It was environmentalist Tzeporah Berman’s second summer on Vancouver Island helping conduct scientific research for the Wilderness Committee. The data the team had collected the previous summer, while camped in a grove of Sitka spruce in an old-growth temperate rainforest, proved that the survival of a seabird called the marbled murrelet depended on the forest. It was supposed lead to the permanent preservation of the forest.
They were doing good work, she thought. They were making a difference. But a funny thing happened on the way to the grove. It was gone. Logged, save for a few trees where they found the nest. This is the moment scientist Tzeporah Berman came to an end and Berman the environmental activist was born.
“It was this feeling of, literally, racing in front of bulldozers, and that it was too slow,” says Berman of the pace of change through traditional legal and scientific means. “I needed new tools.”
Nearly two decades later, the Ontario native, who attended Ryerson University in the ’80s and had visions of a career in fashion, heads up the climate and energy campaign at Greenpeace International in Amsterdam. She founded two environmental organizations, ForestEthics and Power Up Canada, and had a major hand in protecting the Great Bear Rainforest as well as the creation of the monumental Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement.
She’s schmoozed with the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio and Paris Hilton and has been called an enemy of the state on live TV. Oh, and she was once charged with 863 counts of aiding and abetting during the blockades in Clayoquot Sound — the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history, when over 8,50 people were arrested.
Her first book, This Crazy Time, was released on Sept. 10, and she reads at two author events in the Toronto area this month, including one tonight at Indigo Manulife Centre.
After nearly two decades of standing up for mother earth, why write a book now?
“You know, I was having my own climate reckoning. I was coming to terms with the implications of the growing threat of global warming, and I realized that I was really closing a chapter on 16 years of my life,” says Berman.
“I wanted to write this book to process that, and then, part of it was looking into climate issues. And it horrified me, not because we can’t solve it, but because we can and don’t.”
In Conversation: Rick Smith and Tzeporah Berman, Indigo Manulife Centre, 55 Bloor St. W.