Understory: the Official Blog of RAN

Archive for November, 2006

Was Martin Luther King Jr. a Terrorist?

The U.S. House will soon vote on a bill that would define acts of peaceful protest as terrorism. Already passed by the Senate, the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, S. 1926 and H.R. 4239 (AETA) categorizes activists as terrorists if they engage in First Amendment-protected activities like demonstrations, leafleting, undercover investigations and boycotts targeted at any [...]

Angola 3: Free them

Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace have been in solitary confinement in Louisiana State Penitentiary for more than 34 years. In prison for armed robbery they were convicted of killing a prison guard in 1971 despite a substantial amount of questionable evidence against them. Woodfox and Wallace are two of the original Angola 3 [...]

No Love for Massey Energy at the Polls

As a great blue wave washed over America with a new majority in Congress and ousted Donald Rumsfeld from the Pentagon, George Bush and the Republican Party aren’t the only ones who were rebuked on November 7th. On Election Night, Massey Energy and its CEO Don Blankenship were foiled at the polls as over [...]

Touring Toronto with Grassy Grandmas

Here’s David’s report from his trip up to Ontario this week. The Grassy Narrows speaking tour has turned out to be a real hit – we have reached about 450 people in 6 cities in one week. You can hear a pin drop while the Grassy Narrows clan mothers speak, and they have had some very positive [...]

Police Raid Home of Ecuadorian Environmentalist

On October 17th, police in ski masks carrying automatic weapons raided the home of Carlos Zorrilla, the Executive Director of Defense and Ecological Conservation of Intag (DECOIN), a grassroots group comprised of farmers, peasants and priests that he co-founded in Intag of Northwest Ecuador in 1995. Mr. Zorrilla was able to get out of his [...]

Landmark Agreement for Achuar Nation

Oil was discovered in the 1970s in a remote region of the northern Peruvian Amazon that the Achuar have inhabited for thousands of years. Over the past 30 years, the community’s consent was neither sought nor gained as U.S.-based Occidental Petroleum (OXY) drilled over 150 wells and built more than 300 miles of roads and [...]

World Rainforest Week Report Back

A big thank you to all of you who decided to take action last week during the fourth annual World Rainforest Week. Over 2,000 of you pledged to take action during the 7 day effort to highlight rainforest destruction all over the world. 1,162 of you lived tree-free on Tuesday, while 1,053 of you supported the [...]

Ford’s Largest MegaDealer Joins the Campaign to Break America’s Oil Addiction!

Please join us in celebrating a milestone for the Jumpstart Ford campaign. Last week, AutoNation became the first major car dealer to join Plug-In Partners, calling on automakers to manufacture plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) and make them available to American customers. PHEVs are hybrid vehicles that dramatically reduce our dependence on oil by plugging into [...]

Lyptus?

We get tons of questions here at RAN. Here’s a good one from Anne, about buying wood floors for her home: I’ve been looking into what I thought were “green” options for redoing my floors. Specifically, I’m considering FSC-certified Brazilian Cherry or Lyptus. I saw on your web-site, however, that Weyerhaeuser, which has the patent on [...]

Bringing Oil and Climate Impacts to Ford Headquarters

On Wednesday, September 27, 2006, representatives from oil-impacted communities in Nigeria and Micronesia met with Ford officials to ask the company to sign a pledge to help end America’s oil addiction by building vastly more fuel-efficient vehicles. The community leaders were shocked that not only would they not sign the pledge but that Ford has no plans to [...]

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