Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist (34 page)

Once the Round Table is comfortable with its membership and mandate, it can move on to the next stage, the identification of issues and concerns. Issues are real points of substance that most members agree are important to the dispute or task at hand. Concerns are like worries, not always accepted by a majority of the members, but they must be given consideration even if only one member has the concern.

The process of identifying issues and concerns begins to allow the members to stop stating their positions, and to identify the reasons why they hold those positions. Instead of saying, “I am against the uranium mine”, they are asked to say why, such as “uranium mining may cause water pollution”. The process of identifying issues and concerns should be an exhaustive one; no stone should be left unturned. Even after all issues and concerns have been identified, this agenda item should be left open throughout the process, for additions if necessary. As a general rule in consensus process, the agenda should always be open to make it clear nothing has been cut off from discussion.

The issues and concerns should then be listed in some logical or methodical way. Sometimes a group of issues will come under a single general heading. The identification of issues and concerns will usually require two or three full meetings.

Then begins the process of working through the issues one at a time. For each issue, a process for information gathering is determined. Documents, maps, and experts are identified. All members of the Round Table should be able to put any information before the group and should be able to suggest experts who might shed light on the issue. This often requires a budget for bringing people to the table. In addition, it is often beneficial to go on field trips to see the location(s) involved in the dispute or discussion. For each issue or concern, all members should be satisfied the information-gathering phase has been sufficiently exhaustive and all relevant information is now before them.

The next stage involves the facilitator’s attempt to help find common ground on as many issues and concerns as possible. It is quite usual for the Round Table to reach unanimous agreement around many issues. In the case of a uranium mine, for example, it is likely the statement “Occupational exposure to radiation must be strictly monitored and controlled” would be unanimously adopted. But other statements, such as “Uranium mining should be banned in this country”, will likely not find unanimous support.

At this point the facilitator’s most important task is at hand. The facilitator must draft a document, outlining the nature of agreement or disagreement for each issue and concern, finding wording that is accepted unanimously by the Round Table members. This means producing a document expressing clearly where there is unanimous agreement, and where there is disagreement, a description of the nature of the disagreement(s) in words unanimously accepted by the members.

Thus, a consensus document can be produced even though there is disagreement on some points. The great benefit of this process is it provides the actual policy-makers, government, with a very clear expression of public opinion. Compared to the war of headlines in the media that often characterizes land use and other resource issues, the Round Table approach brings clarity and coherence to the forefront of the debate.

The Consensus Document should then be distributed widely in the community, and formally presented, in person, to the level(s) of government involved in decision-making. Then it is up to the political process to make decisions that bring public policy more in line with the round table’s advice. It is a very powerful tool because it is difficult for governments to ignore a clearly stated set of recommendations where everyone has agreed with the language.
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We would find out later this is one of the reasons governments don’t always like round tables, sometimes they cast too much light on the subject.

Global Warming: The Early Years

In the autumn of 1989, the B.C. government published a paper reporting on the amount of carbon dioxide being emitted from various industries and sectors in the province. This was early on in the province’s discussion of climate change and this was an important inventory as it provided a baseline for consideration of policies that might reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The report indicated that the forest industry was the largest emitter of carbon dioxide, followed by the transportation sector, heavy industry, and commercial and residential buildings. I studied the report and soon realized the forest industry was being unfairly used as a whipping boy. It had become a kind of national sport to attack the evil tree killers at every opportunity and here was another example of how they were messing up the environment.

Upon careful reading it became clear that most of the carbon dioxide emitted by the forest industry was from burning waste wood, bark, and biomass in sawmill and pulp mill operations. In other words, the industry was using renewable energy rather than fossil fuel. This prompted me to do two things. First I wrote an essay titled “Are All Carbon Atoms Created Equal?” in which I made the case that carbon dioxide from renewable fuels (biomass) should be treated differently from carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels, even though they are chemically identical.
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This is because biomass fuels are part of a cycle of carbon dioxide first absorbed by plants, in this case trees, then released by combustion, and then absorbed again by new growing trees. There is no cycle with fossil fuel combustion. Fossil fuels are a one-way trip taking carbon that was stored in the ground for millions of years and releasing it into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. This concept of distinguishing between CO
₂
from renewable fuels versus nonrenewable fuels has since been accepted by the international community of climate scientists and has been incorporated into the Kyoto Climate Change Treaty and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change policy.

Second, I paid a visit to Ray Smith, a friend of my dad’s and the president of MacMillan Bloedel, which was then B.C.’s largest forest company. I explained to Ray how the greenhouse gas inventory unfairly targeted the forest sector as the worst culprit. I also explained that the defense coming from spokespeople for the forest industry was just as misleading and off the mark. It had become standard practice among foresters to claim it was good to cut the old forest down and plant new trees because young trees were growing and absorbing more carbon dioxide than old trees that had stopped growing. While this is true, it is only half the story because when you cut trees down much of their stored carbon gets released in the form of carbon dioxide. In balance, forestry is close to neutral, but it can be a net carbon dioxide emitter (source) and it can be a net carbon dioxide absorber (sink). No matter what, forestry is far more in balance than fossil fuel combustion. But the industry wasn’t doing itself any favors by painting a rosier picture than it deserved. Ray took all this in and agreed it would be useful to create an initiative aimed at getting a better understanding of the carbon cycle, especially as it applied to the forest industry. He introduced me to his vice-president for research, Dr. Otto Forgacs. We got along famously.

Otto and I developed a plan and applied to the British Columbia Science Council for funding for research and meetings. We succeeded in bringing together, into regular round table meetings, all the significant emitters and regulators of greenhouse gases in the province as well as the hydroelectric utility and a representative from Greenpeace. We called our group the BC Carbon Project. Its aim was to develop a common understanding among all parties of the role each played and could play in greenhouse gas emissions reductions. We commissioned an independent review of the relationship between forest management and greenhouse gas emissions, which was eventually tabled with the provincial government and all other interest groups. We established clearly that biomass energy was in a different category from fossil fuels and that it was transportation, moving people and goods, which accounted for the highest carbon emissions.

War in the Woods

About six months after I was appointed to the B.C. Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, I received another phone call, this time an unsolicited one. It was Jack Munro, president of the forest worker’s union, and he had an invitation for me. At the time it seemed harmless enough. He wanted me to join a new citizens’ group, the Forest Alliance of B.C., which was being formed by the major forest industry companies in British Columbia to help them with their environmental issues, which included public concerns about clearcutting and old-growth forests. This was an initiative of the CEOs and they had asked Jack, a career labor union leader, to chair the citizens’ group. Jack had a reputation for being a tough negotiator, but he was also the kind of union guy who would share a meal with the bosses. Over time he had proven to be pragmatic rather than just “hard left” as were many of his contemporaries and rivals in the union movement.

Jack explained that forest companies were concerned about the negative publicity they were receiving from environmental groups in B.C. Collectively polls showed that only 34 percent of the province’s public believed companies were doing a good job of protecting the environment. That was quite a condemnation in a province that was responsible for half of Canada’s forestry production, which amounted to about US$12 billion per year. And there was a growing threat from large export markets, Germany and the U.K., in particular, that they would boycott B.C. forest products. North American environmental groups such as Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and the Rainforest Action Network were fueling this campaign.

Ninety-five percent of the commercial forestland in B.C. is Crown land, meaning land that is publicly owned and therefore controlled by the provincial government. Unlike in the U.S., where most public land is federally owned, in Canada public land is nearly all provincially owned. The forest companies operate under various forms of license, giving them the right to cut timber in approved areas in return for paying a royalty, called “stumpage,” to the government. This worked fine until there were accusations of bad forestry practices. The companies quickly pointed out that the government had approved all the forestry plans so that was where responsibility rested. The government became very good at deflecting attention to the companies: after all they were the ones cutting the trees. Government promised to crack down on offenders and the environmental groups were happy to attack the companies in the name of corporate greed and environmental destruction. The War in the Woods was to define environmental politics and, to a large measure, politics in general, during the 1990s in B.C.

The industry initially reacted like a deer caught in the headlights. Its leaders could not understand why none of the existing mechanisms, such as its own communications and public relations departments, the industry associations, or even the government, could get a handle on deteriorating public perception. A group of industry CEOs began to meet informally to discuss their growing dilemma. They hired the Canadian office of one of the world’s largest public relations companies, New York-based Burson-Marsteller, to advise them on strategy. Its advice was to create a citizen’s advisory board, modeled after the chemical industry’s Responsible Care program, which had helped that sector with its environmental issues. So Jack Munro and the CEOs began to draft prominent citizens from all walks of life across the province. The only interests they didn’t invite were the activists who were campaigning to boycott the industry. In that sense the Forest Alliance was not a true round table; not all interests were to be included. Yet it was a kind of hybrid in that most of the members were non-forestry industry people and the group was to operate independently of the companies and to provide them with recommendations.

Not only was I personally intrigued by the project, my family’s 75 years in the forestry business compelled me to lend a hand. Here was an opportunity to apply the knowledge I had gained in the environmental movement in assisting the industry my grandfather and father had been involved in all their lives. My dad had worked very hard to improve the image of the working people who were now being accused of “rape” and “desecration” of nature, the very people who provide us with the wood to build our homes and the paper to make our books. And Jack Munro was a close friend of my father’s: they sat on various labor-management boards together and saw eye-to-eye on worker safety and the need for fair wages. I accepted Jack’s invitation with enthusiasm. My wife, Eileen, said it would cost us dearly with regard to our environmentally oriented friends. She was right.

During the four years since I had left Greenpeace, there had not been much public notice of my new direction. My role as president of the B.C. Salmon Farmers Association had brought me into some conflict with environmental groups but the anti-salmon farming campaign was still pretty low-key at that time. My membership on the B.C. Round Table was mainstream enough. But I was not prepared for the firestorm of public and private invective that followed my acceptance to be one of 30 directors of the Forest Alliance.