Promise to Protect Canada's Great Bear Rainforest - A Major Carbon Storehouse - Hangs in Balance

Two years ago, the Great Bear Rainforest of British Columbia captured the world's imagination when BC Premier Gordon Campbell announced a progressive conservation agreement to protect the globally significant rainforest home to the mysterious white Spirit Bear.

BC's coastal old-growth rainforests contain between 500 up to an astounding high of 1300 tonnes of carbon per hectare. They also continue to capture around 2 tonnes of carbon per hectare from the atmosphere each year. Years of clearcut logging cut vast holes in the rainforest, threatening to destroy it and worsen the climate crisis.

With Campbell's announcement, it looked like these threats were over. However, some key components of the agreement have yet to be implemented and the final government deadline of March 2009 is fast approaching.

ForestEthics, Greenpeace and Sierra Club of Canada, BC Chapter - the environmental groups that worked for ten years to save the Great Bear Rainforest - just launched an online outreach campaign to put pressure on the BC government to keep its promise:

www.savethegreatbear.org/keepthepromise

Unless the government's agreement is fully implemented, they say the ecological health of the world's largest temperate rainforest is once again in jepaordy.

The environmental groups have enlisted a crack shot team of online gurus, social convening geeks and designers from across Canada to appeal to a new younger audience of armchair activists and to translate an ancient landscape and its resident creatures (most of which people will never see or

experience) into compelling online personalities. Srategies range from microtargetting based on religious, political and cultural affilations to more traditional techniques like good old fashioned contests including iTunes giveaways and Grizzly Bear viewing trips.

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About the climate cover-up

Democracy is utterly dependent upon an electorate that is accurately informed. In promoting climate change denial (and often denying their responsibility for doing so) industry has done more than endanger the environment. It has undermined democracy.

There is a vast difference between putting forth a point of view, honestly held, and intentionally sowing the seeds of confusion. Free speech does not include the right to deceive. Deception is not a point of view. And the right to disagree does not include a right to intentionally subvert the public awareness.

Although all public relations professionals are bound by a duty to not knowingly mislead the public, some have executed comprehensive campaigns of misinformation on behalf of industry clients on issues ranging from tobacco and asbestos to seat belts.

Lately, these fringe players have turned their efforts to creating confusion about climate change. This PR campaign could not be accomplished without the compliance of media as well as the assent and participation of leaders in government and business.