Heated Battle Over Canadian Forests Becomes a War of PR

When some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities--including Tom Cruise, Penny Marshall, Oliver Stone, Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand--signed a full-page newspaper advertisement in May condemning the “chain saw massacre” of Canada’s West Coast forests, the Forest Alliance of British Columbia reacted quickly.

The alliance, which is based here and describes itself as “a nonprofit citizens’ organization,” sent letters that afternoon to everyone listed in the New York Times ad, offering to take them through the forests to reassure them that Canadians are friends of the environment.

Anyone who accepts the invitation might be escorted into the woods by Patrick Moore, a Forest Alliance consultant whose environmental credentials sound impeccable. A pioneer member of Greenpeace, he spent much of the 1970s engaged in the group’s campaigns against whaling and seal hunting.

But the Forest Alliance is far from a neutral party in the debate over how fast and how many of British Columbia’s ancient trees ought to be felled.

It is, in fact, the public relations arm of British Columbia’s timber industry.

Moore, who left Greenpeace 15 years ago, is the point man in an international campaign to remake the industry’s image. Reviled by many former colleagues in the environmental movement, Moore spends much of his time defending timber clear-cutting, the controversial practice of denuding a stretch of forest of every tree standing, which he describes as creating “man-made meadows.”

The rise of the Forest Alliance, in part, represents a recognition by Canada’s timber and wood-products industry that environmentalists were outmaneuvering it on the public relations front. But it also suggests that the future of the timber business and the fate of western Canada’s pristine forests may rest in large part on winning the hearts and minds of corporate directors and consumers around the globe, who are being urged to boycott selected Canadian wood and paper products.

“Not only were they [environmental organizations] kicking the hell out of us in British Columbia, they were beginning to kick us around all over the world,” explained Jack Munro, who became chairman of the Forest Alliance in 1992 after nearly 20 years as president of the timber industry’s largest union.

In the last three years, alliance representatives have escorted scores of visitors, including business executives, members of the European Parliament, environmental activists and journalists, into British Columbia forests, displaying environmentally sensitive logging techniques and dropping by helicopter into patches of ancient forest recently designated as wilderness parkland by the provincial government.

Even environmental leaders concede that this counteroffensive, along with government initiatives to expand protected areas, has blunted their forest preservation efforts.

Just three summers ago, in one of the largest campaigns of civil disobedience in Canadian history, hundreds of protesters were arrested for blocking timber companies from cutting ancient rain forest around Clayoquot Sound on Vancouver Island’s west coast. But that passion has receded, and in the just-concluded provincial election campaign here, environmental issues barely registered at the polls.

With the struggle in Canada reduced to the level of low-intensity guerrilla warfare, forest preservationists have moved their campaign abroad, often in partnership with American organizations such as the San Francisco-based Rainforest Action Network.

Some of these efforts are publicity oriented, such as the Hollywood ad. But others, like a campaign to get Pacific Telesis to stop buying Canadian forest pulp for its yellow pages, are aimed at the timber industry’s bottom line.

Results have been mixed. City governments up and down California, including those in San Francisco, Santa Monica, Berkeley and Santa Cruz, have urged PacTel to use alternative suppliers. The number of PacTel shareholders voting at this year’s annual meeting to halt company purchases of Canadian rain forest pulp more than doubled from 1995, though it still totaled only 9%.

The Hollywood ad, however, backfired a bit in Canada. Few things rile the average Canadian more than Americans assuming a position of moral superiority.

“The blow-dried automata of the little or big screen . . . never let the chance for a little positive PR slip away on so flimsy a ground as simple competence in the issue at hand,” radio commentator Rex Murphy snarled in a nationally broadcast critique. “I suppose it offers another pillow to the vanity of the intensely narcissistic to feel that they’re put on Earth for a higher purpose than to be guests on Jay Leno or to flog anti-pimple unguents.”

Such setbacks notwithstanding, and despite much smaller budgets, activists for the most part have kept the alliance and other industry organizations on the defensive.

In Santa Monica, where the anti-logging issue was placed on the City Council agenda by local residents, Councilman Ken Genser said he was startled by the intensity of industry lobbying, which included personal appeals by Forest Alliance representatives who flew in from Canada.

The alliance also bought its own New York Times ad on June 7 to counter the Hollywood attack. Moore recently finished a Northern California speaking tour, advancing his argument that clear cuts, while ugly, are not always ecologically unsound. He argues that they mimic natural phenomena, such as fires, and in any event, he likes to point out, trees grow back.

Environmentalists fault both Moore’s science and his motives. No act of nature is as efficient at removing every tree as a timber company, they note, nor is a young forest the ecological equivalent of an ancient one.

“I just don’t understand how someone could ethically change,” said British Columbia activist Ric Careless, who served on the board of the Sierra Club of Western Canada with Moore in the early 1970s. “Now we see things very differently. . . . In the end, you have to ask who’s paying the bills. His bills are being paid by the industry.”

Moore, whose father and grandfather were loggers, says he left Greenpeace because the group “failed to evolve.”

“It’s not as if I’m now in favor of dumping nuclear waste in the ocean or killing sperm whales or building nuclear reactors,” he said. “But I am in favor of cutting trees to provide consumers with the most sustainable commodity in the world.”

The fundamental division is over how much of British Columbia’s forest should be placed off limits to the timber industry. Of particular concern is coastal rain forest, home of some of the largest last stands on Earth. An estimated 44% of the province’s vulnerable forest is old growth, said Fred Bunnell, a University of British Columbia forestry expert.

Since 1972, the provincial government has created 160 parks or protected areas totaling more than 7 million acres. The government also has enforced more restrictive rules on logging and has backed experimental techniques designed to reduce the size and adverse impact of clear cuts.

But while there is general applause among environmentalists for the government preservation program, they argue that much more needs to be done. Large areas of Clayoquot Sound remain open to logging, for example. Moreover, there is deep skepticism about government claims that British Columbia now has the toughest timber regimen in the world.

A coalition of 15 Canadian and American environmental organizations has proposed an end to all clear-cutting and road building in old-growth forests. Some groups, including Greenpeace, would go further, pushing the big timber companies out of the forests in favor of small, community-based operations that would log much more selectively.

That seems unlikely, given the continued importance of logging to British Columbia’s economy. About one in 10 jobs in the province is linked to the timber industry, and wood accounts for more than half the province’s exports.