Enviro heroes: Tzeporah Berman

Environmental activist, PowerUp Canada

Blockades to boycotts to boardrooms. That's how Tzeporah Berman summarizes her journey from protest-organizer to environmental campaigner who is busily changing the way multi-million-dollar corporations do business and how government writes environmental policy.

As one of the founders and former director of ForestEthics, a non-profit environmental organization with offices in Canada, the U.S. and Chile, Berman led multiple initiatives supporting the organization's mission: to protect endangered forests. Thanks to ForestEthics and The Home Depot, for example, one million acres of natural forests are now being preserved in Chile.

ForestEthics has worked with many multinational companies, including Dell, Estée Lauder, Hewlett Packard, Staples, Williams-Sonoma and more to help them develop stronger environmental policies and ensure their suppliers maintain environmentally friendly practices. "The influence of the marketplace is integral to protecting the key areas of the natural forest that are left," says Berman. "Economic prosperity in the long term is tied to ecological prosperity now."

One of its most visible campaigns, Victoria's Dirty Secret, targeted the lingerie company's catalogue practices—and won, extending a much-needed lifeline to Canada's boreal forest.

It was during Berman's first demonstration—the 10,000-strong Clayoquot Sound protests in 1993 against logging giant MacMillan Bloedel—that she first started to formulate her plan to revolutionize environmental activism. When she and her fellow protestors saw no real change in logging practices after the protests, they were forced to reconsider their approach. "We kept asking questions like, 'If they didn't respond to people, what would they respond to?'"

That's when it hit home: money. Berman started strategic public-boycotting campaigns against MacMillan Bloedel's biggest customers, which resulted in the first cancellation of a multi-million-dollar contract by Scott Paper. This in turn led to the slow phasing out of clear-cut logging practices in Clayoquot Sound.

However, while the campaign had been a success, it had taken five years to accomplish, and Berman and her team were running out of time. "We log faster in Canada than almost anywhere in the world," she says, "about two acres a minute, 24 hours a day." Berman and her associates took a map, drew a circle around what was left of the intact valleys in B.C.'s coastal rainforests and named the area the Great Bear Rainforests. "It was an intense thing to do," says Berman. Former B.C. Premier Glenn Clark "called me an 'enemy of the state.'"

Not surprisingly, Berman persevered. In February 2006, the historic Great Bear Rainforest Agreement was signed, protecting five million acres of B.C.'s forest from logging and promising, among other things, new ecosystem-based forestry management in the rest of the B.C. rainforest, setting a new precedent for forest protection.

Berman is now executive director of PowerUp Canada, a non-profit calling for "stronger laws to address global warming," among other initiatives. As vocal as ever about this new cause, Berman was in Washington, D.C., in March, at the largest climate protest in North American history, calling on President Obama to pressure Canada to act strongly on climate.

This article is part of Enviro Heroes, a series spotlighting the efforts of individuals determined to make a difference. It was updated in April 2009.