Eco justice

Greenpeace Quebec’s director discusses
the group’s small yet significant victories
and ambitious yet attainable goals

BOREAL BOOSTERS: Greenpeace Protesters, 2007

by MATT JONES

Melissa Filion is not worried about being bored on the job. Ever since she took over as Interim Director of Greenpeace Quebec last month, she’s divided her time between briefing gung-ho activists preparing to chain themselves to buildings and trying to calm down the inevitably flummoxed CEOs on the receiving end of the group’s sometimes forceful brand of eco-justice. Filion, 32, took the position following a four-year run on the organization’s boreal forest campaign. She’s replacing Eric Darier—who went on sabbatical after a year on the job—until next June.

“It’s serious work,” she says. “You have to take some strong stances, and not everyone likes you.” Victories haven’t come easy, but Filion says that recent campaigns against AbitibiBowater and Kimberly-Clark (the makers of Kleenex and Cottonelle) show that persistence can pay off.

Greenpeace’s battle with Quebec’s largest logging company, AbitibiBowater, began in July 2007, when three activists scaled the façade of the Sun Life Building, draping an 11 x 8 metre banner over its austere neoclassical columns, branded with the words: “Abitibi-Consolidated: Looters of our forests.” The company denied allegations that it was over-cutting, but their intransigence only moved Greenpeace to apply pressure from a different angle.

“We blocked a shipment of pulp,” explains Filion. “We do a lot of work with their customers. Some of them are quite sensitive about the boreal forest question.”

Filion says these actions have led some customers, such as Rona and Bureau en gros, to put pressure on the company, either by demanding that they change their practices or by reducing their contracts. She cites Rona’s new forestry policy, launched last November, as a success story.

“For Greenpeace, it was one of the best policies in North America for the retail sector because they set targets and a timeline to reach those targets,” Filion says.

As part of the policy, Rona announced that it would only buy lumber that had been certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), an international non-profit that issues guidelines for sustainable forestry. Filion says this announcement forced Rona’s suppliers, including AbitibiBowater, to alter their practices to feed this demand.

“AbitibiBowater has decided to reach that certification on some of their management units in Quebec and in Ontario. So, clearly, pressure from organizations like Greenpeace can change the marketplace, change the supply and make an impact on the forest.”

PERSISTENT, POSITIVE: Melissa Filion

HANKY PANKY

Last year, Greenpeace announced a victory in its five-year standoff with Kimberly-Clark. The company committed to obtaining 100 per cent of its wood fibre from sustainable sources and gave itself until 2011 to phase out the use of non-FSC-certified wood fibre from the Canadian boreal forest. That’s quite an about-face for a company that Filion says had refused to even meet with Greenpeace for years.

“There were more than 100 direct actions, photo-ops, demonstrations. There were thousands of e-mails and faxes sent to the company. There were articles about Kleenex tissues and their impact on the forest and their link with climate change published all over the world. There’s really been constant pressure on the company,” she says, adding that Greenpeace’s job will now be to ensure that these changes are felt in the province’s forests.

In the meantime, Greenpeace is busy working on its Oceans campaign. Whereas other ecologists have concentrated on distributing lists of which fish you should avoid grilling, searing and tartare-ing, Filion says Greenpeace has made a “tactical choice” to go to the source and target supermarkets. “We’re asking them to not buy certain fish that are on our Redlist,” she explains. Their Web site lists 15 endangered fish and crustaceans as well as tips on how to choose greener seafood (eat local, choose farmed fish and eat lower down the food chain). They’ve also ranked Canadian supermarkets from indiscriminate fish-floggers (last place: Métro, 0.1/10) to the slightly more selective (first place: Loblaws, 2.4/10).

This fall will also see the organization gearing up for the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December. Along with a coalition of environmentalist groups, they’ll be pushing for Kyoto Plus, a plan to “strengthen and extend” the Kyoto Protocol after 2012, the year specified for emissions reduction in the original agreement. The new plan calls for Canada to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 25 per cent by 2020. However, Filion isn’t holding out hope that the Harper government will figure out greenhouse science any time soon.

“We’re targeting not only the Harper government but all MPs so that they take a position on Kyoto Plus,” she says.

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