by Valhalla Wilderness Society
Dear Greenpeace: Tzeporah Berman and her organization, ForestEthics, introduced into British Columbia a new kind of environmentalism called the collaborative movement. This approach means environmental groups collaborating with some our most destructive corporations and most anti-environment governments.  It is based on the fact that corporations are always willing to give a little to conservation in order to get a lot. 

 

And corporations have gotten a lot from it. ForestEthics and its allies endorsed a plan to log two-thirds of the Great Bear Rainforest under "Ecosystem-based Management" with logging standards that make a mockery of the name, followed by an endorsement of a plan to recover the endangered mountain caribou without appreciably reducing the rate of logging of its habitat.

Last year Bermann shocked many BC environmentalists by becoming the leading advocate of private power projects on BC's rivers and streams at a time when most of the environmental movement and a large swathe of the general public were fighting them tooth and nail.  Many of these were projects with huge carbon footprints that would do devastating damage to rivers and coastal ecosystems.

During the election, Berman, ForestEthics and allies shocked many in the province with their outspoken support of the current government's plan to privatize our rivers, while totally ignoring the government's plan to pipe dirty tarsands oil across BC and load it into oil tankers in BC's vital coastal waters - all under the claim of concern about climate change.

Berman then shocked many around the world by giving Premier Gordon Campbell an award at the Copenhagen climate change summit, despite the fact that BC's climate action remains minuscule and the government remains committed to piping the tar sands oil to the coast. This was viewed by many as a publicity stunt at a time when there was world focus on Canada's obstructionism of climate change reforms, and the protests by many international activists against the tarsands.

Life on Earth is facing a death sentence because of our burning of fossil fuels. This is not a time for environmentalists to meet behind closed doors with Big Oil and Big Power Producers. A time when life on Earth depends upon a major transformation is not a time for minor concessions from industry in return for endorsements of their major destructive activities.

 

Whatever one thinks about the merits of private power projects as "green energy", there is no question to anyone that tarsands oil is not green energy. Berman's ability to ignore the Campbell government's role in planning to pipe tarsands oil to a huge oil terminal on the coast has made it astonishing and hugely objectionable to many in the BC environmental movement (including myself and my colleagues) that Greenpeace has chosen Berman to head its energy campaign.