EPA Rejects Palm Oil: Good News for Indonesian Rainforests

Before I started doing environmental work, I’d assumed that biofuel use would have a positive effect on the climate. It turns out the truth about biofuels is much more complex than I’d originally thought. Not every biofuel on the market today has a positive impact on the environment, and some actually pose a major threat. [...]

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Can California’s New Law Stop Slave Labor In Palm Oil?

Whether you’re one of the 3,200 companies that do business in California with at least $100 million in worldwide gross receipts, or a consumer that buys products from anywhere other than your local mom and pop shops, you better check this out. Effective this month, a new law called the Transparency in Supply Chains Act [...]

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Farmers Unite with RAN To Fight Cargill And Challenge Corporate Control Of Our Food System

Last week, over 40 Minnesota residents made a citizens’ arrest of Cargill, Inc. in front of the company’s downtown Minneapolis office at the Grain Exchange. I walked away from the event struck with inspiration and hope. Why? In addition to being amazed that so many enthusiastic people braved below-freezing weather to hold Cargill accountable for [...]

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BREAKING: Occupy Cargill Activists Stage Citizens’ Arrest of Cargill, Inc.

MINNEAPOLIS – A colorful crowd of 40 Occupy activists, food justice advocates, farmers, and anti-corporate-personhood protestors braved below freezing temperatures today to gather with Rainforest Action Network to voice their grievances and stage a mock citizen’s arrest of Cargill Inc. in downtown Minneapolis. Bolstered by mass demonstrations nationwide on the second anniversary of the disastrous [...]

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Levi’s Unzips New Policy Excluding Logging Giant Asia Pulp & Paper

Asia Pulp and Paper is having a hard time holding onto customers these days. With the release of its forest products purchasing policy, Levi Strauss & Company has become the latest major brand to ban business with Asia Pulp and Paper (APP). This comes on the heels of a major public cancellation with APP affiliate [...]

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Can You Arrest A Corporation?

There are some who say that corporations are people. So can you arrest one? Well, we’re going to find out. Right now, corporations technically have the same First Amendment rights as real live people (as ruled by the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC two years ago). So shouldn’t we (real live people) [...]

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Top 5 Reasons to Donate to Rainforest Action Network

Rainforest Action Network works all year educating, organizing and mobilizing people to address some of the most pressing environmental issues of our day—the effect of deforestation and dirty energy on human rights, ecosystems and the climate. From CSR to CEOs, RAN is known as a force to be reckoned with in scores of Fortune 500 [...]

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From The Field: Borneo’s Tanjung Puting National Park And The High Stakes Of The Palm Oil Crisis

Since joining RAN’s forest program over two years ago, I have read and written about the many dire consequences of industrial scale palm oil plantations in Indonesia: one of the highest deforestation rates in the world, critical habitat for endangered species like orangutans destroyed, gross human rights abuses and labor conditions, and social conflict between [...]

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Occupy Our Food Supply!

Cargill tries to employ a 'too big to fail' analysis of their role in fighting world hunger, but it is the research of multiple studies that show that organic agriculture and agroecology have a better chance of created food security and solving the problems of hunger than the corporate model profiteering from crisis to crisis.

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Exposing APP: Keeping Our Eyes On The Prize

As Rainforest Action Network (RAN) continues our negotiations with The Walt Disney Company to secure a comprehensive paper policy that would exclude rainforest destruction from the company’s products, we are also keeping our eyes on the real prize: reforming logging giant and Indonesian rainforest destroyer Asia Pulp and Paper (APP). APP has been called “one [...]

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