The veteran environmentalist opened up to Asparagus about the Trans Mountain pipeline, fashion pollution, and going back to jail.

Tzeporah Berman first gained public notice a quarter century ago, as a spokesperson for protestors blockading the clearcut logging of old-growth rainforests in British Columbia’s Clayoquot Sound. In the intervening years she’s worn many hats: campaigner, author, negotiator, NGO founder, co-director of Greenpeace’s Global Climate and Energy Program, and government advisor.

Today, she’s a director at Stand.earth, and makes the news most often for her work with Protect the Inlet, the Indigenous-led campaign against the proposed expansion of the Trans Mountain Pipeline. Trans Mountain transports bitumen from Alberta’s tar/oil sands to the BC coast, and earlier this year the Canadian government agreed to purchase the existing pipeline and proposed expansion project from Texas oil giant Kinder Morgan. Berman recently chatted with with Asparagus founder Jessie Johnston about opposing the pipeline, the next generation of activists, and what gives her hope. …

Vancouver’s eco-arts festival brings activist performance to the people.

The fourth edition of Vancouver’s Vines Art Festival opens today, setting up in parks and public spaces around the city through August 19th. Over the course of the next 12 days, festival-goers can experience outdoor music, dance, poetry, sound and fibre-art installations, the first-ever Unsettling Ceremony, and so much more besides, in venues from Kits Beach and Granville Island, to North Vancouver’s Harmony Garden and the festival’s home park, Trout Lake. All for free! Asparagus sat down with founder and artistic director Heather Lamoureux to learn about the festival’s origins, growth, and future. …

Could graphic designers save the world? Maybe if more were like this member of Al Gore’s Climate Reality Leadership Corps.

Todd Barsanti isn’t your stereotypical eco-warrior — he teaches graphic design at an Ontario community college. But he is also one of nearly 14,000 individuals trained to give Al Gore’s climate change presentation (the one featured in the Oscar-winning 2007 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth). A latecomer to the environmental movement, Barsanti constantly seeks links between his distant-seeming passions for design and sustainability. The most striking example of this connection-making is a series of posters he created in 2016, using attention-grabbing materials — charcoal, Christmas lights, raw meat — to convey environmental messages. He recently spoke with Asparagus about his eco-awakening, where design meets sustainability, and a late-in-life lesson about the tide. …

Leading up to an Earth Week residency, the Indigenous artist and activist talks pipeline protests, language immersion, and reconciliation.

Ocean Hyland — an artist and activist from the Tsleil-Waututh Nation — gained international attention last month when Teen Vogue published her op-ed about participating in Protect the Inlet, the Indigenous-led movement against the proposed Trans Mountain pipeline expansion. On Earth Day (April 22), Hyland begins a weeklong artist residency at the Noons Creek salmon hatchery in Port Moody, as part of the Welcome Post Project.

Developed by Coast Salish artist Tasha Faye Evans, the project began on National Indigenous Peoples Day in 2017, offering a wealth of Indigenous cultural experiences in the Vancouver suburb. It will culminate after a year with the raising and blessing of a house post designed by Squamish carver James Harry, on June 21. …

Two recent investigations cast serious doubt on the value of sustainability certification programs.

I was particularly pleased with myself a few months ago, when an idea for an Asparagus department popped into my head: Know Logo would be a regular examination of the meanings of individual ecolabels and their reliability, making supermarket trips easier for green-minded shoppers, one logo at a time. The idea still brings a smile to my face (not least because the name is both a pun and a Naomi Klein reference), but a couple of recent articles made me question the validity of the entire exercise.

The first was Raina Delisle’s “The Ecolabel Fable” for Hakai Magazine, examining problems specifically with the Ocean Wise sustainable seafood program, and also delving into issues affecting other sustainable seafood certification schemes. The second was Richard Conniff’s “Greenwashed Timber: How Sustainable Forest Certification Has Failed,” a deep dive into criticisms of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and its certification program. …

Why pour your time and money into the greeting-card industrial complex when you could be championing important causes?

Back in the fall, as I was working toward launching Asparagus, I had a great idea for an article. It would be called something like “The World According to Kap,” and would paint a picture of the better world Colin Kaepernick was working to build using the 1 million dollars’ worth of charitable donations he made over the course of 2017. I tucked the thought away in my Awesome Story Ideas file, and went back to writing my business plan. Y’know, first things first.

A few weeks later, a more well-established publication (Asparagus being a not-yet-established publication at that point) ran essentially the exact article I’d imagined. And it was a good article. It really didn’t need a do-over. So, I moved the thought to my much larger Stories I Wish I’d Published file, and turned my attention back to getting this site off the ground. You win some, you lose some. …