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Jan. 18, 2008
Environmentalism as a career
For Tzeporah Berman, it's like Tu b'Shevat all year round.
OLGA LIVSHIN
The Jewish early spring holiday of Tu b'Shevat is often called the birthday of trees. This year, to celebrate Tu b'Shevat, the Jewish Museum and Archives of B.C. is presenting the public lecture Who Will Repair It? The lecturer, Tzeporah Berman, is one of the leaders of the eco-movement in Canada. She is the program director of ForestEthics, an organization dedicated to protecting endangered forests worldwide.
"We asked Berman to come and speak because she clearly is not someone who takes trees for granted. Being raised in a religious household, she participated in the tree-planting on Tu b'Shevat as a child, and her Judaic background had definitely been a factor in her choice of her life's work," said the museum's education co-ordinator, Greg Robinson.
A student of environmental studies from Toronto, Berman first came to Vancouver Island in 1991 for a summer practice. Having fallen in love with the rugged beauty of the ancient Clayoquot forest, she returned the next year to complete her studies. To her dismay, the forest she camped in a year before had disappeared. What she found instead was mutilated land, a huge field of freshly logged stumps.
Shocked by the barbarity and speed of logging that was decimating the wilderness, she joined the protest group Friends of Clayoquot Sound (FCS), which was organizing logging blockades in the area. Before long, she became one of the trailblazers of the crusade for Clayoquot.
In the summer of 1993, after the British Columbia government had made the decision to log 75 per cent of the old-growth forest, the fight for the forest spilled out of the province. While the FCS blockaded the logging roads, demonstrators all over Europe picketed Canadian embassies and the faces of Berman and other Clayoquot activists adorned national and provincial papers and TV screens.
Bob Bossin, a folksinger who also participated in the campaign to save Clayoquot, writes on his website: "Over 10,000 people passed through the protest camp that summer.... Nine hundred were arrested for attempting to block the logging trucks. It was a level of civil disobedience unprecedented in Canadian history. Tzeporah Berman was the chief spokeswoman. She was so effective that, when Premier Harcourt flew to Europe on a damage control mission, Greenpeace flew Berman over to debate him at every stop."
Later that summer, Berman was arrested, facing several years in prison for aiding and abetting hundreds of criminal charges. Fortunately, her fight attracted many supporters. After more than a year of legal proceedings, the court dismissed the case.
Legal hurdles have not been the only obstacles in Berman's life. Because of her uncompromising position, she started getting death threats. Overwhelmed by the negative publicity, she escaped for a two-week vacation. When she returned, she found her Vancouver home torched. Afraid for her life, she accepted a job offer at the Greenpeace San Francisco office.
She didn't abandon her fight for Clayoquot but she had changed her approach. "When it [democracy] fails, we need to be more sophisticated, we need to look for new strategies to build power," she said. The blockades of Clayoquot obviously didn't work – the logging continued. What would work?
Greenpeace devised a novel strategy: to hit the logging company in the wallet. Berman became the spokeswoman for the new campaign. Focusing on the customers of the logging giants, Berman and her associates tried to persuade the printers and readers of phone books and catalogues to change the paper they buy.
When Bell Canada learned that their phone books were made from the 1,000-year-old trees, they were inclined to listen. Scott Paper and other companies listened, too. Confronted by the prospect of losing customers if they didn't change their logging practice, MacMillan Bloedel started negotiations. Those negotiations resulted in the agreement of 1999, which marked a tentative victory for Clayoquot. It proved that talking was possible between the loggers and the protesters, if all parties were willing to compromise.
For Berman, that victory was the beginning of her arduous road to save the earth's forests. She spearheaded the struggle for the Great Bear Rainforest, 35 million acres of wilderness on the West Coast of Canada. She recalled that moment vividly: "I remember grabbing a marker and drawing a circle around the map and saying, 'We want this.' We called it the Great Bear Rainforest. At the time on the maps it was referred to as the Midcoast Timber Supply Area. There is a lesson here in branding."
After a few years with Greenpeace, Berman co-founded the company ForestEthics. The company's website states: "When we find that endangered forests are being destroyed, we determine which corporations are purchasing the products of that destruction. If a corporation refuses to change its practices, we hold that company publicly accountable – with protests, websites, e-mail campaigns, national advertisements and more."
Because of the efforts of Berman and her colleagues in ForestEthics, many corporations, like Home Depot, Staples and Victoria's Secret, have recently changed their policies regarding paper and wood products, forcing the logging companies to adapt to the more eco-friendly solutions. The agreement to protect five million acres of the Great Bear Rainforest was reached in 2006.
Now, Berman and her family are back in British Columbia, working on her next project - Boreal Forest, the last big old forest on the planet. Stretching like a green, breathing belt across northern Canada, the Boreal is one of the largest intact ecosystems in the world. Berman said, "... those wild places that we depend on for basic ecosystem services – the air we breathe and the water we drink – those forests are at their limit and we need to treat these issues and those forests as though they are our life boat, because they are."
In addition to her work for ForestEthics, Berman participated in the 2007 documentary The 11th Hour, directed by Leonardo DiCaprio. She also makes frequent speaking tours across North America and Europe, trying to educate as many people as she can on environmental concerns.
"I'm inspired by our success, by the tireless struggle of so many people towards our common goals," she said in a telephone interview. "And I'm invigorated by my sons. They make me centred and even more productive then before. I'm doing it for their future."
Michael Barkusky, a representative of the local Judaic environmental group Adam va-Adamah, which is sponsoring a reception after Berman's upcoming lecture, said: "Adam va-Adamah ... certainly shares Berman's passionate concern for the natural environment and a sense that the world faces a serious ecological crisis in coming years. We also agree that this crisis is not simply a matter of science, economics or politics (although it involves all of those things, too) but is a matter of ethics. The Jewish religious tradition requires us to see the ecological crisis as an ethical and spiritual issue, on which one cannot simply be neutral or 'not care' without being seriously at variance with the ethical traditions of our nation."
Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer.
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