Ep131: Tzeporah Berman "Canada's Controversial Queen of Green"

This week's guest on Cleaning Up is Tzeporah Berman. Tzeporah has been leading environmental campaigns in her native Canada and beyond for over thirty years. Today, she is Chair of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, and International Program Director at Stand.earth, the environmental organisation that she co-founded.

Tzeporah was formerly co-director of Greenpeace’s Global Climate and Energy Program, and her success campaigning against fossil development has seen her dubbed “Canada’s Queen of Green”. 

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Links and Related Episodes 

Watch Episode 45 with Catherine McKenna: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEP1SGL-DcA 

Watch Tzeporah’s TED Talk on the “bad math” of the fossil-fuel industry: https://www.ted.com/talks/tzeporah_berman_the_bad_math_of_the_fossil_fuel_industry 

Find out more about Stand.earth here: https://stand.earth/ 

Learn about the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative: https://fossilfueltreaty.org/ 

Explore the Global Registry of Fossil Fuels: https://fossilfuelregistry.org/

Guest Bio 

Tzeporah Berman is an environmental campaigner and policy advisor. She is International Program Director at Stand.earth, the environmental organization that she co-founded (as ForestEthics), and Chair of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. At Stand.earth she works to help develop strategies for the Amazon, shipping, fashion, pipeline, LNG and old growth forests campaigns. 

As co-director of Greenpeace’s Global Climate and Energy program, she led the creation of the Arctic campaign and a successful “Unfriend Coal” campaign to get Facebook, Apple, and others to switch from coal to renewable energy for their data centres. Tzeporah was one of the creators and lead negotiators of the Great Bear Rainforest agreement and the Canadian Boreal Forest Initiative. Her work has contributed to the protection of over 40 million hectares of old growth forests. 

In 2013 Tzeporah was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of British Columbia, and she was the 2019 recipient of the Climate Breakthrough Project Award. Tzeporah is Adjunct Professor of Environmental Studies at York University, Canada. In 2021, she was arrested for blockading the logging of thousand-year-old trees in Fairy Creek, Vancouver Island.