Free the Wayzata 3

In what has become quite a local buzz, RAN just released a shocking video of police arresting a mother orangutan and her baby from a public bench in downtown Wayzata, Minnesota. To be perfectly clear, this mother orangutan, just like the hitch-hiking male orangutan that was arrested outside of Cargill’s HQ last week by private [...]

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KI Nation Paddles 300 km to Protect their Wild Watershed

Canada’s Boreal forest is part of the world’s largest land-based carbon storehouse. It is also the world’s greatest reservoir of fresh water, and is among the largest unlogged forests left on the planet. But the Boreal has been under threat for years, and, as is often the case, local Indigenous peoples who live in and [...]

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Cargill’s Not so Secret Expansion Plans in Indonesia

If Cargill’s PR stunt a few months ago left you feeling confused about the company’s role in driving deforestation and potential orangutan extinction in Indonesia, you might find it helpful to know that a couple of recent articles expose the truth. A recent Indonesia Finance Today article clarifies that Cargill plans to expand its plantation [...]

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Deep in the Amazon, A Story is Waiting to be Told

Media technologies and professional skills are valuable tools that enable Indigenous communities living in rainforests around the world to communicate about the crisis of deforestation through sharing their stories, language, and art. Amazon Voice, a great new NGO that is working directly with the local Amazon communities based on a foundation of reciprocity and mutual [...]

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International Day of Action to Save Tripa Rainforest

While many of us realize on some fleeting, uncomfortable level that our generation holds the future of countless species and ecosystems in our hands, rarely is the choice to allow extinction to happen – or to fight like hell to stop it – so clear as it is right now with humankind’s closest relative, the [...]

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Bringing a Competitive Spirit to Rainforest Protection

Through our Protect-an-Acre program, RAN recently provided a small grant to Caura Futures. This lean, innovative organization supports the conservation of the 45,300 km² Caura River Basin in Venezuela, one of the few pristine tropical watersheds on Earth, by working with local Indigenous communities and providing training and tools to improve human health and promote [...]

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The Future Of Endangered Orangutans Is In Your Hands

There has been an overwhelming amount of attention paid recently to the plight of Indonesia’s most iconic species due to habitat loss. Last month the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) updated the status of Sumatran elephants to critically endangered on its Red List of Threatened Species, a category which Sumatran orangutans and rhinoceros’ [...]

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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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Cargill’s Record Profits Come at the Expense of Record Deforestation

Cargill just reported record profits of $4.2 billion dollars for its 2010 fiscal year, a 63% increase over the previous year. As the world’s biggest agricultural trader — and the largest importer of rainforest-destroying palm oil into the US — it’s easy to see how the company achieved such huge numbers. From Girl Scout cookies [...]

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What is Sustainable Palm Oil? Part Three

This is the third and final installment in a series of posts that endeavors to answer a simple question: What is sustainable palm oil? The answer, of course, is anything but simple. The first blog post in this series explored the weaknesses of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), the dominant certification standard for [...]

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