The Rock's Solid People

By Rob Antle

Summary

In the tiny town of Main Brook near the tip of Newfoundland’s Great Northern Peninsula lives a woman the locals call the Eider Lady.

And the term hasn’t always been used as a compliment, Barb Genge says.

When she first got involved with projects aimed at conserving the area’s dwindling common eider duck population, there was no great love for her work in the community.

It was the late 1980s, a difficult time for environmental causes in Newfoundland and Labrador, no matter how well-intentioned.

Residents of the province were still burning from the glare of the international spotlight turned on them in the 1970s and 1980s. A star-driven international lobbying campaign led to the collapse of the commercial sealing industry.

That left many in the province with bitter feelings.

“It was a pretty hair-raising experience, because a few years before that, they stopped the seal hunt,” Genge recalls. “I took a really hard ride from it, because (it’s difficult) when you do stuff before it’s acceptable.”

In fact, in 1989, when Genge began getting involved with conservation work, the term “environmentalist” was still a dirty word in Newfoundland.

“So I got labelled, because I was working to bring back a resource that got depleted. People looked at me as a big conservationist, and figured I wanted to stop hunting.”

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