Beatty Street Publishing Inc. — Showing readers the world in a whole new light
Beatty Street Publishing Inc. (BSP) is an innovative publisher of books that challenge the way we see the world and the environment around us.
“We’re focussed on acquiring books that provide our readers with new and important insights and help them better understand the world in a range of areas, particularly the environment,” said Trevor Figueiredo, a BSP founder.
“We’re always looking for authors that can challenge stale thinking and present new ways of solving social, economic and environmental problems,” said Figueiredo.
“That’s why we’re so excited to be publishing the 10th Anniversary Edition of Trees are the Answer, Greenpeace co-founder Dr. Patrick Moore’s insightful book about the value of forests,” said Figueiredo.
Founded in Vancouver, Canada by three long-time colleagues – Patrick Moore, Tom Tevlin and Trevor Figueiredo — in the sustainability and communications sector, the firm aims to educate and inform readers on issues of public interest having to do with the food, energy and materials we derive each day from the planet.
Beginning with the 10th Anniversary revised version of Trees Are The Answer by Greenpeace co-founder and former leader Dr. Patrick Moore, Beatty Street Publishing Inc. has a number of other titles in the works.
10th Anniversary Edition of Trees are the Answer from one of this decade’s most influential environmental leaders — Now Available!
The 10th Anniversary Edition of Trees are the Answer, Greenpeace Co-founder and former leader Dr. Patrick Moore’s book about the value of forests is now available for purchase at www.beattystreetpublishing.com.
Using words and photographs, Dr. Moore, an Ecology PhD, challenges our common assumptions about forests and forestry, and demonstrates in easy to understand terms why those assumptions are so often wrong.
In an approach that runs counter to much of the environmental movement’s current thinking, Trees are the Answer gives readers new eyes with which to see the land, exploring the beauty, biodiversity and spirit of forests growing back after logging.
“This book has been fully revised and updated to reflect Dr. Moore’s unconventional thinking on many current environmental issues from green building to climate change, renewable biofuel energy to paper and product recycling,” said Beatty Street Publishing President Tom Tevlin.
“This is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding how we can take better care of our forests and our environment,” said Tevlin.
See forests like you’ve never seen them before in the DVD version of Trees are the Answer
In this video production hosted by Greenpeace co-founder and former leader Dr. Patrick Moore, viewers take an engaging journey through forests while learning about their benefits and the importance of sustainable forestry.
Dr. Moore, an Ecology PhD, challenges our common assumptions about forests and forestry, and demonstrates in easy to understand terms why those assumptions are so often wrong.
Through detailed imagery and narration, Dr. Moore explains why forests are vital to us all and what it means to manage a forest well.
Produced for the expert and novice alike, this DVD will entertain and enlighten by taking you behind the scenes, to show you forests and forest management in a way you’ve likely never seen before.
Buy it now at www.beattystreetpublishing.com
Confessions of a Greenpeace Drop-Out – Coming soon to Beatty Street Publishing Inc.
Confessions of a Greenpeace DropOut is Dr. Patrick Moore’s engaging firsthand account of his many years spent as the ultimate Greenpeace insider, a co-founder and leader in the organization’s top committee. Moore explains why, 15 years after co-founding it, he left Greenpeace to establish a more sensible, science-based approach to environmentalism.
Confessions details Moore’s vision for a more sustainable world. From energy independence to climate change, genetic engineering to aquaculture, Moore sheds new light on some of the most controversial subjects in the news today.
Confessions will be published soon exclusively by Beatty Street Publishing Inc.
For more information see www.beattystreetpublishing.com and follow us on Twitter @beattystreet.
An Excerpt from the 10th Anniversary Edition of Trees are the Answer
I was born into the remote, windswept fjords of northern Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada. My childhood was spent living in a logging and fishing community on the edge of a rugged rainforest wilderness. A few hardy pioneer families, the remnants of the native community, and a crew of loggers were the only inhabitants of the float camp and tiny fishing village of Winter Harbour that was home for my first 15 years.
My grandfather, Albert Moore, arrived in Quatsino Sound in 1915 as chief timber cruiser for the Whelan Brothers who were building northern Vancouver Island’s first pulp mill at Port Alice. He mapped many of the region’s forests for the first time, surveying the topography and taking an inventory of the trees. When that task was completed in 1923 he went out on his own as a contract logger. He hired some men, set up a small float camp, and began to cut the old growth hemlock and cedar growing near the water’s edge.
The original Kwakiutl inhabitants of Winter Harbour called their village Clienna. They had survived on this shore for thousands of years on the abundant salmon, clams, and berries, and built their houses of cedar planks taken from the forest behind them. Over the years, in common with many aboriginal communities, the people of Clienna were decimated by measles, smallpox, and other diseases introduced by Europeans. By the time my grandfather established his float camp in Winter Harbour in 1936 the village site had long been abandoned, the survivors having relocated to the nearby community of Quatsino. I was born into that float camp in 1947, spending my first seven years in a bulky life jacket that was compulsory dress outside the house.
There were no frills in the life of a west coast logger in those early years. Four men bunked in each 12-by-24-foot shack, one to a corner, with a 45-gallon oil drum woodstove in the center where rain soaked clothes were hung to dry. They worked six or seven days a week, getting up in the dark, working in the rain and wrestling in the mud trying to fix broken machinery. It was hard, relentless work, falling the huge trees, winching them down the mountain to the sea where they could be boomed to the mill, all the while staying alert to escape being slashed by a snapping cable or crushed by a run-away log. When the loggers were not working there was nothing much to do back at the bunkhouse but play cards or listen to the radio. It was a lonely and sometimes miserable existence.
Until as late as the 1970s there was not much concern for the environmental effects of logging. Entire valleys and mountainsides of timber were clearcut with little regard for salmon streams, wildlife habitat, or reforestation. This was not done maliciously; it was simply assumed that the forest would grow back in time. Words such as environment, ecology, and biodiversity, and the concepts they represent, were absent from everyday conversation.
The early float camp era was ending during my boyhood. As the merchantable trees along the water’s edge had all been cut, my father, Bill Moore, who had taken over from his dad, obtained a lease in 1954 from the Kwakiutl to establish a permanent community on the original native village site. Roads were built to access timber farther up the valleys. Diesel had replaced steam some years before but it was the introduction of the motorized chainsaw, replacing double-bitted axes and crosscut handsaws that revolutionized logging. Productivity increased dramatically with improvements in technology. Loggers and their families shared in the post-war boom in material culture and working class affluence. It was a wonderful time to live in the rainforest.
I didn’t know I lived in a rainforest; to us it was the “woods” and it rained a lot. When it rained for 30 days straight we began to miss the sun. My playground and backyard was a recent clearcut across the road from our house. We didn’t call it a clearcut because the word wasn’t known; it was simply an “opening” or the “slash.” The slash was a better place to play than the deep dark of the old growth forest surrounding us. It was brighter and when the sun shone it was warmer and drier. The only other places where the sun came out were down at the dock and on the tide flats. In the clearing you could sit on a stump in the sun and all summer long the berries grew; first the salmon berries, then thimbleberries, then huckleberries and finally the salal berries. They were all deliciously different and we shared them with birds, deer and bears. As time went on new trees came up and added year-round green to the logged area. Hemlocks, cedars, and firs competing for the sunlight eventually crowded out the berry bushes. It was time to move on to a more recent clearcut. From this experience I developed a very different impression of clearcut logging from one that might be gained in the popular press today.
Today I can walk through forests where my grandfather clearcut logged 60 and 70 years ago and if it weren’t for the presence of rotting, moss-covered stumps you would never know it had once been cleared. The new forest is so lush and full of shrubs and ferns that all evidence of disturbance has been overgrown. Bears, wolves, cougars, ravens and all the other forest-dwellers roam there. The trees are straight and tall and although they have not yet reached the great size of some of their predecessors they form a dense and growing cover on land once cleared bare. The marvel of this renewal is that it took place entirely on its own, without the slightest help from human hands. There had been no thought given to reforestation or any other aspect of restoration. Nature has regenerated in spite of human disturbance and is rapidly returning to its original condition.
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I had chosen as my Ph.D. thesis topic the case of a huge copper mine project that proposed to dump its waste into Rupert Inlet, part of Quatsino Sound near my home at Winter Harbour. The US-based mining company stated publicly that the waters of Rupert Inlet were stratified in layers of differing density and that the mine waste would sink to the bottom and have no effect on the productive surface waters. A few days of research on my part revealed data from previous oceanographic surveys that virtually proved the opposite case. The waters of Rupert Inlet were thoroughly mixed from top to bottom and any waste injected into the inlet would surely be carried into the surface waters by ocean currents. I challenged the mining company in public hearings only to find that the public process had little or no impact on the final decision. To top it off, my professors informed me that they had been advised that if I ever wanted a job when I graduated perhaps I should change the nature of my inquiry. This was 1969 and I rebelled against such blatant coercion. In my Ph.D. thesis I proved conclusively that the mine waste was carried into the surface waters and that the government’s pollution control process was essentially immune to truth. I had become, through an entirely academic process, a radical environmental activist.
This experience led to my involvement in the founding of the Greenpeace movement in early 1971. Meeting regularly in the basement of the Unitarian Church in Vancouver, we planned the first Greenpeace campaign, a protest voyage against US nuclear testing in the Aleutian Islands. For the next 15 years I helped lead Greenpeace as it grew into the world’s largest environmental activist group, with branches in 26 countries and an annual budget of more than $100 million.
Those were heady years and sometimes looking back it is hard to believe what we did and what we accomplished. They were frightening times too. In the early 1970s the Vietnam War was raging and the prospect of nuclear holocaust loomed. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring5 had warned of toxic chemicals in the environment and Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb predicted mass starvation and ecosystem collapse. The great whales were being hunted to extinction. We believed “the Third World War will be the war to save the environment.”
Our ragtag band of Greenpeace volunteers pledged to be the shock troops in that war. We adopted a philosophy linking the tradition of non-violent protest with the newly emerging awareness of ecology and the environment, and used our knowledge of communications media to create events that television news could not resist. Images of daring environmentalists dodging whale harpoons and blocking nuclear tests filled the front pages and evening newscasts.
There was no stopping us as we broadened our campaigns to oppose baby seal killing, toxic discharges, nuclear waste dumping, supertanker traffic, driftnet fishing, kangaroo hunting, and the exploitation of Antarctica.
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