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Sept. 2, 2011
A pragmatic environmentalist
Tzeporah Berman will speak at Capilano U. next week.
CYNTHIA RAMSAY
Everyone sets their own priorities in life and, for Tzeporah Berman, the environment – from saving the rainforests to saving the entire planet from the effects of climate change – is high on her list. It has been for more than 20 years now and, though she remains as committed as ever, her approach has changed. She still has within her the inflexible idealist who was arrested when protesting MacMillan Bloedel’s clear-cutting of Clayoquot Sound in 1993, but she has acquired many other responsibilities to juggle, including parenthood, and, at 42, has become known for her negotiating skill and pragmatism.
Berman, who is climate and energy co-director of Greenpeace International (in Amsterdam) and co-founder and executive director of PowerUp Canada, shares highlights of her activism career in her new book, This Crazy Time: Living Our Environmental Challenge, which she is promoting on a four-city national tour that will bring her to Capilano University on Sept. 7. The book, co-written by Vancouver filmmaker and journalist Mark Leiren-Young, is part personal memoir and part history of the modern environmental movement.
The promotional material (which, on a nitpicky note, used five pieces of paper) doesn’t do This Crazy Time – or Berman – justice. With quotes of praise from “the choir” and comparisons to Naomi Klein and No Logo, the publicists are, in effect, closing the door to any potential readers who are not radical environmentalists. Yet Berman is not a one-trick pony and, while she cares deeply about the state of the world, she doesn’t seem to see the need to avoid what are inconvenient – and, therefore, overlooked – truths for many committed activists, such as the fact that not all people who disagree with them are to be discounted as uncaring or ignorant, and not all companies are out to purposefully pollute and destroy precious resources.
From her book, it seems that Berman has learned to appreciate the value of education, cooperation and, not necessarily compromise, but compromise when necessary, to coin a phrase. She holds people to account and is not afraid to publicly embarrass companies and governments to achieve her goals – for example, ForestEthics, which she helped found, ran a campaign to stop stores from printing their catalogues on paper made from wood from Canada’s boreal forests; it ran with the headline, “Victoria’s Dirty Secret,” and featured a Victoria Secret lingerie model holding a hand-drawn chainsaw. However, in her various capacities with different environmental organizations, Berman also has given public kudos to former foes, such as MacBlo and Staples, when they have changed how they do business, not without criticism from other environmentalists.
Most importantly, Berman has become solution-oriented. As an example, she relates how, initially, when Greenpeace confronted companies like the New York Times and Home Depot about their use of endangered forests for wood and paper products, the organization could not provide them with suggestions for alternative sources. “We started having conversations about certification and to define and differentiate between logging practices so we could determine what ecologically responsible logging looked like,” writes Berman. “We had to move beyond simply opposing logging to figuring out how to create a classification for kosher wood.”
In such turns of phrase, as well as in passages about her upbringing, Berman’s Jewishness enters into This Crazy Time. She grew up in an observant Conservative household in London, Ont., and was involved in the Jewish community there from a young age, following in her parents’ footsteps. When her father died from complications in surgery and her mother died two years later, Berman was still a teenager; her oldest sister became the legal guardian of the kids. “My faith was shattered after my parents’ death, and I turned away from the synagogue except in one area,” writes Berman, continuing to explain that she still said Kaddish for her parents whenever there was a minyan, which was difficult because only men were counted at the time. She and her siblings joined a group lobbying for women to be included as part of the minyan, and Berman believes that “our story helped the cause, and we were able to convince the rabbi, cantor and synagogue board that change was necessary.”
Berman talks about being raised “in a family with a strong social conscience. We were taught to think about our community, to volunteer, to give a part of our allowance to tzedakah (charity).” She admits that, nonetheless, she started out her higher education in fashion design. After a trip to Europe, where she witnessed horrible air pollution in Greece and the effects of acid rain on the Harz mountains in Germany, which “horrified” her, she dropped fashion and enrolled in environmental studies. The rest, as they say, is history, and Berman structures This Crazy Time chronologically around several pivotal moments in her life (work) story to date.
This Crazy Time is a bit repetitive, as are many books intended to inspire: the message that we cannot rely on others to do the job, but that each of us can, and must, do our part to improve the environment comes through loud and clear. The book also has its self-congratulatory moments – Berman has cried many tears over the world’s future, apparently, and it seems that readers are supposed to appreciate that she is sacrificing time with her family to try and create her vision of a better future, because, of course, she is doing it for all of us, too.
On the whole, however, This Crazy Time is a well-written, interesting read. Berman seems to be a down-to-earth, reasonable person with a good sense of humor; someone who is intelligent, ambitious and very good at whatever job she undertakes; and someone who is self-confident enough to admit that she doesn’t know everything and doesn’t have all the answers. She is also open about her own inconsistencies with respect to living an environmentally pure life; she will travel by airplane, for example, and, while she doesn’t eat much meat, she is not 100-percent vegetarian. It is so much easier to consider the views of someone who is not “holier than thou,” especially when you don’t agree with them on every point. And it is this, as well as her seemingly genuine desire to listen to others, that makes Berman a much more effective activist than most.
Tzeporah Berman is speaking at North Shore Credit Union Centre for the Performing Arts, located in the Birch Building at Capilano University, as part of its Cap Speaker Series. For tickets ($15/$12) to the Sept. 7, 7:30 p.m., event, visit capilanou.ca/news-events/nscucentre.html.
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