pressure, Kimberly-Clark announced that it set a goal of obtaining 100 percent of the wood fiber used in its products from environmentally responsible sources. By 2011, Kimberly-Clark promised that 40 percent of its North American fiber will be either recycled or certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (an independent, non-governmental, nonprofit global organization that certifies and labels lumber from responsibly managed forests).
In June 2009, Greenpeace published the report “Slaughtering the Amazon,” which traced cattle products (leather and beef) used in top brand running shoes, designer handbags, clothes, and fast food directly back to their origin, to ranches in the Amazon. The Brazilian cattle industry accounts for roughly 80 percent of Amazon deforestation and 14 percent of the world's annual forest loss. Greenpeace called for an immediate moratorium on further Amazon deforestation and named the companies that may be unwittingly contributing to this (and human rights abuses) through their raw material purchases. The leading global brands named were Adidas/Reebok, Nike, Carrefour, Eurostar, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Toyota, Honda, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Prada, IKEA, Kraft, Tesco, and Wal-Mart.
One week after the report was published, Brazil's largest supermarket chains, including Wal-Mart and Carrefour, announced that they would be suspending their contracts with suppliers found to be involved in Amazon deforestation and would develop guidelines to ensure that cattle products were not from illegally cleared Amazon lands. The Brazilian government also responded. A federal prosecutor filed a billion-dollar suit against the cattle industry for environmental damage. Firms that sell this tainted beef may now be fined 500 reals ($260) per kilo (2.2 pounds).
There are activists who volunteer to be on the frontlines in their efforts to stop the clear-cutting and killing of endangered species. Success at the site means they interfered and stopped the destruction, often in spite of physical dangers from men whose livelihood or profits are interfered with. Success overall, such as this Greenpeace example in the Amazon, involved combining on-site activism with the skills and connections of activists who can get media attention and government action. This may turn out to be just a holding action that warded off the forces of greed or need for a time, and just in this one place. Or, in my more optimistic overview, this is a holding action (and there are others) that spares trees until environmentalism and saving trees rather than cutting them down becomes profitable.
As awareness of global warming increases, more tourists than ever are opting for eco-friendly holidays, which is one way saving trees and profitability may be coming together. In an October 2010 announcement, Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General and United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Executive Director, said: “National parks and protected areas represent one key and successful response to conserving and managing this planet's nature-based assets. And in a way that can generate revenues and livelihoods for local communities. Indeed, by some estimates, $1-$2 billion of global tourism is linked to the world's network of around 150,000 protected sites.” Protected sites are included under ecotourism, which takes 77 billion of the global tourism market and is growing (UNEP online).
Activism with Heart
As I learn about trees and what is happening to them, other concerns and thoughts come together: trees, global warming, effects on the soil and on animal life and on the most vulnerable people on the planet (impoverished women and children—especially girl children), as a result of corporate emphasis on short-term bottom lines, and my own collusion through what I eat, buy, and do. I come to a mental discomfort zone in myself that is familiar. With consciousness comes choice, with choice comes responsibility to do something. There is so much to do, so many causes and appeals. Just as the seed for this book was the destruction of one tree that was special to me, ripples of thought associations result from what I learn about what I could do, what others I know are doing, and how doing something rather than nothing does feel better. Also, whatever any of us does, if it comes from the heart and, I'd add, from a depth of feeling for what needs help and therefore from who we are, then what we do and how much is the next right action for us.
In 2006, Rebecca Hosking was horrified at seeing hundreds of bird carcasses dead from plastic bags lodged in their stomachs, went to her hometown of Modbury, England, and persuaded all of its forty-three shopkeepers to agree to a plastic-bag ban (Adams, “Rebecca Hosking: Banning Plastic Bags,” Time, 2009, p. 52). One appalled and compassionate woman led the way; by 2009, eighty other towns in the United Kingdom had followed suit. In 2007, San Francisco Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi's proposal banning plastic bags and requiring recyclable or compostable sacks passed to make San Francisco the first city in the United States to do so. Where I live, the grocery checkout line becomes a moment of choice: paper or plastic? (Trees or birds?) My solution, a large colorful and reusable bag that proclaims: “I used to be a plastic bottle.”
Ever since I wrote Urgent Message from Mother: Gather the Women, Save the World, I've been a message carrier out in the world, saying, “Mother Wants You!” But consistent with the individuation work I do as a Jungian analyst, I speak of how important it is to take on what you recognize as being your particular assignment, and not something others say you ought to do. I think that when an assignment comes along with your name on it, you can recognize it by your answers to three questions that only you can answer: “Is this meaningful?” Every good cause is meaningful, but is this one meaningful to you? “Will it be fun?” Not to underestimate that it will be work, may take courage, and may mark you as weird, but to make the point: will you be in good company, are these people with whom you can laugh and cry, work through difficulties, and stand shoulder to shoulder? Fun also has to do with tapping into your creativity and using who you are for a cause close to your heart. And last, “Is it motivated by love?” Love of what or whom you care about and want to help or save generates energy; success is measured by your heart in the small stories as well as in achieving goals.
You may not feel a strong, inaudible call to your activist soul when the desire to make a difference and ways to do so grows slowly, one step at a time. Many activists began as volunteers, recruited from the sidelines. When help was needed, they showed up. Activism often begins by doing one thing, and then the next right thing. It may begin with emails that raise your hackles or your consciousness, or calls to your compassionate heart. The first active step may be the petitions you sign and the donations you make. It may lead to going to meetings or a conference. One thing leads to another and you find your assignment. However you get there, once you recognize and commit to your assignment, it will likely take more than you expected and give more in return.
The Naturalist Who Became a Writer-Activist
I came across Joan Dunning, who exemplifies just this, when a title in the used book section at my local bookstore, Book Passage, caught my eye: From the Redwood Forest: Ancient Trees and the Bottom Line: A Headwaters Journey, which she wrote. Joan was asked by a friend, “Will you just come to a meeting?” She said yes simply to get her friend to stop nagging, thinking it would also be token support for her local ecosystem. Joan was a naturalist who studied birds and was asked to read from a chapter she had written on the marbled murrelet, an unusual, robin-sized seabird, which should be a ground nester like the rest of its family but instead makes its nest in the tallest living things on Earth. High in redwood forests, the marbled murrelet incubates one glass-green egg in a depression in a bed of thick lichens.
As Joan read, she became aware of all the emotion behind the observant naturalist that she is. The assignment she took on was this book, written for “the millions of parents who take care of every aspect of their children's lives but one: whether the Earth itself will survive.” Her guides were the young people she met, mostly in their twenties. A young man who spent nights and days in a small hammock suspended high above the ground attached to the trunk of one of these redwoods was one of her teachers. He gave a firsthand description of what he witnessed as these ancient trees are felled, beginning with the creation of the fall-bed to cushion the fall so the massive tree won't splinter, to how just before it falls,
