British Columbia Forest Alliance

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see early book on aus/nz cda? attack on the greens

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4.5 Organising anti-environmental action

The Wise Use Movement

The Wise Use movement is a loose network of groups within the USA that are held together by a common loathing of environmental pressure groups and environmental legislation and an agenda stressing the rights of private property owners to make their own decisions as to how best to exploit natural resources. The movement is a broad church uniting workers in the extractive industries, libertarian free marketers, and the extreme right. Many commentators believe that B-M was instrumental in setting up the Wise Use movement. Many of B-M’s more unsavoury clients have sponsored Wise Use groups, and in the 1980s when the movement began 36 of the companies known to be sponsoring Wise Use groups were clients of B-M[41]. Direct proof of B-M’s involvement has so far remained elusive.

British Columbia Forest Alliance

An anti-environmental group that B-M certainly did create is the British Columbia Forest Alliance. In late 1990 B-M was hired to re-engineer the public image of Canada’s forest industries. The cornerstone of its campaign was a new front group, the British Columbia Forest Alliance. Environmental researcher, Andy Rowell described it thus “The Alliance was designed as the industry’s stealth bomber, packed with influential people and fuelled with industry dollars, to blast holes in the environmentalists’ forestry campaigns. However, it came packaged as a dove of concern and conciliation”.[42]

The BC Forest Alliance was launched in April 1991 under the leadership of Jack Munro, formerly the Chairperson of the International Wood Workers of America Union. Gary Ley, of B-M, was appointed executive director. In its first year it received $1m from corporate sponsors[43].

The Vancouver Sun, the biggest newspaper in British Columbia, with a daily circulation of 260,000, soon fell under the influence of the Alliance. Forest company officials and Alliance members were soon visiting its offices. Before the launch of the BC Forest Alliance, the Sun had five full-time reporters covering forestry, native affairs, and other environmental issues. Soon only one environment journalist remained. The rest were assigned to a category called "resources" in the business section.

Reporters who wrote critically about the forest industry, and those who probed the workings of the Forest Alliance and Burson-Marsteller itself, say they were subjected to pressure. The Sun's forestry reporter, Ben Parfitt, was pulled from environmental issues after writing about Burson-Marsteller and the Forest Alliance, and reporter Mark Hume was grilled by a logging company official and an industry consultant, in the editor’s office, about columns he had written about a pro-logging coalition, while the editor, Hume says, stood by in silence[44].

Ken Rietz of Burson Marsteller produced a seven- part TV series, entitled “The Forest and the People” to spread pro-industry propaganda[45].

The BC Forest Alliance now claims a membership of 10,000 individuals and 300 companies and industry groups[46].

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Rumored involvement in anti-environmental movement<p style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 20.3999996185303px; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;">

The "Wise Use Movement" is a loose network of groups within the U.S. joined by opposition to environmental pressure groups and environmental legislation, and promotion of an agenda stressing the rights of private property owners to decide to how best to exploit natural resources on their lands. The movement unites workers in the extractive industries, libertarian free marketers, and the extreme right. Many commentators believe that B-M was instrumental in setting up the Wise Use movement. They point to the fact that some of B-M’s clients have sponsored Wise Use groups, and in the 1980s when the movement began, 36 of the companies known to be sponsoring Wise Use groups were B-M clients. Direct proof of B-M’s involvement remains elusive.

B-M's public front for Canada's forestry industry

In late 1990 B-M was hired to re-engineer the public image of Canada’s forest industries. The cornerstone of its campaign was a new front group, the British Columbia Forest Alliance. Launched in April 1991, the Alliance was headed Jack Munro, formerly the chairperson of the International Wood Workers of America Union. Gary Ley, of B-M, was appointed executive director. In its first year the alliance <a href="http://www.cjr.org/year/93/6/logging.asp" style="text-decoration: none;">received</a> $1m from corporate sponsors.

The Vancouver Sun, British Columbia's biggest newspaper, with a daily circulation of 260,000, drew visits from forest company officials and alliance members. Before the launch of the BC Forest Alliance, the Sun had had five full-time reporters covering forestry, native affairs, and other environment-related issues. Soon only one environment journalist remained. The rest were assigned to a category called "resources" in the business section. Reporters who wrote critically about the forest industry, and those who probed the workings of the Forest Alliance and Burson-Marsteller itself, say they were subjected to pressure. The Sun's forestry reporter, Ben Parfitt, was pulled from environmental issues after writing about Burson-Marsteller and the Forest Alliance. A logging company official and an industry consultant grilled reporter Mark Hume in the editor’s office, about columns he had written about a pro-logging coalition, while the editor, Hume says, stood by in silence. The <a href="http://www.forest.org/" style="text-decoration: none;">BC Forest Alliance</a> now claims a membership of 10,000 individuals and 300 companies and industry groups.

Forest Protection Society (Australia)<p style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 20.3999996185303px; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;">

Throughout the 1980s the Australian timber industry was targeted by ecological campaigns and direct action. In response, the industry spawned a new front group, the Forest Protection Society (FPS), with start-up money from the Forest Industry Campaign Association.

Employing Wise Use-style rhetoric, the FPS got itself listed as an environmental protection organization in the Directory of Australian Associations. The FPS promotes a “balanced use” of Australia’s forests, and claims that the best way to protect forests is to extract the wood and sell it. From the start the FPS aimed to build a large "grassroots" membership to suggest an independent standpoint. The FPS involves itself in numerous forest campaigns, fighting for the rights of local communities to exploit the forests, and supporting the interests of the timber industry. By April 1998 the FPS had 56 local branches across Australia.

<a href="http://www.green.net.au/boycott/timber.htm" style="text-decoration: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Other tactics</a> used by the FPS include taking over local environmentalist meetings, with the result that activists became distracted from their ongoing campaign. Like many groups associated with the American Wise Use movement, the FPS is a client of Burson-Marsteller.

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This campaign to shift the vocabulary of public discourse to serve corporate interests is a trademark tactic of the self-named “Wise Use” movement. The Wise Use movement was christened in 1988 at a strategy conference in Reno, Nevada, that was attended by resource industry leaders from Canada and the US.

A similar lexical shift occurred in British Columbia in the early 1990s. After returning from the founding Wise Use conference, BC logging companies hired Burson-Marsteller, the biggest PR firm on the planet, to create the BC Forest Alliance in an attempt to ‘greenwash’ their industry. (BC logging companies were, at that time, facing a massive international boycott over their voracious clear-cutting of the province’s temperate rainforests.)

The Forest Alliance managed to shift BC’s major news media off the historic label of “logging companies” and onto the kindler, gentler, greener label of “forest companies”.

In a 1993 article I filed to the Columbia Journalism Review on this very tactic, I had to argue with the editor to keep the term “logging companies” in the piece. Her position was: If they want to be called ‘forest companies’ then that is what we should call them. My position was: They make their money by cutting down trees. We should label them accordingly. I won that time, but it was not easy.

So “tar sands” or “oil sands”?