The Royal BC Museum has included environmental activist Tzeporah Berman in a permanent exhibition as one of the 150 people who have changed British Columbia's history. As the founder of ForestEthics and PowerUp Canada, she has co-written her memoir, This Crazy Time: Living Our Environmental Challenge (Knopf Canada, 2011), with Mark Leiren-Young, to recall her self-educational journey from its beginning during a trip to Europe to her present position as a co-director of the climate and energy program at Greenpeace International. In the early 1990s, Berman joined the protests to save the endangered rainforests of Clayoquot Sound on Vancouver Island. For her role in organizing blockades on logging roads--then the largest act of civil disobedience in Canada's history--she faced nearly one thousand criminal charges and six years in prison. Later, with ForestEthics she took on Victoria's Secret with a well-publicized photo of a chainsaw-wielding lingerie model, pressuring the catalogue manufacturer to stop using paper made from old-growth forests. Berman has negotiated with CEOs and political leaders to help reshape policies and practices, confronting the wood--and paper--purchasing practices of some of the largest corporations in the world. At the Bali climate conference, her eyes were opened to the key challenge of our age: climate change. Devastated by the lack of progress at the Copenhagen climate conference, she co-founded PowerUp Canada and then joined Greenpeace International. She was once described as "Canada's Queen of Green" in a Reader's Digest cover story and the Utne Reader recognized her as one of 50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World.

www.tzeporahberman.com

Review of the author's work by BC Studies:
This Crazy Time: Living Our Environmental Challenge

BOOKS:

This Crazy Time: Living Our Environmental Challenge (Knopf Canada, 2011) $32.00 978-0-30739978-6. With Mark Leiren-Young

[BCBW 2011]