Before Tzeporah Berman became an “enemy of the state,” she was a student at the University of Toronto with thick glasses and an appreciation for a chubby little bird called the marbled murrelet.
Berman flew to British Columbia for fieldwork and spent an awed summer in the shadow of thousand-year-old, three-hundred-foot-tall trees, listening for bird calls at dusk and dawn. She figured she could help to protect the forest from logging if she could prove that cute murrelets nested there.
Alas, she returned the next year to a moonscape peppered with jagged stumps, the calling card of clear-cutting. What was bad for her thesis data collection was worse for the future of Canadian forests and thousands of species, so she decided to join a blockade in what would eventually become Canada’s largest campaign of civil disobedience in history (Never heard of it? Me neither, but this was way back in 1991, when dinosaurs without internet used to roam the Earth).
20 years later, Berman penned This Crazy Time, a book to “get you off your ass so that you can kick some.” It is part memoir, part dictation of lessons learned, and part throw-down to her fellow environmentalists.
Berman’s evolution from logging protester, to boardroom negotiator, to climate campaigner drives the narrative of the book. She first found her “voice” with a megaphone in hand, directing demonstrators who sat in front of tree-slaying, heavy machinery. Over 10,000 Canadians joined the protests in Clayoquot Sound, BC. Berman was arrested and charged with 857 counts of “aiding and abetting,” though she was acquitted shortly after her status as a media darling was secured. She was the spokesperson who convinced 86 per cent of Canadians that logging in Clayoquot should be stopped.
Yet, the logging continued, widespread outrage notwithstanding. “Democracy failed,” Berman concluded, so she decided to target the companies that were buying the wood. Berman opted for boycotts and met with far greater success. One particularly memorable campaign targeted Victoria’s Secret catalogues, skinny models printed on dead trees, delivered as junk mail at a rate of a million copies per day. Ads featured a scantily clad blonde bombshell toting a chainsaw under the headline “Victoria’s Dirty Secret.”
Boycott campaigns and parallel negotiations with paper customers have helped cancel millions of dollars of logging contracts for BC lumber. When a company agreed with Berman, they sought her advice on where to log, and how, which initiated her into the world of lesser evils. Some companies were sold on more sustainable logging, and Berman was then able to approach governments with her new allies. “It’s one thing to fight or ignore a bunch of hippies blockading a logging road; it’s quite another thing when those activists are backed by some of the largest corporations in the world.”
Despite her many successes, Berman’s book is surprisingly lacking in smugness. This is because she helped to save forests from commercial logging, only to see them threatened by climate change and its ravenous pal, the pine beetle. She realized “fighting for forest without taking on climate change was like repainting the Titanic after hitting the iceberg.” At first, this truth broke her spirits and she retreated to DVDs of Battlestar Galactica and cuddle sessions with her kids. Then Berman took full measure of the carbon behemoth looming on the horizon and rolled up her sleeves once again.
Canada has few credible environmental stars, and Berman is among them. She has survived death threats and media stardom, sold Paris Hilton on the merits of forest conservation, and negotiated with First Nations. It’s no fun being lectured about environmental apocalypse by a know-it-all, which is probably why Berman enlisted the help of a comedian, Mark Leiren-Young, as co-author. It seems like Berman promised not to be righteous as long as Leiren-Young wasn’t ironic, and the result is a reminder that it is still possible to be both earnest and funny.
Perhaps the book’s biggest contribution is Berman’s take on environmentalism’s “identity crisis.” Her calls for a pragmatic “new environmentalism” could use some branding help, but her suggestions are clear. Do what works, which is typically anything that will cost a business profit or cost a politician votes. Make reducing carbon emissions the top priority because climate change is by far the biggest environmental threat there is. Hydro dams flood forests and wind turbines kill birds, but activists need to keep their eyes on the goal.
Finally, come election time, there will be no perfect party or candidate, but people should vote for the leaders who hate carbon the most. “It just makes sense to vote for the person who’s going to save your ass.”
