Those who were on the front lines 20 and 30 years ago have urgent lessons for the activists of today.
After decades of campaigning, we have yet to achieve the most crucial forest reforms: preserving all remaining ancient forests; an end to raw log exports; creating sustainable, value-added forest economies, and returning land to Indigenous people.
We won dozens of victories over the years. But the West Coast’s patchwork of parks and conservancies falls short of protecting enough low-elevation forests and habitat corridors for large predators like grizzly bears and wolves. They need more than isolated pockets of biodiversity.
Clearcut logging is still standard operating procedure. Forest tenures aren’t required to supply local mills that keep communities employed. BC’s raw log exports are over 6 million cubic metres each year.
“I believe the NDP did an amazing thing for this province by doubling the park system in the ‘90s. However, they failed to follow up by bringing in truly sustainable logging practices or ending the export of raw logs,” Dan Lewis of Clayoquot Action summed up in a review of BC’s “War in the Woods.”
The haves and the have-nots
In the 1980s and ‘90s, the political landscape was dominated by small volunteer-based groups. They were nimble, feisty, and ready to deploy diverse tactics. Many took aim at giants, and sometimes they won.
At the same time, the bigger environmental groups were learning to manage their campaigns like businesses. They set goals that could be achieved quickly in order to declare a victory and move on to the next. They found that winning often meant making deals with government and industry. Thus came the rise of the Environmental Non-Governmental Organization (ENGO), alongside what some have labeled, sarcastically, the “Non-Profit Industrial Complex.”
Activist Bill Moyers described the different roles of campaigners almost 40 years ago in his seminal work, “Movement Action Plan.” His organizing model describes how some activists seek to collaborate with industry and government. Others are principled no-compromise idealists, and the best results are achieved when the people in different roles work together. In the Great Bear Rainforest talks, resource corporations made a place at the bargaining table for ENGOs, while excluding the grassroots.
In the beginning, there was unity. Three of the biggest, best-funded and most business-like international ENGOs formed the Rainforest Solutions Project (RSP) and agreed to an equal partnership with Nuxalk hereditary chiefs and the House of Smayusta to protect the forests of BC’s Central Coast. But when the Province and the RSP made their big announcement in 2006, the Nuxalk chiefs – along with many grassroots groups – were left out.
In the end, the Great Bear Rainforest Agreement protected only 32 per cent of the land, with many areas left open to mining, roads, hydroelectric projects, and other industrial uses – a far cry from the publicly-announced goal of 44 to 50 per cent protection needed to save species diversity.
But RSP approved the deal without consulting their former partners. At the time, Sierra Club’s Lisa Matthaus, speaking for the RSP, conceded it was inadequate. “The protected areas alone are not sufficient, but this is a political compromise.”
Divide and conquer
How did this happen?
“I remember Don McMillan of Interfor telling me that the industry had a plan for us,” Dani Rubin, former director of BC Environmental Network, said in 2006. “It’s pretty clear now that the corporate strategy was to divide the environmental movement by electing to negotiate only with the pragmatists, leaving the rest of us out in the cold.”
To get their seats at the big table, the ENGOs agreed to give up their biggest bargaining chips: protests and markets campaigns. There were no more high-profile blockades of logging operations, no lobbying wood buyers, and no public criticisms of the process.
This decision pulled the rug out from under the smaller volunteer groups. “They made the Central Coast an environmental-protest-free zone,” according to Qwatsinas, the late Nuxalk hereditary chief who was part of the RSP protocol. “How are you going to set forth your demands at the table when your will is broken?”
While direct action strategies like blockades and boycotts have an immediate, although sometimes temporary, impact on logging operations, negotiations do not. The Great Bear talks dragged on for years, and the rate of deforestation only increased. Qwatsinas and others said that companies were slashing and burning faster than ever to maximize profits ahead of any new restrictions. It’s a dynamic familiar to forest campaigners. Qwatsinas called it “talk and log.”
Blockades and boycotts hurt the companies where it counts: in the bottom line. Financial pressure can force them to make substantial concessions to stop the pain. “Customers don’t want to buy their two-by-fours or their pulp with a protester attached to it. If we don’t end [the protests], they will buy their products elsewhere,” Bill Dumont, chief forester at Western Forest Products, told the Vancouver Sun in May 2000.
The revolution will not be funded
In the lead-up to the Great Bear compromise, RSP groups accepted $120 million from the Rockefeller Foundation. That’s when they started to lose touch with their core values, according to Vancouver Island activist Ingmar Lee.
“I just believe that we should be working together against these incorrigible forces of destruction rather than working together with them,” he said in 2006. “I have always advocated a broad spectrum of environmentalist effort, but the grassroots activist community has been excluded from the project from the start.”
Widespread disillusionment about the Great Bear compromise in 2006 echoed the gloom that followed the collapse of the government-sponsored Commission on Resources and the Environment talks on Vancouver Island in 1994. CORE set out to build a consensus between business and environmentalists for sustainable forestry and old growth protection. But on the West Coast, the few places that won official protection were the ones made famous by protests and blockades.
What could we achieve if we committed to real solidarity between the haves and the have-nots? In 2011, mainstream groups and radicals united to fight a sprawling vacation-home development along Juan de Fuca Marine Trail Park on Vancouver Island. The coalition made a conscious decision to stick together by dividing up the work: the big non-profits would be the reasonable ones open to negotiation. The direct-action groups were the muscle, the no-compromise enforcers. Any deal would need the support of both protest groups and ENGOs to be viable. Observers said it was a lost cause, but we won that campaign decisively.
Water protectors and no-pipelines campaigners launched the Caravan to Unis’tot’en Camp in 2012 to bring supplies, resources, and crowd-funding to Wet’suwet’en people whose lands were seen as a path to get dilbit to tankers on the coast. They sought an alliance with the better-funded organisations. But non-profit staffers told us they only support elected chiefs and band offices, not hereditary chiefs, not people who lived on the land in their traditional way.
Twelve years later, that attitude has reversed. The executive directors who dismissed the Caravan from their well-appointed boardrooms are now working with hereditary chiefs and Indigenous environmentalists, an arrangement that benefits the land, the water, the wildlife, and the people.
RSP investors, ENGOs and philanthropists helped start dozens of businesses, launched a hundred new Guardian programs, created a thousand jobs, and brought in hundreds of millions in investments and development.
But like governments and political parties, philanthropists have their own priorities, and those can change overnight. Grant money is promised and then cancelled. The pursuit of big money can warp the priorities of even the most principled groups. And billionaires just don’t support radical economic change.
The lesson is to build deep-rooted coalitions within communities and between bioregions. And if ENGOs keep their promises to hereditary chiefs and hold space for grassroots organizations, imagine how much we all could win.
Zoe Blunt is a veteran water protector, tree-sitter, and blockader. She is the new editor of Watershed Sentinel.
