities to landscapes across British Columbia and beyond. From Wildwood Ecoforest to Cortes Island and onward to new watershed sites on Vancouver Island, the work continues — rooted in the same idea that started it all: that people and forests can thrive together.