Thursday, 9 May 2002

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.

Sometimes I see in my mind’s eye a jousting contest, a King Arthur’s court, Knights of the Round Table sort of thing. The environmental movement is on one side of the medieval arena and the logging industry is on the other. The environmental movement picks its weapon — a beautiful handmade steel joust that is 12 feet long and glistening in the noonday sun — and rides out on a black stallion. The logging industry makes its picks. It can’t ride such a horse and it can’t heft around such a mighty jousting sword. The industry enters the stadium on a donkey wielding a rusty butter knife. Instead of celebrating and getting ready to kick some serious corporate butt, the environmental movement all too often starts looking for a way to trade down to be on a par with these pathetic wares. This is what the industry wants — for us to abandon our strengths and fight by their terms. Don’t do it. The messages we communicate must come back to our core issues — in our case, it’s the forest. And at ForestEthics, when it comes to message, I have to turn it over to Kristi Chester, our communications director:

Kristi Chester: communications cowgirl.

A year and a half ago, my environmental activism was a fly-by-night operation. I was running a design studio for environmental nonprofits in the cracks and crevices of time that existed around my full-time job as a graphic designer here in San Francisco. My job was great — I love designing — I just didn’t like doing it to help fill the overflowing coffers of corporations.

My desire to create a life’s work that moves us forward as a people and a planet forward felt compromised. So when ForestEthics offered me the position of communications director, I was overjoyed.

A year into the job and countless unpaid hours of insomnia later, it’s not my desire to do good that’s compromised, it’s my beauty sleep.

I’ve found that the price tag attached to the supreme fortune of being able to do what I love for a cause that I believe in can be measured in the minutes between 2 and 5 a.m. Somehow, I can’t stop thinking about how to get the issues that I work on out into the public’s eye. This sort of obsessive behavior seems to come with the territory when you’re dealing with activists.

The now-protected Great Bear Rainforest.

When I do get to sleep, I dream of getting Oprah to interview the two women at ForestEthics who went head-to-head with the industry big wigs in British Columbia and won, helping to win the protection of the largest tract of temperate rainforest in North American history. What better story? (Oprah, if you’re reading this, my number’s 415.863.4570.) Or how about R.E.M. doing the public service announcement for our paper campaign? I can see it now in the pages of People. Maybe Michael Stipe would consider going on location to an International Paper clearcut in North Carolina …

Whether you’re dealing with the clearcutting of massive amounts of native forests in Chile to make way for plantations of pine trees, or the purchasing practices of corporations like Staples, (which link directly to issues of public health, environmental justice, and ecosystem destruction), it’s impossible to put this work down and walk out the door at 5 p.m.

The more I’m exposed, the more urgent it becomes. It’s like putting your finger in the hole in dike, only to have another hole spout, and another and another. There’s so much destruction and so many battlegrounds, it’s impossible to ever feel like you’ve done enough.

Todd compares it to an epic battle, the environmentalists versus the corporations … It’s easy to feel that way, especially as I come to know more and more about the merciless exploitation of entire forests and communities. As the gatekeeper of the message, I always bring it back to the core issue — our fight is to protect forests and the people that depend on them. And we have no competing agenda.

The truth isn’t always clearcut.

When a company claims to be environmentally friendly because it plants three trees for every one it logs, it’s obscuring the truth, which is that a farm of trees is not the same as a forest; it’s the equivalent of calling astroturf grass. Often, these attempts at greenwashing are just a decoy to detract attention from the real costs of forest destruction — aerial herbicide spraying that’s increased 800 percent in the Southeastern United States in the past decade, 10,000-acre clearcuts, and tons of toxics being poured into our rivers and streams. We need to counteract industry’s attempts to obfuscate and battle its vacuous claims. But we can’t abandon the thing that the companies can’t defend themselves against: industrial-scale forest destruction. Bringing it back to the basics is what it’s all about, no matter how enticing or intellectually challenging the industry bait may be. What the industry wants — in this case, the logging industry — is to take everyone’s eye off the ball. Let’s bring it back to the basics and bear witness to what they are doing.

At the end of the day, after hours of conference calls and the circulation of the 26th draft of a press release, I close my laptop and remind myself why I do this work.

Sometimes it happens on the subway ride home, sometimes it happens during my walk on the beach with the dogs, but I always come back to that unshakable place inside myself, solid as a stone, that grows daily with the joy of doing the work that I believe in.