Copyright 2001, Environmental News Network
August 31, 2001

While many activists are disheartened by the ongoing destruction of the world’s ecosystems and government reluctance to take on environmental offenders, the National Resource Defense Council (NRDC) claims there’s still cause for celebration.

"It occurred to us about a year ago that we'd proven that we could energize many thousands of people to take action over one or two isolated -- but important -- issues," said Alan Metrick , director of the NRDC campaign called "BioGems."

"We were winning fights at a rapid pace, and we had a growing list of online activists itching to take on more bad guys, but we hadn't yet identified our next battles. That's when BioGems was born," said Metrick.

The BioGems campaign has many successes to brag about. For example, on April 4, 2001, British Columbia’s spectacular Great Bear Rainforest gained federal protection from commercial logging. The government-sponsored conservation measure is one of the largest in North American history and is aimed at protecting the habitat of the Spirit Bear. The key to this hard-won victory was the consumer pressure NRDC and its partners brought to bear on logging companies and their customers.

Meanwhile, South of the Border, environmentalists successfully halted Mitsubishi’s plans to build the world’s largest salt works in Baja California’s San Ignacio Lagoon. The warm, shallow waters of the region are important breeding grounds for the gray whale. Mitsubishi heard form over a million concerned citizens before it pulled out of the project in March 2000.In June, shortly after receiving thousands of letters from BioGems activists, the government of Brazil closed an illegal road through Iguaçu Falls National Park, a 460,000-acre Atlantic rainforest on Brazil's southern border adjoining Argentina.

"We've been sending e-mail messages to our growing list of electronic activists, alerting them to developments in each of the campaigns and asking them to send messages to help out. These messages have been very successful. Already we've stopped a bad project in Belize by having our activists communicate with a U.S. based company, expressing their displeasure with the project," said Metrick. "This stuff really works."

Though environmentalists can be proud of these victories, NRDC warns that many key battles are yet to be won. In Brazil, a government scheme to introduce new highways, power lines, dams and other major infrastructure projects will threaten the Amazon rainforest. BioGems will take on the Brazilian government this year.

"BioGems is different from anything we've attempted before largely in that it's a multi-year campaign that will allow us to add new projects to our list as we win important victories in others. This way we always have something in the 'pipeline' so that our electronic activists can remain engaged -- something they tell us they want," said Metrick. Error: Unable to read footer file.