There is a lot of theological chitchat about Judas Iscariot. Judas, according to the Gospels, is one of Jesus’ twelve apostles. Judas follows Jesus in his wanderings; he listens to Jesus’ teachings and sees his miracles; and then he hands him over to the authorities for an excruciating death. The Gospel of Mark explains Judas’ actions this way: “Then one of the Twelve—the one called Judas Iscariot—went to the chief priests and asked, ‘What are you willing to give me if I deliver him over to you?’ So they counted out for him thirty pieces of silver. From then on Judas watched for an opportunity to hand him over.” Judas is our template for the sellout, the guy who’ll kill the son of God if there’s a cash reward.
Tzeporah Berman, one of Canada’s highest profile environmentalists and author of This Crazy Time: Living Our Environmental Challenge, gets called a Judas a lot. Mostly on the comments boards of independent media outlets, where stories on her work get reported. “Tzeporah Berman, a legend in her own mind has now sold out for her ‘30 pieces of silver’. Who pay’s her way these days?” [sic] a commenter aptly called Grumpy scoffs on the Tyee, a well-known source for independent online journalism in BC. When Vancouver’s The Georgia Straight quoted Berman saying she would consider someday running for office, LostMyGlasses commented, “I will quit my job and actively volunteer all my time against her.”
Berman found her feet as a key organizer at the historic Clayoquot Sound protests in 1993, and to right-wing thinkers she is a radical activist. To her detractors on the left, however, Berman is a sellout. As a founding member of organizations like ForestEthics and PowerUp Canada, and as an employee of Greenpeace, Berman has been criticized for even bothering to negotiate with industry and government, in her efforts to promote the environmental responsibility of corporations.
It’s hard to say at what point compromise becomes apostasy. Berman’s position is that holding out for complete victory is a non-starter, and most negotiation theorists would probably say that she is right. “Just saying no until we are blue in the face,” Berman writes, “will not save our forests or our planet.” Under the auspices of ForestEthics, and in coalition with Greenpeace and several other environmental groups, in 1995 Berman became involved in the fight to preserve what’s now called the Great Bear Rainforest—at the time, the area was known as “the mid-coast timber supply area.” The huggable new name was part of a campaign to protect all 69 of the intact rainforest valleys in coastal BC, a goal which Berman says many viewed as unrealistic and extreme. The Province newspaper ran an article with the full front-page headline, “Greenpeace—will they wreck British Columbia?” Berman and her colleagues got daily death threats at their office.
The agreement eventually reached in 2006 was shaped by a coalition of NGOs, logging companies, First Nations bands, and government, and it protected about one-third of the forest. In the remaining two-thirds, where logging was allowed, it would be conducted in accordance with a new ecosystem-based management plan. Berman writes, “The negotiations had been a resounding success.” The major NGOs involved, such as Greenpeace and the Sierra Club BC, still claim the Great Bear Rainforest agreement as a landmark success. The negotiation model, in which representatives from industry, environmental NGOs, and First Nations all sat down together to reach a compromise, is one that many hope can be replicated in Brazil’s Amazon and other sensitive areas of the globe.
Thomas Schelling was one of the first to develop a formal theory of negotiation. The Times Literary Supplement listed his 1960 book, The Strategy of Conflict, among the 100 most influential books published since the Second World War. Schelling’s thinking was shaped by the long clash of world-views that was the Cold War, in which the conflict was played out largely in the realm of psychology, as a game of threats and counter-threats, perceived intentions, and unstated limits. Schelling wrote, “To study the strategy of conflict is to take the view that most conflict situations are essentially bargaining situations.” The primary idea in bargaining is that there is some level of shared interest—the street vendor selling socks wants you to buy a pair of socks, and you want to own a pair of the socks displayed on her rickety table. There is a price that is too low for it to be in the vendor’s interest to sell, and there is a price that is too high for it to be in your interest to buy. Now you need to figure out what those prices are and whether you can find a number in between.
With environmental causes, however, as with human rights issues, there is a moral problem with trying to assign a “price” to a shift in stance. In Berman’s negotiations over BC’s coastal rainforest, what’s being weighed is how much destruction is acceptable in the interests of economic development—of thousand-year-old trees, of rare species of birds and bears, and of other animals who depend on an intact ecosystem. And because Canada’s rainforest is one of the ways the planet traps carbon dioxide, preventing it from accumulating in the atmosphere, it’s not just a question of trees and bears; it’s humans threatened by drought and flooding caused by climate change.
It seems clear any solution resulting in these consequences is morally indefensible. And in the abstract, most people would agree that this is true. When it comes to contextualized choices, however, it turns out that most people do put a price on life. In one of its first episodes, Radiolab, the brilliant radio show of science and ideas, posed for its listeners a classic dilemma in moral philosophy: the trolley problem. This thought experiment imagines a situation in which five men are working on a rail line and, unbeknownst to them, a runaway trolley is barreling towards them. You are standing at the station watching, and close to you is a lever that would divert the trolley onto another track, saving the lives of the five men. However, the second track is not empty, but rather has one worker on it; to save five lives, you would be sacrificing one. What do you do? The trolley problem has been extensively studied by philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists, and they have found that most people are willing to pull the lever.
In real world negotiations, even once the sacrifices have been made, there can still be a frustrating gap between striking the bargain and forcing your opponent to live up to it. The Great Bear Rainforest agreement was signed in 2006, but in 2013 the government has yet to complete the mapping that would delineate protected parts of the forest. At Rio+20, the recent United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, rainforest scientists from around the world composed and sent an open letter to BC Premier Christy Clark urging her to live up to her government’s promises. “The history of how the provincial government of British Columbia, First Nations, conservation groups, and the timber industry joined together on the Great Bear agreements is an exemplary model of conservation that we hope will be replicated around the globe,” the letter reads.
“We commend you for reaching these agreements and now urge you to demonstrate your commitments to fulfilling them.”
It certainly feels as if there’s been treachery somewhere. Or if not treachery, then maybe, as some of Berman’s detractors argue, naiveté. Industry and government don’t live up to their commitments, they argue, so it’s stupid and dangerous to bargain with them. Clark’s government recently announced that Enbridge’s Northern Gateway Project pipeline does not meet their standards, which has environmentalists celebrating, but the Vancouver Observer calls it a “sneaky non-rejection”—the 99-page document leaves the BC government plenty of wiggle room. The pipeline would cross from the Alberta tar sands right through the Great Bear. And while Berman stands behind her choice to work largely within the existing system rather than demand radical changes to the system itself, she admits to some doubts about how well that can work in fighting climate change.
“I have worked hard in the past couple of decades to find a balance, to find common ground, but in this case I’m truly stumped. How do you define ‘balance’ in an era of ecological devastation? ‘Balance’ used to mean that a company would have some impact on the environment that was acceptable given the economic benefits,” she writes. “In ten years, we’re going to have huge economic costs as a result of dislocation and droughts and famine, so what exactly is ‘balance’ and where’s the ‘benefit’?”
As Alden Meyer, the director of strategy and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists notes, “the atmosphere doesn’t negotiate with politicians.” It took ten years for the Great Bear Rainforest agreement to go from a project to an imperfect agreement, and in the past sevenyears it still hasn’t been fully implemented. That kind of timeline for the Alberta tar sands is terrifying.
For theologians, one of the problems with the story of Judas is that it doesn’t really make sense. Why stumble through the desert in the train of a disowned rabbi for three years only to throw it all away for a payout of thirty shekels and a reputation as civilization’s ultimate traitor? There are probably easier ways to make a few pieces of silver. There are probably also easier lives than that of a high-profile environmentalist—Berman writes about having a logger spit in her face on a ferry, and about opening her mail to find a photo of herself defaced with a red swastika and the message, “You Jew bitch trying to destroy British Columbia.” If Berman does decide to run for office one day, there will be plenty on both sides ready with their pitchforks. Knowing exactly what that’s like, however, might put her ahead of the game.
