'Powering Up' with Tzeporah Berman

With a natural gift for sound bites, Tzeporah Berman is milking her 15 minutes of fame to issue a clarion call for green energy

“I can’t remember: are your eggs free-range?”

It’s 9 a.m. on Thursday morning and Tzeporah Berman is scanning the chalkboard at Gastown’s Brioche Café. The sun casts dappled shadows on the scarred wooden floor, and the morning quiet is broken by the occasional trolley bus passing by on Cordova Street.

Reassured that the café serves only certified organic eggs, Berman orders an egg croissant, then settles in for her media interview—the first in a full day of appointments. If her Daytimer is particularly packed today, it’s because she hopes to cram in a handful of meetings before jumping on a seaplane to join her husband and two sons for dinner at their home on Cortes Island.

Berman’s ruffled blouse and black slacks are more likely hemp than Holt’s, but there’s clearly no mistaking the stylish 40-year-old for the 25-year-old protestor who was arrested for leading the logging-road blockade during the infamous War in the Woods at Clayoquot Sound in the 1990s.

It’s been a long journey, and Berman has lost none of the drive and conviction that first brought her to the West Coast to study endangered species in the early '90s. But today the mother of two is more likely to be found rubbing shoulders with corporate executives and federal ministers than manning the blockades.

Not content to rest on her reputation for saving the Great Bear Rainforest, Berman has a far more ambitious goal in sight: steering Canada away from its fossil-fuel fixation and toward a low-carbon economy.

An activist is born

Berman first came to the West Coast as a University of Toronto student in 1991 to study the habitat of the marbled murrelet on Vancouver Island. When she returned the following year, the devastation she saw spurred her to action: “I was just devastated by the impact of clearcut logging in this area,” she recalls. “These are trees that were a thousand years old, 300 feet tall, and that I knew personally. I knew those groves.”

So that summer she moved up the coast to join the protest that was already underway in Clayoquot Sound, where she ended up co-coordinating the blockade of logging roads. By the end of that year, 10,000 people had come to join the protest, and 1,000 had been arrested, including Berman.

From picket line to paper trail to victory

She started working with Greenpeace to track who was buying the lumber and paper products emanating from the old-growth forests, and soon found herself sitting in the boardrooms of some of the largest corporations in the world, negotiating over hundreds of millions of dollars of paper consumption.

Those negotiations led to the historic 2001 agreement [PDF] between forestry companies, manufacturers and retailers that would result in an end to clearcut logging in what has since been dubbed the Great Bear Rainforest. [Read about further developments as greater protections have been instituted and watch the slideshow.]

With her credentials firmly entrenched, Berman settled into her role as the go-to expert on save-the-forest campaigns.

She left Greenpeace in 2000 to co-found ForestEthics, another nonprofit devoted more specifically to protecting endangered forests.

Rubbing elbows with Leonarado DiCaprio, Paris Hilton

But she would be jolted once again from her comfort zone in 2007. First came a brush with stardom when she played a bit part in The 11th Hour, Leonardo DiCaprio’s documentary on climate change.

Berman took full advantage of the publicity opportunities, pausing to pose arm in arm with Paris Hilton on the “green carpet” at the Hollywood premiere, and jumping on the opportunity to get the message out to world media about the precarious state of the world’s forests.