Labour / Le Travail
Issue 90 (2022)

Research Note / Note de recherche

Histories of Environmental Coalition Building in British Columbia: Using History to Build Working-Class Environmentalism

John-Henry Harter, Simon Fraser University

Abstract: On 3 February 1989, leaders of the British Columbia labour movement, members of the environmental movement, and representatives from the Nuu-chah-nulth-aht Tribal Council (ntc) gathered to meet at Tin Wis, the ntc meeting space, in Tofino, BC, to discuss an alliance around environmental issues on the West Coast of Vancouver Island. This article takes this meeting, and subsequent alliance, as a way to explore the impact, potential, and contested meanings of alliances forged among workers, environmentalists, and First Nations in British Columbia in the late 20th century and beyond. In this way, the article examines from a historical perspective what sociologists have framed as the period of new social movements.

Keywords: labour, environment, First Nations, British Columbia, new social movements, alliances, politics

Résumé : Le 3 février 1989, des dirigeants du mouvement syndical de la Colombie-Britannique, des membres du mouvement écologiste et des représentants du Nuu-chah-nulth-aht Tribal Council (ntc) se sont réunis pour se rencontrer à Tin Wis, l’espace de réunion du ntc, à Tofino, pour discuter d’une alliance autour des questions environnementales sur la côte ouest de l’Île de Vancouver. Cet article prend cette rencontre, et l’alliance subséquente, comme un moyen d’explorer l’impact, le potentiel et les significations contestées des alliances forgées entre les travailleurs, les écologistes et les Premières Nations en Colombie-Britannique à la fin du 20e siècle et au-delà. De cette manière, l’article examine d’un point de vue historique ce que les sociologues ont défini comme la période de nouveaux mouvements sociaux.

Mots clefs : travail, environnement, Premiers peuples, Colombie-Britannique, nouveaux mouvements sociaux, alliances, politique

On 3 February 1989, leaders of the British Columbia labour movement, members of the environmental movement, and representatives from the Nuu-chah-nulth-aht Tribal Council (ntc) gathered to meet at Tin Wis, the ntc meeting space, in Tofino, BC. Here, workers, environmentalists, and First Nations came together to talk about their common interests. According to George Heyman, one of the labour representatives, “the goal was democratic control in our communities and regions, within the context of developing ecological sustainability.”¹

Participants at Tin Wis represented a wide variety of activists from across the labour and environmental movements as well as the ntc and members of the New Democratic Party (ndp), which at the time was the opposition party in British Columbia. An informal coalition of workers, environmentalists, First Nations, and politicians had first formed in 1988 to seek solutions to environmental conflicts happening up and down Vancouver Island, but this gathering produced the Tin Wis Accord, which declared a more formal alliance.

A coalition like that announced at Tin Wis represented a serious threat to the business-as-usual model of forestry companies. As one contemporary observer put it, “What is perhaps most significant in the Tin Wis position is a recognition that any meaningful pursuit of environmental sustainability must be linked to an analysis of current corporate control and political-economic decision-making.”² The threat to corporate forestry is why coalition work is so important and why industry is often desperate to thwart it. However, coalitions are fragile, and a coalition’s aims and vision, as outlined in a document like the Tin Wis Accord, are only a real threat if implemented. As time would tell, and as demonstrated below, a coalition with a radical vision such as Tin Wis could not reasonably expect the state to enact such a vision without taking on capital directly. Based on this history, coalitions among workers, environmentalists, and Indigenous groups must seriously consider what they are willing to do to take on the power of capital and the state, if and when their goals are dismissed or derailed. Turning shared goals into collective achievements is more difficult than coming to an agreement over a series of meetings.

Alliances between workers and environmentalists are important. Examples like Tin Wis, however short-lived, demonstrate that worker-environmentalists can and have successfully worked with a variety of new social movement groups in addition to First Nations.³ This article explores the history of alliances between workers and environmentalists to illustrate the potential of such alliances as instances of working-class environmentalism. It also examines how both the state and capitalists, represented in this case by the bc ndp and forestry companies, work to maintain hegemony by framing state and capitalist interests in corporate forestry practices as the common interest. It is in the interests of the dominant class to ensure that coalitions like the ones examined in this article do not succeed in forming a counterhegemonic bloc that offers solutions opposed to both capitalism and the state, including the social democratic state represented by the bc ndp.⁴

The relationship between worker-environmentalists and environmental organizations is complicated. The discussion that follows maps the dynamics of alliances in the British Columbian context while acknowledging the contradictions and conflicts that occur both within the labour movement itself and between labour and environmentalist alliances. The goal is to critically examine the structural and ideological obstacles inhibiting alliances of this kind and the social and political contexts that make building and maintaining solidarity between the working class and environmentalists so difficult.

The different strands of ecology – that is, conservation and preservation – that developed into the modern environmental movement have historically neglected the world of work and workers. The history of the ideas we have about the environment, the wilderness, and what constitutes environmentalism has been largely class segregated. Richard White, in his article “Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?,” suggests that environmentalists do not adequately consider work in their understanding of environmental issues. He argues, “Most environmentalists disdain and distrust those who most obviously work in nature. Environmentalists have come to associate work – particularly heavy bodily labor, blue-collar work – with environmental degradation.”⁵ Thomas Dunk makes a similar point, arguing that the environmental movement did not adequately address working-class concerns about resource use.⁶

Unlike White and Dunk, some academics perpetuate this exclusion of class when discussing environmentalism, which results in labour activism being framed as only about workplace issues and, more importantly, as antithetical to environmental activism. However, not all analyses have separated class and environmentalism, and this article is situated within a counternarrative to the mainstream environmental history, loosely called environmental justice. More than thirty years ago, Carlos Schwantes laid out a framework for putting class back into the discourse of environmentalism, but relatively few have taken it up.⁷ A few have looked at labour and the environment through the lens of the labour process.⁸ A growing number have examined environmental and labour alliances.⁹ Other historians have taken an interest in the classed nature of environmental activism and examined the possibilities of worker-environmentalist alliances. As Robert Gordon argues in “Shell No!,” “between the late 1960s and early 1980s, workers, progressive union leaders, and environmental activists from across the country concluded that the spread of hazardous substances in the workplace and the spread of pollution in the environment represented two aspects of the same problem.”¹⁰ Within this relatively small but growing body of literature, the history of workers and environmentalists is merging – and also emerging, as the field of working-class environmental history.

More recently, historian Chad Montrie published a short overview of workers and environmentalists in the United States entitled A People’s History of Environmentalism in the United States.¹¹ Erik Loomis’ Empire of Timber examines the actions of workers as environmentalists in the Pacific Northwest.¹² Meredith Burgmann and Verity Burgmann’s Green Bans, Red Union: Environmental Activism and the New South Wales Builders Labourers’ Federation provides a perspective outside of North America, as does Myrna I. Santiago’s The Ecology of Oil: Environment, Labor, and the Mexican Revolution, 1900–1938.¹³ In the Canadian context, Gordon Hak explores similar themes in Capital and Labour in the British Columbia Forest Industry.¹⁴ Another example from British Columbia is Richard Rajala’s “This Wasteful Use of a River: Log Driving, Conservation, and British Columbia’s Stellako River Controversy, 1965–72.”¹⁵ Labour/Le Travail published two articles on worker environmentalism in the same issue: Katrin MacPhee’s “Canadian Working-Class Environmentalism, 1965–1985,” and Joan McFarland’s “Labour and the Environment: Five Stories from New Brunswick since the 1970s.”¹⁶

Confrontations between workers and environmentalists on the ground have not magically been resolved, nor have the differences between labour history and environmental history been erased. Yet, by uncovering more of the history of worker environmentalism, we may help better bridge the gap between workers and environmentalists. In British Columbia, there is a long history of workers and environmentalists forming alliances to work on particular issues. There is also a history of worker-initiated environmental committees within the labour movement. Hak notes that the BC Federation of Labour formed a Natural Resources Committee in 1969. The committee recommended that “union members join spec [Society Promoting Environmental Conservation] or other environmental groups, and offered support to the new pollution committees established by the International Brotherhood of Pulp, Sulphite and Paper Mill Workers (ibpspmw) locals in BC.”¹⁷ In the 1970s, the labour movement continued working on environmental issues. Many of the alliances formed between workers and environmentalists were part of workers’ health and safety committees, where workers’ concerns overlapped with the concerns of environmentalists. Laurel Sefton MacDowell notes in her article “Greening the Canadian Workplace: Unions and the Environment” that “throughout the 1970s and 1980s, as unions increasingly brought occupational health and safety matters to the bargaining table, the number of strikes over such issues increased, and unions allocated more staff, time, and money to reducing workplace hazards and disease.”¹⁸ Health and safety committees are an important part of worker-environmentalist activism, but this activism is not limited to this area.

Just prior to the formation of the Tin Wis Coalition in 1988, the International Woodworkers of America (iwa Canada) national convention created a new department of forestry and environment to deal with “issues faced by iwa members in their dual role of forestry workers and citizens, designed to assist the officers in addressing forestry and environmental issues.”¹⁹ The iwa was well positioned to comment on the forestry industry being both environmentally and economically unsustainable; the practice of companies being granted logging rights through tree farm licences in exchange for providing jobs and building mills in the communities was falling apart and had been for some time.²⁰ The forest tenure system in British Columbia at the time had been in place since World War II but had its roots at the turn of the century. In 1905, BC premier Richard McBride opened up the province to corporate logging interests by creating special licences that would allow companies to log Crown land for a period of 21 years. Within three years, 15,000 such licences were granted. Patricia Marchak, an authority on the politics of forestry in British Columbia, notes that it is difficult to separate corporate and government interests in BC as “the relationship between forestry companies and governments is embedded in the policy of granting long-term logging rights (tenures) to companies that build mills and employ workers. Governments became dependent on the companies their policy favoured.”²¹ The logging industry continued to grow, with rapid advances in technology creating a Fordist model of corporate forestry.²²

Logging expanded greatly from the 1960s onward, introducing significant changes in technology that cost many resource workers their jobs. Two periods of changes in technology resulted in huge job losses: 1974–75, when the grapple yarder was introduced; and 1983–84, when giant feller bunchers were introduced.²³ Both the grapple yarder and the feller buncher greatly reduced the number of workers needed in the forest, and not because production slowed down. Technological changes allowed production to increase while employment decreased in logging, sawmills and planing mills, and pulp and paper mills.²⁴ Forestry companies blamed the loss of jobs on environmentalists in order to turn workers against the environmental movement, providing the companies with a convenient scapegoat. This diversionary tactic allowed companies to ignore real issues such as overproduction, technological changes, and capitalist imperatives to increase production and profits and cut costs, such as labour.

By the late 1980s, several articles in iwa Canada’s paper, the Lumber Worker, indicate the degree to which the union prioritized discussion of environmental issues. Unionists were clearly aware of the impact of environmentally unsound practices on their members.²⁵ One issue provided extensive coverage of the conflict over logging in the Carmanah Valley, on Vancouver Island, arguing that the media were ignoring issues that workers and environmentalists agreed upon – specifically, a call for remanufacturing as a way to increase employment and reduce environmental impact and a call for value-added production modelled on Sweden.²⁶ Other issues emphasized the connection between log exports and jobs. As of March 1989, iwa Canada had renewed its call for a total ban on the export of raw logs from British Columbia.²⁷ Another article described a workers’ protest against wood waste, noting, “Protestors demanded that the company put a halt to high grading logging sites and exporting timber at the expense of their millworkers.”²⁸

Worker-environmentalists, by virtue of being at the site of production, were able to make the connections between unsound environmental practices and the class implications of these practices for workers. At the same time, they sought to work with others to challenge these practices. The union called for a commission of inquiry into the creation of any new tree farm licences, “along with community, environmental, and Native groups to reveal forest land mismanagement by current tree farm license holders.”²⁹ In addition, Local 1-80 submitted a brief outlining its position, and over 300 members demonstrated in Parksville while the BC Minister of Forests was conducting public hearings.³⁰

The rhetoric around logging versus environmentalism was heating up by the early 1990s in British Columbia; many newspapers were heralding a “war in the woods,” and industry groups were doing their best to set workers against environmentalists. Simultaneously, however, there was growing co-operation among workers, environmentalists, and First Nations, despite the obstacles put in their way, as the example of the Tin Wis Coalition demonstrates.

In the fall of 1989, articles starting appearing in local newspapers that were critical of logging in the Kyuquot Sound area.³¹ The Nuu-chah-nulth-aht Tribal Council – which had been working with Friends of Strathcona, a group trying to stop new mining in Strathcona Park – was concerned that the media were framing this issue in such a way that implied, in Chief Councillor Earl J. Smith’s words, that “native people had given the environmentalists and other organizations the right to speak on the native people’s behalf and advance their cause and interests.” This narrative, Smith continued, created the perception that “native people were against logging, the forest industry and against any development.” This was a misrepresentation of the Nations within the ntc: the Ehattesaht, Kyuquot, and Mowachaht. Smith explained that the ntc recommended “a process much the same as the Clayoquot Sound Sustainable Development Committee. This would provide an opportunity for native people to present our own case on our terms and conditions based on our native principles and values and vision.”³² This led to the formation of just such a group, called the Western Strathcona Local Advisory Council. The council consisted of representatives from the ntc as well as from unions, the environmentalist community, and the forestry and tourism industries.

The informal group would become the Tin Wis Coalition.³³ Frank Cox, a participant, remembers the rationale for environmental groups getting involved in the process: “Early in 1988, in response to conflicts about the use of Strathcona Park land on Vancouver Island, an alliance of native, labour and environmental organizations was formed. Because similar land use conflicts existed throughout BC, often pitting environmentalists, natives, and workers against each other, it was felt that a forum was necessary to facilitate discussion among us and to help to find what common ground could link us in the search for real alternatives to existing land use policies.”³⁴

A background paper, entitled “Tin-Wis Congress: An Environmental Perspective,” was provided to all attendees prior to their arrival, to serve as a guide to their discussions.³⁵ The models discussed and advocated in these forums were worker-oriented solutions, meaning solutions that were about employment, safety, and sustainability, not company profits. Solutions based on the decentralization of forestry operations and community controls over the means of production were presented as an alternative to the existing structures.³⁶ For the coalition, the source of the forestry conflicts in the province was an economic system that valued profit over workers and the environment. The Tin Wis Accord, the final result of the meetings, challenged that relationship between government and corporation in favour of community control based on recognition of Aboriginal title and a shared goal of sustainability.

The Tin Wis participants committed themselves “to develop and implement the mechanisms for Native people, trade unionists, environmentalists, women, youth and others to work together on a regional basis to resolve resource development and environmental issues and conflicts and to further the process of developing a ‘people’s’ alternative to the policies of the present government.”³⁷ This possibility – an alternative to the corporate order that had gone virtually unchallenged since the early 1900s – is what truly threatened both capital and the state. The coalition seemed to be offering a true alternative, a possible counterhegemonic bloc, to business as usual. Each membership group was responsible for going back to its constituencies to work on a further plan and develop an alternative model of forest stewardship.

Another meeting of the coalition was held in Port Alberni in 1990. Out of the second meeting came an agreement to work on a new forest stewardship framework for the province. One of the ntc representatives, Bill Green, reported back to the Tribal Council that “a number of changes have been suggested by the First Nations of BC to make the [Forest Stewardship Act] more accountable for the First Nations and these changes have not been implemented.” “The ntc through the Tin-Wis coalition,” Green continued, would “participate in drafting and promoting the Forest Stewardship Act.”³⁸

The final text of the Tin Wis Accord was concise and to the point:

The Tin Wis Accord

1. We commit ourselves to active support for the recognition, by all non-Native governments, of aboriginal title and rights; and for the immediate commencement of governmental and community processes to negotiate treaties between Native nations and non-Native governments. We recognize that these rights have not been and cannot be extinguished.
2. We further commit ourselves to develop and implement a process of learning and sharing within and between Native and non-Native communities and organizations, with a goal of developing trust and a shared vision about how we can justly and sustainably share in this Earth. This includes a process of learning about the full meaning of terms like democracy, community, local control and ownership.
3. In accordance with the above, we further commit ourselves to develop and implement mechanisms for Native people, trade unionists, environmentalists, women, youth and others to work together on a regional basis to resolve resource development and environmental issues and conflicts and to further the process of developing a “people’s” alternative to the policies of the present government.³⁹

The list of groups endorsing the accord – a cross-section of workers, environmentalists, First Nations, and political parties in British Columbia – shows the success of the alliance.⁴⁰

Unfortunately, even though ndp members had been part of the coalition, once the ndp replaced the Social Credit government in 1992, it did not implement the processes laid out by Tin Wis.⁴¹ The ndp government of Mike Harcourt would create the Committee on Resources and Environment (core) and, notably, included forestry corporations in the deliberations.⁴² This was a direct contradiction of the intentions of Tin Wis to offer an alternative to corporate forestry. The bc ndp showed the limits of social democracy: it was not willing to implement a people’s vision of alternatives to capitalism. Instead, it reinserted both the state and corporations back into the discussion, thus ensuring that the hegemony of corporate forestry practices would be maintained.

Unfortunately, the Tin Wis Coalition fell apart in 1991 when a blockade stopping logging in Tsitika Valley turned ugly, with confrontations between environmentalists and iwa members.⁴³ Given the eventual outcome, the Tin Wis Coalition could be viewed as a failure. It did succeed, however, in demonstrating that workers, environmentalists, and First Nations have shared interests. It is worth remembering, too, that the coalition faced resistance from forestry companies and a government intent on preserving the status quo. In the case of forestry companies and their front groups, it was not in their interest to discuss the alliance or give it credence.⁴⁴

The Tin Wis Accord was followed by an equally ambitious co-operative effort, also on Vancouver Island, and many from the Tin Wis Coalition began to work on the South Island Forest Accord (sifa) after Tin Wis collapsed. The sifa was an attempt to address mutual concerns about corporate logging practices and the impact that then current unsustainable logging practices would have on their communities. iwa Local 1-80 engaged in dialogue with five environmental organizations: the Carmanah Forestry Society, the Environmental Youth Alliance (South Vancouver Island), the Friends of Carmanah/Walbran, the Sierra Club of Western Canada, and the Western Canada Wilderness Committee. The result was the sifa. Signed on 6 September 1991, this accord is another example of an alliance between workers and environmentalists; unfortunately, it is also an example of the limits of such alliances.

After the initial signing, the iwa Canada, the Village of Tofino, the Union of BC Municipalities, and the Arrowsmith Ecological Association endorsed the sifa.⁴⁵ The accord noted that “wilderness preservation is not the greatest threat to forest industry jobs. However, preservation could worsen an already bleak situation unless drastic changes are made now.” Consequently, the accord continued, “iwa Canada Local 1-80 clc, hereby publicly declare our common ground and unity of purpose in demanding the following changes in the management and stewardship of British Columbia’s forest heritage”:

1. Some old growth forest ecosystems must be protected in perpetuity to maintain the health of the biosphere. In order to determine how much should be set aside in the South Vancouver Island, we urgently require:
   a) A complete socio/biophysical inventory of all forest lands; and,
   b) Job creation strategies which utilize the untapped possibilities within the forest industry to offset potential job loss arising from the protection of additional areas. When the foregoing conditions have been met, we can then jointly seek the protection of additional areas.
2. The purpose of harvesting the forest is to promote and enhance long term community stability through the creation of jobs. We must create more jobs per cubic meter of wood. New jobs can be created through better use of the forest resource. Better forest uses include: value added manufacturing; environmentally appropriate logging systems; commercial thinning; intensive silviculture; land and habitat restoration; old growth forest research and ecotourism. All exports of raw logs and cants must be immediately stopped.
3. Government forest policy must be changed to ensure that decisions are no longer made without the active and authoritative participation in all levels of planning by all concerned. Local control must be balanced with the provincial public interest. Informed communication and accountability by all concerned is essential. Decisions with negative impacts on workers and communities must be accompanied by economic development strategies to offset those impacts.
4. Some logging practices must be changed to protect all forest functions including in particular: wildlife and fisheries habitat; river systems; biodiversity and soil productivity. Such changes must ensure a safe working environment.
5. Outstanding Native land claims must be fairly and expeditiously resolved.⁴⁶

The signing of the accord was not without its critics. According to the magazine Canadian Dimension, “the media was immediately sceptical of the claim that the Accord was ‘historic.’” The article explained that “a closer look suggests that sifa’s words alone are not earthshattering, but the symbolism of a joint worker-environmentalist statement on common ground is.”⁴⁷ sifa was largely symbolic and was a watered-down version of Tin Wis. It had weaker language on recognizing Aboriginal title and on community control of forestry. With the failure of Tin Wis and, soon after, the limits of sifa becoming apparent, it was clear that the state would not implement the visions of coalitions among workers, environmentalists, and First Nations, despite their best efforts, as long as the state was taking its cues from corporations rather than from the large sections of the population represented by the coalitions. Even with sifa’s somewhat less transformative vision, the co-operation of diverse groups outside of the state corporate framework was still unsuccessful.⁴⁸

Nevertheless, these alliances illustrate that it is possible to link the struggles of loggers and environmentalists. Conflicts between the two are neither desirable nor inevitable. However, in these cases and others, the alliances made among workers, environmentalists, political parties, and First Nations were not perfect; there would be cracks, divisions, and disputes.

Disputes within the resource industries can range from serious to more symbolic. For example, the iwa demanded that the Sunshine Coast School Board pull a book, Maxine’s Tree, from its shelves, arguing that the book was “casting the logging industry in a dingy light when the reader is shown a clearcut at the end.”⁴⁹ Workers and environmentalists targeting each other, as evidenced by the dispute over Maxine’s Tree, is a recurring problem, despite the history of environmentalists and labour working together in successful alliances.

Alliances are difficult to accomplish within the existing economic framework because no matter how much each side compromises, they cannot control the actions of capital. In addition, unions are also bound by legal obligations to their membership, and thus they must balance workers’ interests in their workplace with their larger societal interests as citizens. The iwa articulated its obligations as a union to its members and to larger environmental concerns. There was a tension between those obligations. For example, its 1990 policy statement, Our Children’s World, argued that to achieve long-term sustainability the union had to “work to find a balance between our environmental, social and economic concerns.” In order to accomplish this sustainability, the union must “include environmental considerations such as biodiversity and our forests’ role in the exchange of gases that makes life possible on the Earth.” The union made a “commitment to protect forest soils, waterways and life forms that depend on them.” Yet, the statement also recognized “economic factors such as employment creation, the generation of wealth and export earnings.” Social concerns included “the health and safety of forest workers and the preservation of viable communities based on forestry.”⁵⁰

That focus on both sustainability and employment creation, on biodiversity and preservation of forestry communities, is often where workers and environmentalists seem to disagree. This fundamental difference in interests and responsibilities will continually cause strain in any labour-environmental alliance. Environmental organizations are free to develop goals and campaigns and to change them; they are not legally bound to any course of action. Conversely, unions have a legal duty to represent their members’ interests in the workplace regarding wages, benefits, health and safety, collective bargaining, mediation, and a whole range of workplace issues.⁵¹ Unions can act in the interests of the environment, too, through committees, policy, and alliances, but they also have a completely different and often more complex set of responsibilities than an organization dedicated solely to environmental issues.

Environmentalists can also be uninterested in working with unions and their members. For example, in an article on local control of forests, published in the journal Environments, the authors quote an environmentalist and resident of Tofino who stated that they did not see loggers as part of their community: “I think part of what we’re having trouble with here in Clayoquot Sound is that the loggers don’t live here. The loggers may live in Ucluelet, some of them live in Port Alberni. … So suddenly it’s a pulp mill worker in Port Alberni that I have to be thinking about and that’s hard.” For this activist, these workers were not part of the environmentalist milieu in Tofino and “in fact right at the beginning we said, ‘forget it, we’re not going to worry about a pulpmill worker in Port Alberni,’ that’s too far away basically for it to be considered part of our community, part of the community of decisions.” Yet, it had to be acknowledged that “there really is an interdependency that has to be recognized so we do have to give some thought to those jobs far away. But it has made it harder, it has meant that we’re not working just at that community level, it’s not me sitting down with my local logging community member and trying to sort this out. It’s trying to deal with people that I don’t know.”⁵² As this quotation suggests, what may seem like an obvious alliance from a theoretical perspective is much harder to achieve on the ground.

It has become almost axiomatic in the analysis of coalition protests to lay the blame for any failures, perceived or real, on organized labour.⁵³ Union bureaucracy, and the inertia it can cause within the scope of activism and protest, is important, and it is an area of study much debated within labour history. However, it is too easy to simply blame organized labour and its bureaucracy for the tensions between itself and other social movements.⁵⁴ There are several problems with this type of criticism. First, it is rooted in wanting organized labour to be something it is not – specifically, an issue-oriented new social movement group. Second, these criticisms also uncritically accept environmental groups as inherently progressive and, conversely, the unions as regressive. Third, there is a clear lack of understanding of the purpose of unions and the legal responsibilities they have to their membership. All of these problems lead to a faulty conclusion that unions are not capable of being part of a counterhegemonic bloc.

Often, only the faults of organized labour and the problems of working-class organizations have been examined, while new social movements have escaped a critical eye. Prominent sociologist John Bellamy Foster, who looks at both environmentalists and workers, contends that it is both “the narrow conservationist thrust of most environmentalism in the United States” and the “unimaginative business union response of organized labour” that are problems when attempting to form coalitions.⁵⁵ While business unionism – or social unionism, for that matter – is not above reproach, a more critical lens also must be used to examine the environmental movement and the tactics used by capital to divide workers and environmentalists.

Workers themselves are not ignorant of anti-worker, anti-union attitudes that exist within the environmental movement and of their cost to potential alliances and the work of sustainability. In 2007, the Steelworkers-iwa noted the divide between workers and the environmental movement at its national convention while recommitting to continuing to work with environmentalists.⁵⁶ According to the union, “We have repeatedly encountered serious problems in finding common ground with some environmental organizations. We know we cannot simply wish away the resulting conflicts.”⁵⁷ The Steelworkers-iwa identified its primary concern when working with environmental groups as the history of disregard for workers’ issues exhibited by environmental organizations. “Often in the past these groups have pursued their own campaigns or fund-raising objectives, without adequately considering the needs of workers, their families and their communities,” the union stated. “Green preservationist groups have ignored workers, discounted our concerns about employment or safety and generally disrespected our members and our union.”⁵⁸ Despite the problems, sustainable environmental policy cannot be divorced from a sustainable economy; it is difficult, if not impossible, to have one without the other. Workers stand to lose when technologies resulting in faster, more profitable, and less environmentally sound logging practices are implemented, and of course, they lose when the environment collapses.

The critical focus on labour is further complicated by the fact that workers and their organizations are often excluded from negotiations in which the three parties are environmental groups, First Nations, and corporations, with the state serving as a supposedly neutral, but actually biased, arbiter. In such negotiations, corporate interests are seen to speak for their workers as well as their company. A prime example is the recent Great Bear Rainforest Accord. The groups involved were the BC government, five forestry companies, 26 Aboriginal groups, and three environmental organizations. The deal had been in negotiation since 2001 by the Joint Solutions Project.⁵⁹ One-time rivals Ric Slaco and Valerie Langer explain the process of coming to the agreement: “The first time we met – on a blockade at Clayoquot Sound in 1988 – we had a vigorous discussion about old growth forests. Very vigorous. Valerie was a young literacy teacher blocking a logging road. Ric was a young professional forester for a major forest company in Clayoquot Sound.” The two relate how the process worked: “The Companies created the Coast Forest Conservation Initiative, which has five members today – BC Timber Sales, Catalyst Paper, Howe Sound Pulp and Paper, Interfor and Western Forest Products. ForestEthics Solutions, Greenpeace and Sierra Club BC also formed a coalition to engage in this endeavour. The two alliances formed the Joint Solutions Project – agreeing to work collaboratively to find new ways to achieve conservation and management objectives in the Great Bear Rainforest. And we, as stakeholders, developed conservation and management recommendations for First Nation and provincial government decision makers.”⁶⁰ The problem with Joint Solutions Project is that one key stakeholder was left out: workers. Ellen Russell’s framework for studying the capitalist dynamics that inhibit worker-environmental alliances identifies this type of coalition as “a somewhat more complex divide and conquer strategy involv[ing] the creation of temporary (and sometimes alternating) alliances in which the capitalist firm seeks to make common cause with either workers or environmentalists to the detriment of the remaining actor.”⁶¹ This type of intervention by capital raises the question of how successful counterhegemonic coalitions can be if made within the framework of capitalism.

Historian Erik Loomis sees coalitions between capital and environmentalists as evidence of a growing rift between workers and environmentalists. He argues, “Environmentalists have failed to articulate a vision for working-class economy in a post-industrial, multicultural United States. Environmentalism has developed a cozier relationship with green capitalists than with everyday employees. A green energy capitalist is still a capitalist and desires to limit labor costs to increase profit.”⁶² This is most definitely a serious consideration. However, coalitions like Tin Wis do suggest that workers, environmentalists, and First Nations can work together. It is just that they cannot implement their accords within the framework of capitalism. Russell makes this exact point when stating, “Systemic questions might be entertained regarding both the viability of our current conceptions of economic growth and whether capitalism is inimical to the rethinking of production and consumption to respond to environmental and worker concerns.”⁶³ I would suggest the evidence points to yes.

In an article on coalitions in the United States, Kenneth Gould, Tammy Lewis, and J. Timmons Roberts argue that new social movement theorists are wrong to believe that movements “such as the peace, feminist, and ecology movements are beyond class and that people relate to and bond on the basis of identity and shared values.” They argue that new social movements “are class-based movements that have shielded the class differences with ‘identity and culture.’ What the new social movement theorists consider unifying to individuals based on ‘identity’ needs to be examined as a ‘class-based’ identity.” Their overarching point is that the professional managerial class base of mainstream environmentalism is largely incompatible with working-class alliances. Instead, they suggest that the environmental justice and anti-toxic grassroots movements are better partners because “these groups share similar structural positions in the political economy” and “similar analyses of power.”⁶⁴

These critiques are consistent with what might be observed when comparing the Tin Wis Coalition with the Great Bear Rainforest compromise. For example, the third point in the Tin Wis Accord challenges prevailing economic structures in favour of “developing a ‘people’s’ alternative to the policies of the present government.”⁶⁵ Perhaps it is stating the obvious, but Russell notes that “without capitalist firms as the focal point of economic life, the terrain on which to consider these issues would be profoundly transformed.”⁶⁶ In many ways, Tin Wis and the South Island Forest Accord operated without capitalism as the focal point. Without government and forestry corporations at the table, however, these visions could not be realized unless a revolutionary change occurred in the dominant political and economic structures.

Workers have presented challenges to the dominant hegemonic bloc, as have coalitions, however fleeting. But at the same time, the state and corporations have used divide-and-conquer tactics to thwart them – be it in the form of corporate front groups or divide-and-conquer coalitions, exemplified by the Great Bear Rainforest compromise. For a truly counterhegemonic bloc to be successful, this will have to change. Clearly there have been working-class environmentalists, and coalitions among workers, environmentalists, and First Nations, and these alliances have mounted resistance to dominant narratives; however, their accomplishments are largely obscured by mainstream environmentalist discourses and the more general ignorance of working-class history as a whole. Building up knowledge about the history of working-class struggle and resistance makes modern-day coalition building seem more possible, in that it shows it has been done before. Even if the history shows mixed success, by reclaiming the history we can start to see what is possible. This allows for the conception of a worker-environmentalist to be part of the history and thus a goal we can build toward.

How to cite:

John-Henry Harter, “Histories of Environmental Coalition Building in British Columbia: Using History to Build Working-Class Environmentalism,” Labour/Le Travail 90 (Fall 2022): 203–222. https://doi.org/10.52975/llt.2022v90.008

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