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glorious tomorrow, are we?"

Green is the color of money

- 98% of the old-growth forests are gone.

99% of the prairies are gone.

80% of the rivers on this

planet do not support life anymore.

We are out of species, we're out of soil,

and we are out of time.

And what we are being told

by most of the environmental movement

is that the way to stop all of this

is through personal, consumer choices.

- By simply purchasing our product,

the consumer can make a small,

easy step to a greener Earth.

So, by taking that

one roll, and buying

that one roll, you can

help save millions of trees.

- I think we can really look at the history

of the environmental movement to tell

us a lot about why it hasn't been working.

There was a lot of pretty

radical and militant environmentalism

happening, especially

in the 70's and 80's.

In a lot of ways, that was kind of

a heyday for environmentalism.

You know, Greenpeace was founded.

It started to become very mainstream in

some quarters to be an environmentalist.

And then there was also

a shift around that time when...

...corporations realized that they could sell

a lot of things by calling them "green".

- Green-washing is an

attempt by corporations to

put labels on their

activity that are popular

and that appeal to

people's sensibility about,

and concern for, the

environment and for ecology.

- For the mast majority of

people within society today,

there's a total sense

of denial and disconnect

between what they

think is good and right

and then their actions as a

society or as a civilization,

especially as it relates

to the natural world.

- I have a real problem with a lot of the

"solutions" that are put forward by people

because they confuse what is

real with what is not real.

What they do is take the

industrial economy as a given.

"How can we save

the industrial economy,

and oh, it would be nice

if we still have a planet."

- It doesn't matter if I buy,

hemp soap if there's a

runaway greenhouse effect

and the planet becomes uninhabitable.

- The modern mainstream

environmental movement of the

big environmental organizations --

Greenpeace, and Sierra Club,

and the others --

is rooted in that very same cultural lie

that nature is resources.

Nature is things to be used and managed.

Nature is, as the philosopher

Martin Heidegger put it,

just a vast gasoline station

that we can endlessly extract from.

They may say we need to

manage it more wisely,

but as long as they maintain the mindset that

we are the lords of creation and

creation exists for us as resources

to be transformed into commodities

for us to buy and sell,

as long as they maintain

that perspective on what it

means to be an environmentalist,

then they're working

within the same framework

of an ultimately self-destructive

path that the culture is on.

In May 2010,

21 logging companies signed

a deal with several major environmental

organizations, including Greenpeace

and the David Suzuki Foundation.

The deal, known as "The Canadian Boreal

Forest Agreement" aimed to silence all

criticism of logging practices

in the boreal forest.

The Marketplace is also

going to be very important.

Many cusomers have been pushing for

change in the boreal forest.

The Forest Product Association

and its 21 member companies are

responding to the demand

for greener products,

and that marketplace is

going to pay close attention.

If the change isn't happening,

then they're going to put

pressure on the parties who

were part of the agreement --

the environmental organizations,

the forest products companies --

to do the things that

they've set out to do.

And they will reward the companies

when things begin to be implemented and

the change happens on the ground.

I'm fully confident of that.

- One interesting piece of the agreement is

with Greenpeace,

David Suzuki, Forest Ethics,

Canadian Parks and

Wilderness on our side,

when someone else comes and

tries to bully us,

the agreement actually requires

that they come and

work with us in repelling the attack and we'll be

able to say, "Fight me, fight my gang."

- I personally have no use for large,

institutionalized environmental organizations;

I think they're more of a problem than a help.

They're just eco-bureaucracies.

And, you know, I won't name any

because I don't like to badmouth

organizations, except for one, which I

feel that I can, and that's

Greenpeace. And the reason I

can criticize Greenpeace is

I am a co-creator of Greenpeace,

and therefore I feel like Dr. Frankenstein

sometimes, and I feel that since I helped

create the thing I can certainly criticize it.

And I think that Greenpeace has become

the world's biggest feel-good

organization now. People join it

to feel good, to feel, "I'm part of

the solution, I'm not part of the problem."

Greenpeace brings in close

to $300 million a year,

and what do they do with that money?

Generate more money. And the people who

are at the top of the totem pole

now are not environmentalists --

they're fundraisers,

they're accountants,

they're lawyers,

they're businesspeople.

People are voting with their dollars at

the checkout stands. It's because

they know the polling shows that the public cares,

and ultimately they're going to care about their

profit margin and whether they can sell products.

What's happened in British Columbia with the

environmental movement, it's been stalemated.

The big leaders there compromised;

they went in bed

and it snuffed out that movement.

In the 1990's the Nuxalk Nation engaged

in a campaign of direct action to stop

logging on their traditional lands

also known as the Great Bear Rainforest.

Their struggle was eventually co-opted

by well-funded environmental groups

including Greenpeace,

the Sierra Club and Forest Ethics.

- So what happened was there was

direct action, there were blockades

there was an international market campaign

that put a lot of pressure on the companies

that were logging in the Great Bear Rainforest.

But the end result was that it all fed into

a closed-door negotiation with

Tzeporah Berman as chief negotiator

on the conservationists' side,

where a lot of the groups

that actually did the work,

the direct actions,

and did the market campaigns

were shut out of the process.

Public oversight was removed

and the protocol agreements

that were signed with First Nations

and with conservation groups

were basically shunted aside.

So the protocol agreements gave

the negotiators a mandate to

negotiate for 40 to 60

percent conservation

but what happened was

they agreed to 20 percent.

- It's not strange to me

when people tell me that

the former president of Greenpeace

now works for the logging industry of Canada.

The former president of Greenpeace Australia

now works for the mining industry. The former

president of Greenpeace Norway works for the

whaling industry. See, because it's

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