At twenty-five years old, Valerie Langer lived in a village of a thousand people on the edge of a Canadian forest, organising road blockades to stop logging trucks. It was the late 1980s, and Clayoquot Sound — the largest remaining temperate rainforest on Vancouver Island — was being felled piece by piece; at the time, Langer was part of a small group of activists who had decided that fight was worth an entire lifetime.

From there on she built a career spanning nearly four decades that has crossed every phase of modern environmentalism: civil disobedience; market campaigns — a strategy Langer helped invent, shifting pressure from consumers to the major industrial buyers of wood; the collaborative negotiations that led to the protection of the Great Bear Rainforest, 6.4 million hectares of temperate rainforest on the coast of British Columbia; and now the mobilisation of capital to finance the transition to Next Generation materials.

Today Langer is Fibre Solutions Strategist at Canopy, the Canadian environmental organisation that works with more than a thousand global brands — from H&M to Inditex, from Walmart to major packaging groups — representing over $2.1 trillion in combined revenue. We spoke to her a few weeks after the launch, at Davos, of a $2 billion investment plan to scale up the production of alternative fibres to virgin wood pulp, starting from India.

The occasion was also the release of Paper Thin Comfort, a report by Canopy and Finance Earth that lays out the growing risks for anyone dependent on wood fibre: exponentially rising demand from bioenergy, construction and packaging; supply threatened by wildfires, land competition and climate change; and, finally, regulations such as the EU Deforestation Regulation coming into force in December 2026. The message is stark: those who remain tethered to virgin pulp face rising costs, volatility and reputational risk. Those who diversify build resilience.

You pioneered the “market campaign” strategy in the 1990s — pressuring large industrial buyers rather than consumers. Thirty years later, Canopy’s model involves over 1,000 brand partners worth $2.1 trillion in combined revenue. Does that original intuition still hold, or has the landscape fundamentally changed?

I believe we’ve come to a precipice where we need to do everything together. My work has changed, but I don’t think the kind of work I do has become irrelevant. We still need an increase in activism and collective demand on companies to change how they operate, their supply chains, and their commitments to justice and human rights. That remains critically important. What has happened is that the environmental movement has matured different strategies — not better strategies, but the maturity of the movement has created innovation in strategies, and I’ve been part of that innovation. The way business works is very geared towards “what’s in it for me?” and that’s their first priority. How do I make money as a business? Even when there are voluntary policies, it’s always against this background: how can I make money while implementing my environmental commitments? Our work has had to mature to figure out how to help brands see their way to participating in a profitable business while also meeting their environmental goals. And that’s been very, very hard, because there are fundamental problems with the structure of business: you can take a cost and dump it into the environment for free. You pollute the air, you pollute the water, and the effect on biodiversity is an externality — it’s not a cost to your business, for the most part. So the maturation of environmental activism has increasingly gone in the direction of making those externalities a real cost for business — on the regulatory side, through carbon pricing, through regulations like the EUDR that at some point make you pay if you destroy forests in a particular way. And that gives us, as environmental organisations, an opportunity to help businesses that might not otherwise see how this would affect their long-term viability. We talk to them in the same language. Not ideology, but numbers.

Paper Thin Comfort describes a perfect storm — rising wood demand from bioenergy, construction and packaging, supply threatened by wildfires and land competition, and incoming regulation like the EUDR. How much time do companies have to adapt before these risks become unmanageable?

We work with a thousand brands, and all of them use wood-based fibres. We asked ourselves: what will happen to fibre prices and availability when you get this perfect storm of regulations, climate-induced supply reductions, and rising competition? We found that this message resonated powerfully with the brands we spoke to. Increasingly, this is how Canopy’s work functions: we tell our partners, “You have a problem. There’s a risk in your supply chain — an environmental risk against your own climate and biodiversity policies, a future risk on costs. But it’s a risk you should be addressing now.” When you talk like that, you’re speaking the same language as business. Numbers, not ideology. And even though everyone we’ve spoken to has the ethical case for improving their practices — nobody wants to destroy the world they live in — it’s a system. And it’s not a system that any single company can change alone. Even the big brands — like H&M, Inditex, Walmart — with their enormous purchasing power, their procurement decisions alone won’t change an entire supply chain. No supplier is going to invest $200 million, $500 million to build new capacity with different feedstock if they only have one customer, no matter how big. It’s too vulnerable. That’s why Canopy has a particular role: helping brands become pre-competitive collaborators to build the supply chain of the future together. The message needs to reach dozens of suppliers simultaneously, with the same level of confidence: we want to move away from high-carbon, high-biodiversity-impact forest fibre, and we want to integrate recycled and Next Gen alternatives. We’re willing to do it, but you need to meet these criteria. That’s the heart of what we do: creating consistent market signals across supply chains where brands had never before talked to each other about their fibre sourcing.

At Davos you introduced a $2 billion blended finance blueprint, with India as the first country. Why India? And how do you convince an institutional investor to put capital into plants that turn wheat straw into paper pulp?

India has the conditions to make it possible. They’re the second-largest producer of non-wood pulp in the world: one and a half million tonnes of paper made from wheat straw and bagasse, mainly. They already have mills using agricultural residues — China is the largest, and India the second-largest. They have engineers and mill owners who are experienced and don’t consider this something strange. But there’s more. India burns roughly 100 million tonnes of agricultural residues every year. The government has a policy priority to find a solution to stop the burning, because it’s a massive health crisis: approximately 150 people die every day from health problems related to crop residue burning. Then there’s the positioning vis-à-vis Europe. India is very attuned to how the EU is developing new regulations on circularity, carbon, deforestation. The EU and India have recently launched a free trade agreement. India has a massive pulp deficit — it imports large quantities from endangered forest regions. It has hugely ambitious export goals, a track record of scaling industries very fast, and the capital cost of building a mill in India is far lower than in the Northern Hemisphere. There’s also a crucial element: it’s easier for development finance to flow to the Global South. Multilateral banks and development finance institutions have specific mandates to invest in countries like India, in new technology that benefits climate and biodiversity, and which intersects with women’s empowerment and rural income growth. All those elements converge in India. When you look at the world and ask where something very large can happen very fast, India is one of those countries. They have a track record of scaling up very quickly in many sectors. Why not in an industrial sector like pulp, one of the world’s largest commodities?

The EUDR enters into force in December 2026. Unilever already estimates 5–10% annual cost increases for certified paper. Do you see the EU regulation as an accelerator for Next Gen solutions, or do you worry that bureaucratic complexity might slow their adoption?

I’m actually involved with an impact investment firm in the UK, and we’re collaborating on how to invest in scaling Next Gen fibre production for paper and cellulosic textiles in Europe and North America. Even though we see the Global South and China as likely places for very rapid scale-up, Europe’s regulations also point toward a circular, low-carbon industry scaling locally. Europe has specific programmes to finance clean technologies, particularly circular technologies. The first Next Gen circular pulp mill has been built in Sweden. CIRC intends to build their first plant in France, since the investment benefits and the way government incentives are structured in Europe can be genuinely attractive for industry. I don’t believe European industry will fade away. 30% of all fashion is produced in Europe — it’s a huge market. And the circularity imperative of these regulations, the climate regulations that are foundational to the European ethos — it’s not just about building and selling in a market, it’s about meeting fundamental ethical goals. The regulations are moving in this direction, and there are supportive policies that want to build an economy around circular and low-carbon alternatives. This will become a global industry. It will develop on every continent that has agricultural residues for pulp. Using agricultural residues and circular technologies will become the norm. The hard part is the beginning. We’ve seen this with renewable energy: ten or fifteen years ago, solar or wind power was almost 100% more expensive. Today it’s 80% cheaper per kilowatt hour. That trajectory happens because at the start you get government support and regulations, so some progressive companies that say: “It will cost more, but I’ll put my hand up and dedicate 10% of what I buy to a more expensive but less damaging alternative.” It’s slow at first, then the transition becomes very fast. But the beginning is hard, and that’s exactly where Canopy focuses: how can we collectivise the purchasing power of brands that say “OK, I’ll commit 5–10% of my procurement today, even if it’s harder,” and help them build scale? You start with a thousand tonnes, then two thousand, then ten thousand, then fifty thousand. Scale is fast in the final stages, but you have to get through that first stage. That’s where we are.

From Clayoquot Sound to the Great Bear Rainforest to climate finance at Davos, you’ve lived through every phase of modern environmentalism. What is the most important lesson you’ve learned in nearly four decades about how industrial supply chains actually change?

I’ve worked in this field for 37 years now. When I started, I lived in a village of just over a thousand people, on the edge of a forest in Canada. There was a small group of us who had one thing in mind: it doesn’t matter if we’re a small group in a remote place. These are the things worth dedicating your life to. You only have one life, and how are you going to spend it — these hours, these days, these weeks? The work can feel almost impossible, but doing nothing feels worse. Even when the odds seem small, you take the best strategy you have, put your best energy into it, and go. It’s hard work, but it makes you feel like a human being. And even better when you do it with other people who share the same attitude. What makes me optimistic is the history of change in the world. Whether it was women’s right to vote, or the right to clean water and clean air — these were all long, hard fights. But people had a strategy. You don’t do it alone: you join with others, knowing it may take time, knowing the odds may be small. But a small chance is not no chance. And all change has always been like that: a small, smart group of people who said, let’s make the odds a little wider. You start at 1%, it becomes 10%, it becomes 50%, and then everything shifts. I’ve always felt that if I only have 24 hours in a day, I can work on small things or I can work on big things: it takes the same amount of time. So aim for the big goals. And as a woman, I’ve worked in a field where for nearly all of my negotiations over 35 years — except in the fashion sector — 90% of the people across the table were men. My team has always been predominantly women. There was this almost comical aspect: in the meeting rooms the temperature was always too warm for the men and too cold for us. You have to show up as who you are, keep a good sense of humour and a sense of possibility. In the end, you can’t make enemies. You have to surround yourself with people who need to change alongside you. If the men in the paper industry had been my enemies, there would have been no way to reach an agreement. This is perhaps a feminine way of seeing the world: I want allies everywhere, not domination. And I think that’s ultimately part of what makes Canopy work. We’re an organisation led predominantly by women, and we have this sense that partners on all sides — the companies, the suppliers, the brands — are allies who need to find a path that works for them too. We’re there to support them in finding their way through.

Cover: Valerie Langer