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August 31, 2007
Using the whole set of tools
Lobbying sets wheels of environmental change in motion.
KATHARINE HAMER EDITOR
Growing up in London, Ont. – a university town – Tzeporah
Berman got used to sharing the High Holiday dinner table with dozens
of strangers.
"I can remember one night saying to my mom as we were leaving
synagogue, 'Who are these people and why are they coming again for
dinner?' " Berman recalled. "For every High Holiday, my
mother would cook for 20 people, even though we were six, because
she would assume that we would 'pick up the strays,' as my father
called it and we always did – we always had a house full of
students who couldn't get home for the holidays and that was just
part of what we were doing."
The co-founder of the environmental organization Forest Ethics believes
that her upbringing "had an enormous influence on who I am
today. My family really emphasized the importance of community work
and tzedakah and that was, from the time I was very little, a big
part of our lives.
"For me, the work that I do is an extension of the same thing
– you wouldn't want to sit down to dinner and know that there
were others out there who didn't have a place to celebrate and I
wouldn't want to see an announcement made by the British Columbia
government that they had decided not to protect a particular old
growth area and know that I could have had an influence on them
making a different decision. I think, especially in today's day
and age, relative to environmental issues, I believe there is too
much emphasis on individual lifestyle and choices and, while I think
that's important, I think there is a need to stretch and engage
in larger decisions and be a part of helping to shape the future."
Berman is one of numerous environmental and policy experts interviewed
in the new film The 11th Hour. The documentary, produced
and narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio, posits that we have reached a
moment in time where we must act as a global community to prevent
catastrophic and irrevocable damage to the planet. Although her
participation in the film has led to Berman hobnobbing with Hollywood
stars – and raised the profile of her organization – she's
more concerned with one of its key messages: the need for a unified
front in tackling threats to the environment.
"We are at a point now," she said in an interview with
the Independent, "where these issues will only be solved
by us coming together and organizing to make change. What I mean
by that is everything from organizing groups of people and communities
to influence big government decisions, and smaller projects in our
communities to better organize joint use of resources, like community
tool shares and community transportation issues or community gardens,
because the task ahead of us is to reduce our ecological footprint,
which means everything from increasingly buying local to identifying
ways to decrease our carbon footprint, the amount of energy that
we use and our transportation use.
"I think that these challenges require us to rethink the way
we live and the way that we organize our communities. We no longer
have the luxury of thinking of environmental issues as something
that's out there; that's a special interest, that's taken care of
by a small donation we make to an environmental group, or because
we recycle. We need to integrate our concern for the state of the
planet into our everyday lives. That's why I have been emphasizing
the need for engagement with the political process and engagement
in our own community."
Berman, who was front and centre in the Clayoquot Sound anti-logging
blockades back in the early '90s, now spends as much time negotiating
directly with governments and corporations. As part of Forest Ethics'
bid to stop retailers blitzing consumers with paper-wasting catalogues,
the organization staged 850 protests outside Victoria's Secret stores
across North America and ran a campaign of ads outing "Victoria's
Dirty Secret." It worked. Last December, Victoria's Secret
announced it would no longer produce catalogues from endangered
forests.
Similarly, in February 2006, Forest Ethics led the way to an agreement
with the province to protect five million acres of land in the Great
Bear Rainforest from logging. The deal also included provisions
for more ecologically sensitive forest management and the involvement
of local First Nations communities in their traditional territory.
Nonetheless, she thinks holding leaders' feet to the fire remains
a key strategy in the battle for global good. "I think the
only reason that I have the opportunity today to work with the largest
corporations in the world," she said, "is because of the
protests that I engage in and the sometimes very hard-hitting advertisements
that Forest Ethics places to raise awareness ... [you can] create
a relationship and work in partnership with a company, you can do
protests, you can do scientific and economic research ... these
are just different tools in the tool belt and the rate and extent
of environmental degradation today requires that we use them all."
Organizing our communities effectively, reducing consumption and
voting for politicians who genuinely support environmental change
(and are not, as Berman said wryly, merely engaged in "greenwash")
are just some of the ways in which today's environmentalists say
we can make a real difference.
At last week's preview screening of The 11th Hour in Vancouver,
Berman told the audience: "We have a responsibility not only
for what we do, but for what we don't do."
The 11th Hour is on general release starting Friday, Aug.
31. For more information about Forest Ethics, visit www.forestethics.org.
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