The Situation

The Rainforest Solutions Project was engaged in a high-stakes, high-profile campaign to protect British Columbia’s vast Great Bear Rainforest, one of the world’s largest remaining temperate rainforests. The Great Bear, with an area larger than Switzerland stretching along British Columbia’s central and north coast, is home to towering ancient cedar trees and many rare and threatened species, including the white “Spirit” bear. For 10 years the Great Bear had been the focus of an intense struggle against excessive logging, involving on-the-ground protests and boycotts as well as an active campaign to spread the word about the destruction to a worldwide audience.

By 2004, the battle was reaching a new stage. Thanks to the global campaign, many major paper companies and retailers had decided to stop purchasing products from the Great Bear Rainforest. Meanwhile discussions between the British Columbia provincial government and the First Nations governments to decide the future of the Great Bear were underway. Central to these negotiations were land-use recommendations agreed on after intensive talks involving loggers, representatives from First Nations and local communities, and environmentalists.

The Challenge

The arena of action over the Great Bear was shifting from direct action on the ground to creating public pressure for a positive resolution of these government-to-government talks. To adapt to this change, the Rainforest Solutions Project needed a more nimble website that their staff could update quickly with the latest information, engage users and help mobilize thousands of citizens in letter-writing campaigns. Their current website process was too clunky to accomplish these goals easily, said Rainforest Solutions Office Manager/Webmaster Miranda Post, “The old site required a lot of steps,” Post explained. To update content, for example, a staffer would have to contact the site designer who would then pass the changes another person who would then make the changes. “God forbid that one of them would happen to be away,” Post said.

The Solution

In 2004, the Rainforest Solutions Project asked ONE/Northwest to help implement a solution that would give them a more nimble site. The answer was Plone, a powerful, open-source content management tool. After Rainforest Solutions gave us an attractive design for their new website, we brought that design into Plone and trained their staff to use its visual editing tools. “Plone is a dream,” Post said. “The pages look great and it’s easy to use.” We also implemented Democracy in Action, an online advocacy service that allowed Rainforest Solutions to communicate with its supporters and to mobilize them to take actions such as contacting government officials. All this was done for a few thousand dollars, a fraction of what a commercial solution would cost.

The Results

In early 2005, Rainforest Solutions Project successfully launched a new website that was easy to update and closely tied to its various efforts to bring pressure on the British Columbia government to sign off on an agreement to protect the Great Bear Rainforest. As the government- to-government talks dragged on into the summer of 2005, environmentalists launched a public campaign to force a resolution. They ran newspaper ads and distributed tens of thousands of flyers, postcards and stickers calling for action on the Great Bear. Much of this publicity referred people to the Rainforest Solutions website to take further action.

Using Plone, Rainforest Solutions was able to keep its website current and give users the ability to easily contact their representatives. As a result of the campaign, the Premier of British Columbia’s office received tens of thousands of faxes demanding that the province sign off on an agreement to protect the Great Bear. In February 2006, the B.C. government announced a landmark agreement that protects one-third of the Great Bear’s 15 million acres from logging and calls for “lighter touch forestry” known as Ecosystem Based Management (EBM) over the rest of the area by 2009.

Observers are hailing the Great Bear Rainforest agreement as a model that can be used to protect other significant ecosystems around the world. But even as supporters of the Great Bear celebrate a great achievement, they realize that lots of intensive work remains if EBM is to be successfully implemented. Timely information will play an important role in making that happen. That’s why Rainforest Solutions plans to “continue using the website as a platform to update people” on how the process is going, Post explained.