Tzeporah Berman deftly navigates our media-saturated, post-climate change world, fusing the heart and commitment of an environmental diehard with the marketing, pop culture and economic smarts of the best business people. Forging unlikely alliances that get results, she reaches out to governments, to corporations, and to the logging industry, turning potential enemies into allies. Her much-publicized results speak for themselves. With cheeky and viral public awareness media campaigns, she has convinced major companies to stop buying products made from endangered forests—companies like Victoria's Secret, which prints millions of catalogs a year; Lowe's, which buys over a billion dollars a year in forestry products; and Staples, the world's largest paper retailer. And for companies ready to implement policies that are both environmentally friendly and fiscally sound, Berman created Forest Ethics' Corporate Action Program, one of the most sophisticated of its kind. (Partners include Williams-Sonoma, Estee Lauder and Dell.)

Berman and her staff in Canada, the United States and Chile are currently designing a national climate initiative and an international tar sands campaign. Other campaigns involve reforming the catalog and office supply industries. She has launched initiatives to save the Boreal Forest, one of the largest ecosystems in the world, and the Sierra, which provides California with 60% of its drinking water. Berman brought about legislation saving 2 million hectares in Great Bear Forest in BC and has stopped the logging on millions of acres of Native Forests in Chile. Forest Ethics grew out of Berman’s famous protests at Clayoquot Sound, declared a UN Biosphere thanks to her efforts. She is a much-sought speaker internationally, and was a featured expert in the Leonardo DiCaprio-produced documentary The 11th Hour.

Tzeporah Berman does not give diatribes against business. She talks about how corporate environmental leadership—the defining issue of our global economy—creates enormous opportunities, and how you can benefit, both socially and economically.(A recent survey shows that companies whose share prices rose 50% in the last three years had a strong stance on the environment, while those whose shares dropped 10% did not.) With powerful examples, such as Home Depot and Staples, Berman shows you how to address the mounting pressure from customers, share holders, competitors and governments to adopt long term sustainable policies. She clearly lays out how to implement these strategies, which save money, lift employee morale and increase the social life of your brand. She also looks at the cumulative effect of logging on the planet, discusses sustainable logging, and ties it all in to supplier transparency and corporate accountability (Can you tell your customers, when they ask, exactly what goes into your products?). With surprising anecdotes from CEOs and veteran loggers, she obliterates the deeply entrenched myths of Us vs. Them, Activists vs. Corporations, or Loggers vs. Environmentalists. Berman's prescient, profoundly hopeful keynote brings together all sides, creates an open dialog, and harnesses the creative energy needed to find the solutions that will benefit all of us. "It's not about whether or not it's nice to have forests anymore. It's about our future."

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