Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist (36 page)

Logging operations must be planned on the basis of watersheds. The clearing of excessive areas within a given watershed can lead to flooding, soil erosion, and damage to fish-bearing streams and rivers.

Fish habitat must be protected through careful planning along waterways. Buffer strips of forest should be maintained on major streams and rivers to maintain stream bank stability, provide shade, and maintain water quality.

Wildlife habitat must be protected by ensuring that critical features such as deer winter range, bird nesting trees, and woody debris are provided.

Biological diversity in its totality must be protected by ensuring that representative areas of all successional stages, including old-growth or original forest, are present in each forest ecosystem.

The forest industry’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, and hence to the potential for climate change, should be minimized through energy efficiency, wildfire control, soil conservation, and rapid reforestation of harvested land.

Forestry

Government and industry must ensure there are up-to-date and accurate inventories of all forest resources on which to base forest management plans and to determine sustainable harvest levels.

Care must be taken to use harvesting practices and equipment that minimize soil disturbance and damage to the remaining vegetation and wildlife habitat.

Where some form of clearcutting is determined to be an appropriate harvesting practice it must be done in a manner that satisfies all the other Principles of Sustainable Forestry. Other harvesting systems, such as selection and partial cutting, should be used where they are appropriate from a silvicultural perspective.

All commercially valuable wood that is cut during logging operations should be utilized to avoid economic waste.
This must be balanced with the need to leave sufficient woody debris and organic matter to provide wildlife habitat and nutrients for the next generation of trees.

All logged areas should be rapidly reforested either by natural regeneration or by planting with appropriate species. Forest practices such as brushing and thinning should be employed to ensure the survival of the new forest and to improve the quality of wood production.

The use of conventional chemical pesticides must be minimized by employing alternative methods of pest and weed control wherever practical and environmentally sound.

Burning must be carefully prescribed and used only where it is necessary to ensure reforestation, prevent wildfires, and improve wildlife habitat.

Other Commercial Values

Other commercial uses of the forest must be protected and taken into account when planning logging operations. These values include tourism, livestock grazing, hunting, fishing, trapping, honey production, and berry, mushroom, and foliage picking.

Public Involvement and Recreation

Local communities must be directly involved in decisions that affect their stability, employment, economic viability, and quality of life.

Communities and individuals have a right to access information, to be involved in forest planning, and to monitor industrial performance.

Forests should be managed with concern for recreational use by the public. This includes the appearance of roadsides and harvested areas and assistance in providing campsites, picnic areas, boat ramps, and trails.

Visual impact should be taken into consideration when planning logging operations near communities, recreation areas, and along major travel corridors.

Environmentally appropriate practices, such as recycling, waste oil recovery, solid waste reduction and management, energy efficiency, pollution control, the appearance of industrial sites, and a positive attitude toward environmental programs, must be incorporated in all forest industry operations.

Research and Monitoring

Research and development programs must be undertaken to increase knowledge of forest management, to generate more value-added products, and to protect the environment.

There must be an independent forest practices monitoring system that reports its findings to industry and the public.

The Principles of Sustainable Forestry were signed by 13 industry CEOs at a public media conference on February 28, 1992, in Vancouver. This represented well over 90 percent of the forest industry in B.C. Over the next five years a tremendous amount of work was done to bring the companies policies in line with the principles. Today all these points are virtually taken for granted and are considered standard operating procedure. The Forest Alliance taught me real progress could be made, and relatively quickly, when well-meaning people roll up their sleeves and work to get the job done. Just as we did to stop the hydrogen bomb tests in the early years of Greenpeace!

In 1991 I had been recruited into my first environmental consulting job by the architect and planner, Arnie Fullerton, who was working with the chemist Ron Woznow, who had recently been appointed head of the newly established BC Hazardous Waste Commission. Arnie and I were tasked with making recommendations for the collection of toxic wastes and the establishment of treatment facilities. The reaction from environmental groups, including Greenpeace, was that there shouldn’t be any toxic waste and therefore that it was not necessary to have treatment facilities and that if we did attempt to build any they would try to stop us. It was clear they weren’t seeking solutions and were determined to make it very difficult for anyone who was.

Around this time an old acquaintance of mine, businessman Ross McDonald, got in touch with me to talk about how he could become involved in environmental issues. He encouraged me to join him in forming a new initiative and asked me what an appropriate name for such a venture might be. I came up with Greenspirit in late 1991 and have operated under that banner ever since. The
green
allowed me to keep the green in Greenpeace, where I had campaigned for years, and the
spirit
had a double meaning: it reflects both the spiritual side of ecology—we’re all one—and the feeling of team spirit as in a sports contest. Ross and Arnie and I formed an informal partnership, rented office space in downtown Vancouver, and worked to find projects we could all be involved in. It never really gelled but we learned a lot from one another before gradually drifting our separate ways. But Greenspirit was born!

My work with the Forest Alliance was already under way and I was gaining other clients who were eager to join the movement for sustainability and corporate responsibility. I soon became the senior consultant and lead spokesperson for the Forest Alliance, reporting at first to Jack Munro and then to Tom Tevlin, who had been hired from Burson-Marsteller to be the executive director of the group. Tom and I have had a close professional relationship ever since. I reported to him as a consultant, and he reported to the Forest Alliance Board, of which I was the most active member. We developed a strong partnership during the 10 years of Forest Alliance work. Then in 2001, along with our colleague, Trevor Figueiredo, we incorporated Greenspirit Strategies Ltd. to offer advice to government and industry on the wide range of issues encompassed by environment and sustainability. We leased an office in the old warehouse district of Yaletown in downtown Vancouver, and continue working there today.

In the autumn of 1992, the World Wildlife Fund published a thick document titled “Forests in Trouble,” which gave its view of the “crisis” facing the world’s forests.
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It contained a section on Canada, which was entirely about British Columbia and which repeated many of the false claims being spread by the anti-forestry campaign. This was at the height of the effort by activists to orchestrate a boycott of B.C. forest products in Europe, a boycott focused largely in Germany and the U.K. It appeared the report’s author, Nigel Dudley, had simply interviewed the anti-forestry folks in B.C. and had neglected to check any of his “facts” with the relevant government agencies or with the industry associations. For example, the paper claimed the rate of timber harvesting was increasing when, in fact, it had been falling for the past three years and everyone knew it would continue to fall. The report stated all the old-growth forest would be gone in 15 years. That was nearly 20 years ago and there are nearly 100 million acres of original forest remaining in the province today.

We made a public fuss about the sloppy nature of the report, which was all the more damaging because it had been published by the well-respected WWF. They responded by offering us a meeting with the head of their Canadian organization, Monte Hummel, with whom I had become acquainted during the Greenpeace campaign against trophy hunting. I attended along with Jack Munro and Tom Tevlin for the Forest Alliance; WWF was represented by Monte and his chairman, Adam Zimmerman, then president of Noranda, one of Canada’s largest companies and the majority owner of MacMillan Bloedel, B.C.’s largest forest company. The meeting began cordially but soon turned sour as we presented our complaints, about 40 of them, set out clearly in point form. I guess the old Greenpeace campaigner came out in me, as I was more aggressive than diplomacy of this nature called for. Monte became offended and at the end of the meeting, when I offered to buy him a beer, he said that would be a cold day in hell. The meeting broke up and the Forest Alliance contingent invited Adam Zimmerman, a long-time friend of Jack Munro, for a beer and debriefing in the hotel lounge.

Realizing this was a somewhat historic occasion I phoned my old pal Bob Hunter to see if he could join us. Adam Zimmerman, now retired, is one of those rare examples of a senior corporate executive who is also a genuine intellectual. He wrote about sustainable development and how it applied to resource industries like forestry long before it became fashionable for companies to issue annual Sustainability Reports. And Jack Munro, more labor populist than intellectual, is equally comfortable with his Harley Davidson-riding crowd and sipping tea with the Queen of England. Bob Hunter arrived to see his old Greenpeace buddy Pat sitting with the president of the biggest forest company in the country and the former head of the largest forest worker’s union in North America. I didn’t realize it at the time as the conversation was quite good-humored, but Bob went away from the gathering convinced that I had sold my soul to the devil. He promptly commenced writing a six-part series in the North Shore News, a local Vancouver weekly paper in which Bob had maintained a regular column during the years since he left Vancouver for Toronto. It was a scathing personal attack and there was no one in our circles who didn’t read every installment.

Bob reflected the mood of the environmental movement and much of the public at the time: the forest industry represented all that was evil in the corporate world. Rape, pillage, plunder, devastation, loss of virginity and innocence—these words were all used to denounce the tree-cutters and the providers of wood and paper. It was in these columns that I was described as an “eco-Judas.” In his inimitable talent for coming up with clever phrases Bob accused me of “schlepping for the stumpmakers.” In the aftermath about half my friends disowned me, buying into Bob’s claim that I was a sellout and a traitor to the cause. It’s amazing how fickle some friends are. While I spent 15 years on the frontlines of the movement living on a subsistence income, some of my doctor and lawyer friends were bringing in six figures, cheering me on all the way. They were generous with their time, volunteering on many occasions. But they didn’t dedicate the best years of their lives to the movement. Many of them fit the description “millionaire socialists” as they were all for the underdogs in society, even though they were decidedly not among them. Our lawyer friend, the late David Gibbons, denounced me as a “quisling,” not a nice thing to call a guy.

In retrospect I believe they were upset because I was no longer serving
their
ideological ambitions, no longer living out their fantasy of how to save the planet. How dare I decide to carve out a future focused on how I see the world rather than doing their bidding for the rest of my life?

It’s funny how a single event can shape the rest of your life. I had thought my discovering the science of ecology and then my conversion to sustainable development had been the major turning points in my personal evolution. But it was the trial-by-fire of public humiliation that really made me take a stand for what I believed in. I didn’t care how many insults were hurled my way; I knew sustainable forestry was not only possible but also essential to balancing the needs of civilization with the protection of the environment. I realized it was my old friend Bob and many other good and not-so-good friends who were barking up the wrong tree. But in this case their bark took a real bite out of my reputation. I entered a period of wholesale shunning by the environmental community and its friends in the media.