Canada 150: Treks into forest a turning point
Tzeporah Berman’s life devoted to the environment To mark Canada’s 150th birthday, we are counting down to Canada Day with profiles of 150 noteworthy British Columbians.
Teenage fashionista to enfant terrible of protests to polished matron of the middle way, Tzeporah Berman has been called everything from “the Queen of Green” to names unsuitable for a newspaper. Like her or not, she emerged like an apparition from the forest to serve as a ruthlessly effective strategist in the environmental movement.
She told Reader’s Digest in 2009 that her transformation followed a series of epiphanies. First as a first-year student in Ryerson University’s fashion design program when she hiked into a forest killed by acid rain. She dropped fashion for the environmental studies program at the University of Toronto.
Second, studying marbled murrelets (small waterfowl that nests only in old growth forest), she walked through towering 800-yearold trees, ancient as cathedrals. The next year, she found the magical places she had camped a ruin of logging debris. Third, she encountered some young people. They were headed for Clayoquot Sound to stop the clearcuts.
It was 1993. She seized on a new technology, computer-based faxing, and helped inspire 10,000 to trek to the West Coast. Teachers, celebrities, superstars. The Australian rock band Midnight Oil came to play. It was the largest act of collective civil disobedience in Canadian history — and wound up the biggest mass trial, too. Berman faced 850 charges and six years in prison. Famous defence lawyer Clayton Ruby represented her. She walked.
Berman didn’t come to her smarts and tenacity easily. She was born Feb. 5, 1969, the third of four children in a middle-class family in London, Ont. Her parents were small business entrepreneurs: dad ran a little advertising company; mom manufactured promotional items. When she was 13, that vulnerable age of figuring out who she was, her father died. Two years later, her mother did, too. Her oldest sister, Corinne, kept the family together.
If Berman thinks big, she also thinks long. She moved up from blockades to boardrooms, where she now lobbies executives to move toward what she perceives are the right environmental decisions. Her advice isn’t always welcome. It’s almost always to the point. Salvation will be incremental, not instantaneous.
She has served on advisory panels for governments, writes and lectures, has an honorary doctorate from UBC, was cited by the Royal B.C. Museum as one of 150 people who changed the face of the province and by B.C. Business Magazine as one of the 35 most influential women in the province.