Source: The Vancouver Sun

"Doing this work is difficult. Social change isn't easy," she says. "This award is a really important validation that the work that I've been doing for over 20 years-in trying to raise difficult environmental issues and see changes in legislation-is being recognized and supported."

A pioneer in sustainability activism, Berman is credited with helping save over 12 million acres of endangered Canadian forests, including the Great Bear Rainforest and Clayoquot Sound. In the 1990s, she organized logging-road blockades in British Columbia that were, at the time, the largest act of civil disobedience in Canada's history.

Tzeporah Berman is a founder of ForestEthics and PowerUp Canada, and a former co-director of Greenpeace International Climate and Energy. She currently works on tar sands and pipeline campaigns in Canada, the U.S. and Europe with many environmental organizations and First Nations.

Berman was one of the experts in Leonardo Di Caprio's environmental documentary 11th Hour, was one of six Canadian nominees for the Schwab Social Entrepreneur of the Year Award, has been profiled as "50 Visionaries Changing the World" in Utne Reader.