Green-Stacey departing Environment Office

As his young family continues to grow, Benjamin Green-Stacey has decided that it is time for him to turn his attention to them, leaving his role as director of the Kahnawake Environment Protection Office (KEPO) on June 27.

“Everyone has been really supportive and understanding,” said Green-Stacey, who joined KEPO in September 2022 after working for the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) as a senior policy analyst.

Green-Stacey said he originally joined KEPO in 2022 to be able to spearhead tangible changes at the community level.

“That role involved a lot of national-level advocacy with the federal government, and it was kind of high-level work. There were not a lot of tangible outcomes associated with that advocacy. It involved helping to shape programs, but not necessarily being able to use those programs to actually make change on the ground,” said Green-Stacey.

At KEPO, he feels he’s been able to do exactly that.

While he said the tasks he has undertaken at KEPO are not something with a defined endpoint necessarily, calling his work a “project of projects,” he’s happy with what has been accomplished so far.

“I feel like I have been able to do a lot in the time that I have been with KEPO,” said Green-Stacey.

That includes setting up the Kahnawake Environment Advisory Committee (KEAC), the members of which are currently being finalized.

“That’s going to be a very powerful tool for engaging with the community and making sure that their priorities are reflected in KEPO’s focus going forward,” said Green-Stacey.

Part of that engagement process has also been having KEPO be present at community events to help educate Kahnawa’kehró:non on the environment around them - the animals and plants that are there and should be there and the invasive species that should not, for example.

There have also been the various cleanup efforts, which included the restoration of creeks on the territory.

Internally, he has also put the emphasis on establishing Kanien’kéha as an everyday language, with hopes of having it be the primary language of work by 2030.

“We started off with informal steps, but we’re trying to create more formal mechanisms to encourage that transition,” said Green-Stacey.

But the big event of Green-Stacey’s time at KEPO is the 2024 Chateauguay fuel spill, with KEPO and Green-Stacey being a big part of the Crisis Response Team.

“That was something that KEPO was not necessarily designed for,” said Green-Stacey.

“So there were some gaps in terms of where different organizations take responsibility for different things. Just by working through it collaboratively, we’ve been able to identify clear processes where we’ve got pretty well understood roles and responsibilities, and that’s continuing to be more formally fleshed out. We kind of went through it in real time.”

While that internal collaboration has been going well, proactive collaboration with neighbouring communities is another big point of contention that has come from the spill.

“We were able to figure out kind of new processes internally on how to respond, but I think we also need to develop those interfaces with external jurisdictions, and that’s something that is a much bigger conversation, and it’s not just environment, it’s external government relations in general, and that’s always been a challenge,” said Green-Stacey.

The departing director is happy of the steps KEPO has taken to serve the community, and he feels he is leaving the organization in good hands, no matter who ends up replacing him.

He is not saying never to a return, though.

“That’s something that I would like to do, at some point in the future, if the circumstances allow,” said Green-Stacey.

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