Victoria's Dirty Little Secret

As pedestrians clutching umbrellas hurried past San Francisco Victoria's Secret store on a recent Tuesday, a street theater skit unfolded under the gaze of bikini-clad mannequins. The protesters unfurled a pink banner, a "maid" dressed in a revealing black dress and thigh-high stockings danced with a broom, and activists passed out leaflets blasting the company for supporting forest clear cuts.

The short protest didn't attract a huge crowd -- passersby seemed more worried about keeping dry than pausing to take in the rain-soaked parody -- but multiply that number by over 200 other cities where similar protests took place on April 11, and the public awareness factor quickly adds up.

The coordinated protests were planned by the nonprofit forest advocacy group ForestEthics, which is pressuring Victoria's Secret to use more recycled paper and less virgin timber in its catalogs. Since the group's 18-month-old "catalog campaign" began in December 2004, over 600 protests have been staged in front of Victoria's Secret stores.

San Francisco-based ForestEthics' first move against Victoria's Secret was a protest in New York that caused the postponement of the Victoria's Secret "Angels in America" tour debut. Next was a full-page "Victoria's Dirty Secret" ad (PDF) in the New York Times featuring a lingerie-clad model grasping a chainsaw.

A relative youngster among environmental groups, ForestEthics has grabbed the attention of dozens of major U.S. corporations that send out catalogs, with an in-your-face market campaign calling attention to logging in endangered, old-growth forests -- particularly Canada's Boreal Forest, a 1.4 billion-acre swath of trees that helps regulate carbon in the global climate.

A clear-cut road through Canada's Boreal Forest. Photo courtesy of ForestEthics.

When it comes to protecting trees, pictures of pristine forests -- or the alternative, pictures of clear-cut stumps -- don't get quite the same public reaction as sexy underwear. Although Victoria's Secret is not the only company that prints catalogs on virgin timber -- ForestEthics has named dozens of offending companies -- lingerie serves as a good hook for its market campaign. And so far, it appears to be working.

The campaign begins

Twelve years ago, ForestEthics executive director Todd Paglia realized something had to change.

In 1994, Paglia was part of a group fighting to save the timber surrounding Clayoquot Sound, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, from loggers. Environmental organizations and native groups staged some of the largest civil disobedience actions in British Columbia at the time, but as Paglia explained in a recent interview, "We were not able to stop the logging by putting bodies on the line; we needed another way.

"We decided we needed to find out who's buying this wood," Paglia recalled. "Do the customers of the logging companies know this is happening? That was the birth of what we call market campaigns."

Market campaigns have not been used much in forest activism -- bigger environmental organizations, like the National Wildlife Foundation and the Sierra Club, haven't tried them. But Paglia, who worked for Ralph Nader -- perhaps the biggest corporate activist of all time -- felt it was time to push back.

While the average logging company doesn't care how many protesters show up with signs, major corporations in the United States do -- very much. Concerned about their brand, commercial corporations have no interest in being attached to what ForestEthics dubs "forest destruction."

"We feel that at some point, it's time to stop being polite," Paglia said. "One problem big groups have with targeting corporations is that it gets personal; but it's people's health, our children, our wildlife."

17 billion catalogs