© 1996 Toronto Star
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Oliver Stone, Robert Redford, Barbra Streisand, Ed Asner, Steven Seagal, Ted Danson, Mary Steenburgen, Darryl Hannah, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman have never seen a clearcut in British Columbia.
Most have never set foot in the province, though Danson once made a movie, Cousins, in Vancouver, a city some describe tongue-in-cheek as the largest clearcut in the province.
Yet the Hollywood megastars have ignited the emotional equivalent of a forest fire in the debate between environmentalists and the forest industry. They signed a full-page advertisement in The New York Times accusing the B.C. government of carrying out a "chainsaw massacre" on the province's forests.
The star-studded protest is the most recent example of an effective trend among activist groups. Get a big name, the bigger the better, to voice your concerns, and wait for the newspapers, TV stations and other media to beat a path to your issue.
Get more than one name, and sit back and enjoy the fireworks. It's called Celebrity Power. And it works.
The pop singer Sting has brought worldwide attention to the plight of the Amazonian rainforest. Brigitte Bardot had the world's press clamoring to photograph her with a Newfoundland seal. k.d. lang did an anti-beef commercial and sent Alberta's cattle industry into a stew, though she's now better known as an icon of the lesbian, rather than the vegetarian, movement.
Earlier this year, singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn went on a cross-Canada tour to protest land mines in Mozambique. Cockburn, considered one of the most socially-conscious performers in the music industry, was open to interviewers about his role. "My job is an attention-getter. That's the skill I can offer."
It worked. An issue that would normally be ignored by the Canadian media got widespread coverage.
Martin Laba, a professor in media and popular culture at Simon Fraser University, says fame and celebrity have become so important at the end of the 20th century that "having a personality endorse your cause can suddenly make it more legitimate and persuasive. This is the faith we put in celebrity.