Activist wins award

Activist wins award:
Mae Burrows honoured for protecting the environment
By Dan Hilborn, Burnaby NOW assistant editor
Published Oct. 20, 2002

A longtime Burnaby resident and community volunteer has been honoured for her environmental activism.
Mae Burrows, executive director of the Labour Environmental Alliance, is the recipient of the Eugene Rogers Award from the Western Canada Wilderness Committee.
The award is presented annually to an environmentalist who works exceptionally hard to protect nature and who has made an outstanding contribution towards protecting wilderness and fish habitat.
"I was born beside the Fraser River in Haney and always loved rivers. My dad used to say the only thing free is a river," said Burrows, who has spent the better part of thepast decade bringing labour unions and environmental groups together.
"When we started in 1997, there was this huge fight known as 'workers versus the environment'," Burrows said. "But I believe that workers are environmentalists and so we started to bring people together.
"What we found is that there is a lot of common ground between the two. We now have forums on a monthly basis and the impact we're seeing is a lot more cooperation."
Burrows is especially proud of her work with union health and safety committees, working to eliminate the use of cancer-causing cleaning substances in the workplace.
Earlier this year, LEAS worked with the Burnaby school district and CUPE local 379 to identify and replace one of the most hazardous products the district was unknowingly using in local schools - Winsol SE 750, a carpet stain remover containing the potent carcinogen methyl chloride.
"This substance has even been associated with increased learning disorders in children, and my son attends these schools," Burrows said, noting that the response from the school district was the same as she hears from most groups when they discover they are using a dangerous product.
"People always tell me they simply don't know about these problems, but once they find out, they try to change."
Burrows notes that many toxic substances also work as endocrine disrupters, upsetting the hormonal balance in humans and sometimes causing infertility in women and sterility in men.
She has also worked with the Reach for Unbleached program that encourages the use of non-chlorinated papers, and the campaign that successfully halted the construction of the Kemano Completion Project on the Nechako River.
While Burrows says she has always held environmental values close to her heart, she only moved into her current career after spending two decades as an adult educator. Burrows was part of the New Westminster Douglas College faculty for 20 years.
"I still consider myself a teacher, except now I'm teaching people about their right to know," she says. "Even just four or five years ago this was tough work. Remember, that was a time when environmentalists were being called 'enemies of the state'."
Today, the Labour Environmental Alliance no longer has to knock on doors to take its message to the public, because their phone is ringing with unions, organizations and business wanting to know ways to make their workplaces safer.
And while positive change may happen slowly, Burrows is optimistic that the world is moving towards a brighter future.
"I'm pretty excited about the incredible interest we're getting to our campaigns," she said. "I can't keep up with all the calls we're getting from hotels, school and hospitals.
"I truly believe the mountain moving day is coming again."
Burrows lives in Burnaby with her husband Donald Gutstein, the noted SFU communication professor who wrote the prescient 1999 book E-Con: How the Internet Undermines Democracy.
Previous winners of the Eugene Rogers Environmental Award include singer Terry Jacks for his work to stop pulp mill pollution in Howe Sound, Joe Martin of the Nuu-Chah-Nulth Tribal Council and mountaineer John Clark.
The award is named after a New Westminster resident and activist with the Steelhead Society, who died in a 1992 car accident in the early stages of the successful campaign to stop the Kemano Completion project from building a dam on the Nechako River.