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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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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RAN: Big In Japan

This October marks the sixth anniversary of the opening of Rainforest Action Network’s Japan office, spearheaded by our Tokyo-based, activist-ambassador Toyo Kawakami. Toyo began working for RAN in 2005, campaigning to convince large Japanese paper companies and retailers to stop buying wood chips linked to the destruction of Tasmania’s old growth forests sold by Australian [...]

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PHOTOS: RAN on the Frontlines of Indonesia’s Endangered Rainforests

RAN Forest Campaigner Lafcadio Cortesi and I traveled to Sumatra, Indonesia last month to meet with and interview an extensive network of allies involved in the movement to resist the rampant deforestation and human rights abuses occurring there. We witnessed firsthand the ecological devastation, tense social conflicts and choking haze of carbon emissions resulting from [...]

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Can Protected Areas Combat the Sixth Mass Extinction?

Our planet is currently facing one of the most destructive extinction events in the history of the earth, with an estimated loss of 30,000 species per year, known as the Sixth Mass Extinction. The cause?  Humans. The pulp and paper and palm oil industries are causing species extinction left, right, and center in one of [...]

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Greenwash Backfire: Asia Pulp and Paper PR Stunt “Sparks New Controversy”

Just weeks after images of one of the world’s last remaining Sumatran tigers dying in a trap set in an Asia Pulp and Paper (APP) plantation were broadcast to the world, APP shamelessly attempted to recast its image as a conservation hero. CBS news has aired video footage of an elaborate public relations stunt orchestrated [...]

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Paper Tiger: RAN Featured in Must-See Expose on Indonesian Logging

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) has just aired a damning exposé called “Paper Tiger” about the devastating deforestation caused by the pulp and paper industry in Indonesia. The program is called Foreign Correspondent and it is a sort of Aussie 60 Minutes. The piece features compelling footage of logging giant APRIL mowing down vast expanses [...]

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Will Danger Listing Of UNESCO World Heritage Site Save The Orangutan?

Several weeks ago, three national parks in Sumatra, Indonesia were collectively labeled a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Danger. This inscription reiterates the urgency to issue full protections for the last remaining tracts of unspoiled rainforest on the island. The Sumatran rainforest, named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2004 for its wealth of biodiversity, [...]

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A Rainforest Apocalypse? People, Peat And Promises For A New Direction

If you think this title sounds hyperbolic, you probably have not visited Sumatra lately. Before traveling here, I had heard stories about the oceans of oil palm that have been planted where rainforest once stood. But I was not prepared for this. The first sign that something is terribly wrong came before our plane even [...]

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From The Field: A Customary Elder of the Malayu Addresses Asia Pulp and Paper

It’s a good thing RAN’s forest campaigner, Lafcadio Cortesi, speaks Bahasa Indonesian so well. Otherwise I almost certainly would have gotten in the car with the undercover intelligence agent who told me to come with him because he “wanted to practice his English.” We had just arrived in the small village of Siabu, in the [...]

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