Remembering Proud Fanatic - BC Eco-Warrior Betty Krawczyk

"I am a fanatic. But we have to become fanatics in order to make changes."

Long before I wrote about orcas, my focus was forests.

My 2007 movie, The Green Chain, spun into my first podcast series — featured on The Tyee as “Trees and Us” and on the National Film Board and other sites as “The Green Chain” podcast. I interviewed people who were passionate about forests and trees.

One of the first interviews was with Betty Krawczyk - one of the inspirations for the character in The Green Chain played by iconic Canadian actor, Babz Chula.

Some of my fave interviews were collected in a book that was also, conveniently, titled The Green Chain. Here’s the print version of my interview with Betty K - abridged from our epic conversation.

We met and talked in her Vancouver apartment. She served tea. She was a whirlwind…

She died May 9, 2025 at the age of 96. She was born August 4, 1928.

Babz Chula as not quite Betty Krawczyk in The Green Chain.

From The Green Chain: Nothing is Ever Clear Cut - written by Mark Leiren-Young, published by Harbour in 2009. Available on Kindle and more…

Betty Krawczyk is proud to call herself a "fanatic."

The infamous Betty K has been in and out of jail so often that she should be collecting frequent flier miles. At the very least, with every 10th visit she should get a free pack of cigarettes and a harmonica. Betty K did her first jail stint in 1993. She was 65 years old. Her crime: blockading logging trucks.

Since then she's spent more than three and a half years in three different jails serving eight different sentences, and she has no plans to slow down. She’s been called “Vancouver’s best known raging granny”—and she’s definitely raging and a granny—although she’s only an honorary member of the satirical seniors protest troupe that was born in Victoria, BC. While the Raging Grannies are a team, Betty tends to be a one-woman band and a one-woman brand.

Krawczyk credits her birth in southern Louisiana for her passion. "All southern Louisiana people are too passionate for their own good." Her first protest—an antisegregation rally in the early 1960s—changed her life. "I joined a small group of white people called SOS, Save Our Schools. We went down to the same elementary school my children were going to and we picketed the school with signs that said, ‘Don't close, Integrate. Let's be civilized, integrate our schools. Don't close. Closing is Defeat.’ There were only seven of us. It was the first time I'd ever been spit on."

Thanks to segregation, Betty K split with her church—because they sat out the fight. She went on to protest the Vietnam War before moving to Canada and discovering her next cause, saving the forests around her new home, Clayoquot Sound.

I interviewed Betty K at her apartment in Vancouver’s east end—a place packed with boxes full of papers from dozens of battles, including running for mayor of Vancouver with the Work Less Party.

There's an eclectic collection of art on her walls—and I'm sure every piece has a story behind it and the memory of a fight or two—but what stood out for me about the decor was all the art by and about children. This is very much the apartment of a grandmother—she had eight children and has eight grandchildren and one great-grandchild. And she's a grandmother determined to spend the rest of her life fighting for a better world for her grandchildren and everyone else’s.

Krawczyk regularly shares her adventures, experiences and opinions on her blog at www.bettyk.org and she has written three memoirs: Clayoquot: The Sound of My Heart; Lock Me up or Let Me Go: The Protests, Arrest and Trial of an Environmental Activist and Grandmother; and Open Living Confidential: From Inside the Joint. Her latest book is entitled Are You Crazy, Lady?

I talked to Betty K about her adventures in activism, life in prison, why the world needs more fanatics and her accidental discovery of environmentalism after she moved to BC and all her children had left home.

How did you get involved in the environmental movement?

I bought 10 acres [8 hectares] in the Clayoquot Sound on a place called Cypress Bay, and one of my sons built an A-frame for me. It was the most wonderful experience. I lived out there for three years.

It struck me through the heart that the beauty of the place was being demolished by the way the logging companies were just absolutely clear-cutting everything in sight. And as I went back and navigated through the Sound to see some of these more remote places where the clear-cutting was just crazy, you could see that whole mountainsides were sort of washing down into the sea from soil disintegration.

The 10 acres that I had bought was old-growth. There had been some selective logging through there, but it was primarily old-growth. As I became acquainted with the huge mountain behind the place, I saw that what looked green from a distance was up close not really trees, it's shrubs, it's scrub brush. And during the winters when the heavy rains came, that scrub brush didn't hold that mountainside in place, it all slid down. And part of that was coming down around my place.

I got up one morning and went out and there was this humungous landslide sitting on the beach on the cove, covering almost all the cove, certainly covering the creek where I got my water, the stream, and I looked at that and thought, "This is outrageous, this is absolutely outrageous, they're just killing the earth with this clear-cutting."

The debris was washing into the streams. These are, or were, fish-bearing streams that were just being destroyed by the greed of logging companies. So I went to Tofino and complained to the forestry and the fisheries ministries—which did no good. No response. Then I went down to Victoria and complained; still no response.

There was a group in Tofino called the Friends of Clayoquot Sound, and I had been stopping in and giving them bits of money from time to time. But now I knew it was going to take more than that; that all the issues I had worked on before and written about and thought about and researched, they were all predicated on a reasonably healthy Earth. If you don't have a healthy Earth, you don't have anything. Everything else, it’s as though it might not even exist. Without the Earth being healthy, nothing is healthy, nothing will live. So I became convinced that all these other issues had their origin in the way the Earth was thought of, in the way the Earth was treated. I made a commitment at that point to the environment as my friend—a total commitment.

The night before I went out to the blockade, in the summer of 1993, I stayed up all night making sure that I would be able, psychologically, to honour this commitment, whatever it may bring, because I'd never been arrested before and I was fearful of being claustrophobic. And I worried about that. I worried about making an ass out of myself. What if I was the only one being arrested? I didn’t know if anybody would be arrested because it was the first day of the blockade.

So I stayed up all night, I didn't sleep at all, and by the morning's light I had made peace with it that even if I made a fool of myself or I was imprisoned, that was okay.

Were you the oldest person there?

Oh yes, I'm always the oldest person anywhere. [Laughs.] I'll be 80 in August [2008], you know.

So I found that I could stay in jail just fine. I have an active inner life that I can retreat to when the outside becomes too raucous on the nervous system. As a writer, you know how that goes, you can retreat to your own places, imaginary or otherwise. [Betty noted that two other women, who may have been older than her, were also at the blockades.]

How did the other protesters treat you, and how did the police treat you the first day you were arrested?

They were good. Cameras were on them. No police officer wants to be accused of throwing around the fragile bones of grandmas, so they were careful and it was fine.

And then the three of us refused to sign the undertaking to say that we were sorry or that we would be good, so we were sent to the men's prison in Nanaimo, Brannen Lake, in a special unit. Thus began our prison terms. But looking back, that actually was very soft treatment compared to what I've endured in women's prisons on long terms.

Really?

Yes, because there were so many of us that were arrested in the Clayoquot Sound, it was a new thing. Because so many of us were vegetarians, they brought over boxes of vegetables and oils and stuff and let people cook their own stuff. It was pretty easy. And we were allowed to talk to the press.

The impression that I got from watching you on the news and reading various stories about you is that, if anything, prison strengthened your resolve.

It did and it does still … It does strengthen my resolve because what happens is that I've been through the worst that they can do to me and survived it, and I'm not afraid of it. And when you're not afraid of the worst that they can do to you, then you have a power that they don't like, that rattles them.

You wrote on your blog recently about being a fanatic. Can you talk about being a fanatic?

[Laughs.] Well, I am a fanatic. But we have to become fanatics in order to make changes.

I can go down and vote right now, for whatever that means, because of the fanaticism of earlier women. We can join a union if we want to because of fanaticism of men and women, the Wobblies [Industrial Workers of the World union] …There was a huge movement of fanatics that came together and said, "We want more life." They were fanatics of life. What we need is fanatics ...

How do you think the Clayoquot blockade changed things?

For one thing, the Sound became a biosphere reserve. But that’s actually not the main thing. They're looking now at wanting to go into one of the pristine watersheds and log. The First Nations people there are quite on side with logging companies and have always been. A lot of First Nations people are sucked into these agreements, and they're poor, they have been poor, so they will take what the logging companies have to give. I don't want to comment on what I think of them.

But nevertheless it’s not finished yet in the Clayoquot Sound. But one thing it did do was bring to worldwide attention the determination of these logging companies to cut down everything they could possibly cut down.

I can remember arguing with loggers in the Elaho Valley, when we were blockading there, about Interfor. I remember this logger saying, "Why do you keep saying Interfor does this and Interfor does that? We are Interfor!" Well, now they know that they aren't Interfor. Interfor cuts and runs like they've always done.

And now they don't even have their union. The IWA [Industrial, Wood and Allied Workers of Canada] isn't even there anymore because the logging companies managed to kill their union too, along with help from the government ...

They've got to get smarter than that. People have to get smarter than what they have exhibited in the past. We all have to learn from our mistakes. And I've certainly had to learn from mine.

The union just went down the drain because there were no longer enough people working in forestry to keep it going. And it wasn't from anything the environmentalists did or didn't do. It was from mechanization in the forest and the mills, and a provincial government that doesn't care diddlysquat about the people of this province. What they care about is their ideology, of the only way to run anything is by privatizing everything. They are determined to privatize every public natural asset in this province. They're damming our rivers as we speak here.

So the Clayoquot Sound was a pretty thing, in a sense. Did it change anything? No. Except for the worse. It changed everything for the worse because then people think everything is okay. They think there's going to be a biosphere and things are settling down in British Columbia.

Things are not settling down in British Columbia. They're cutting all over the bloody place. What they're doing is taking public land with trees on it, with forests, declaring it private land, cutting the trees and then selling the land to developers. This is what's happening.

I tried to tell these loggers years ago, “Look, if you guys would petition government and tell the government you’re going to do this, and my god stick by it and stand on a blockade—you've got a union, say you want community logging practices, that you want to start having communities in charge of tracts of forests and do selective logging.”

But no, they're brainwashed into thinking that there will be no logging unless some huge multinational, preferably American, company comes and does it and hires them. Otherwise they have no notion of trying to take possession of a resource that is theirs to start with—it belongs to all of us—and petition for the right to manage it in a selective way. Everybody would still be working in the forest if it was selective logging.

How do you feel about trees?

I've always loved trees. I was raised in the swamp in southern Louisiana with cypress trees and oak trees and what they call a "live oak tree" that stays green year-round. And as children we played in the wooded and swampy areas. So I grew up feeling kin to the natural world.

But primarily trees for me are families. When I see an individual tree standing alone, I always feel sorry for it because it's separated from its family. This is why forests present such an enormous thrill to people when they go into a real forest. They don't exactly know the composition of the thrill that they feel. It's even in the breathing, the air of a forest is very different—but it's because you're in the midst of a thriving ecosystem composed of families.

When I give talks in the schools, I try to explain to the kids the difference between an old-growth forest and a tree farm by giving them something they can relate to. I say, "You've got a big area about three times the size of this school. In this forest, you have grandmothers and grandfathers, mommies and daddies, uncles and aunts. Then you have big brothers and sisters and little babies. When the wind blows, the mommies and daddies and the grandmas and grandpas keep the little ones from blowing away.

"To keep the little ones from being flooded away when it rains, the big ones collect water and release it gently to the little ones so they can drink. And then the grandmas and grandpas—because they have to be at least 100 years old before they can grow this lichen—have this lichen fall off them to the ground when the wind blows. The little ones eat it, like vitamins, and it makes their roots grow strong and stabilize.

“Now the difference between this huge family and a tree farm is that the trees don't just grow. The people come in and put down all these rows of trees that are all the same size, they’re all the same age. And they've been altered chemically. They’re not exactly natural. And they don't have any mommies or daddies. And people come periodically and they poison them with herbicides and pesticides and some of them die, a lot of them die. They're washed away. They're blown away.”

And at that time the little kids are all saying, "Aww. Aww." And the teacher's getting alarmed.

If somebody turned around tomorrow and said, "Betty, you're in charge of Canada's forests," what would you do?

Immediately, I would call a meeting of all the activists that I have known. Then I would call people whom I consider experts but that haven't necessarily been activists. I would call people like Tzeporah Berman and David Suzuki, Joe Foy and Ken Wu. But I would also call the people who have lived in the forests, who know the forest from different angles. I would call First Nations people, who have not been, what I consider, too eager to make deals with the government. And there are quite a few of them who have protested the destruction of the forests. I would call the ones who are considered really radical First Nations and I know quite a few of those.

We would all sit down together and not have one single government person there because governments have got us into this and are simply in bed with corporations. We will not have any corporations there. [Laughs.] This is going to be a people's forum because it's the people's forests. These forests belong to all of us, and they belong to First Nations, and they belong to people in general.

And then we will come together with the First Nations people and say, “Okay, we're not going to have any industrial logging in British Columbia—that is out. There can be a certain amount of selective logging.

“Now, what are we going to do here? What areas do each of you think would be able to be logged in a selective manner that has not been already too compromised?”

We will save the pristine valleys, but we have to figure out what to do with the beetle kill. This is a huge problem.

And lets get some real connection going here between activists and scientists and knowledgeable people who understand bio-systems but who also understand that we are going to have a different way of considering the resources of British Columbia and they will not primarily be economic. They will be economic in the sense that a living can be made out of them, but not obscene amounts of money by a few people who steal everything away from the rest of us.

Are you familiar with Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialism theories?

A little. I have to flash back to university to remember them.

Well, they'll break your head, really, if you try to understand them. I’ve incorporated a couple of things he says into my own activism: that we are each unique, and there’s nobody like us in the whole world, and everybody has within them, no matter how they've been conditioned, an element of choice. So with each person being so unique and having somewhat of an element of choice, each person is a representative of the human race. And therefore every individual decision is important because, in a sense, you're deciding for the whole human race. So I think of this on blockades. “Well, okay, I'm making this decision. I decide that this forest should not be cut down." Or I make a decision that we're going to have clean water out of this creek. Then you have the peace that comes with these decisions. That's what it promises. And that's the only thing the universe promises you. But it's huge—it's really huge! It enables you to live not a contented life, but a life that's free of unnecessary worries and strains and anxieties because you just feel more connected with the universal process. That's it. You feel more connected to the universal process.

It brings a lot of . . . I hesitate to say it, but sometimes I’m flooded with joy. [Laughs.] It seems crazy, considering the kind of work I do and the doomsday scenarios. But nevertheless, sometimes I just feel really happy that I got to live this life. And look, you go outside and see the green, it's beautiful, go down to the water. You know it's a great place. The Earth is a great place to have landed on. So we need these times of celebration too.

And that's it. That's my story, and I stick to it.

Please let me know if you’d like me to share more interviews from my collection of um… 1000 or so… and not just “in memoriam.”