Malaysian Palm Oil Scheme: More Problems, Fewer Answers

This post was written by Andrew Ng, a RAN ally and committed activist who has spent more than a decade working on forest issues. What is the future of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO)? Clearly the Malaysian palm oil sector — including both industry and government — wants to challenge it with the [...]

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C – O – A – L Spells Money

Gimme a C! Gimme an O! Gimme an A! Gimme an L! What’s that spell? MONEY!!! By now, loyal blog readers, you are aware that RAN is calling on Bank of America out on their place as the #1 funding agency to the coal industry. To show the nation’s largest bank that we’re intent on [...]

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Does the RSPO Care About Forests and People?

Yesterday was the deadline given to IOI Corporation by the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) to resolve its social conflict with the community of Long Teran Kanan or else face penalties. And guess what? The RSPO again failed to take decisive action against IOI. Meanwhile, IOI is sticking to its guns and defending its [...]

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Account of action & arrest in DC by George Lakey

George Lakey and the Earth Quaker Action Team, joined us on Monday at Appalachia Rising in Washington DC, to protest mountaintop removal mining. His account of our action at PNC bank is one of the best-written, and most accessible, recent accounts I have read about why taking nonviolent direct action is such a powerful strategy. [...]

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Citizens Occupy PNC: The Bank of Mountaintop Removal

UPDATE: Four brave activists were arrested at today’s PNC sit-in, including Reverend Billy Talen, George Lakey, Alexa Ross and Liz Nerat. Today, as part of Appalachia Rising, the largest protest against mountaintop removal coal mining in history, 35 concerned citizens staged a sit-in at PNC’s flagship bank here Washington DC. Currently, PNC Bank is the [...]

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Community Transition in the Coal River Valley

I’m  a big fan of Transition Theory – a model of socioeconomic localization, developed by Rob Hopkins where communities come together to envision and then develop a future where they are not dependent on oil. The big question the community asks is: “for all those aspects of life that this community needs in order to [...]

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Banks Bail on Coal; Top 4 banks Cut Financing for Massey Energy

Two years ago no bank had a policy on coal mining, and Wall Street was providing finance and credit indiscriminately to the most destructive form of mining in the country. Bank of America, Citi, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo have successively passed public policies limiting their financial relationships with coal operators [...]

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Ecuadorian Community Activists Get Canadian Mining Company Delisted from TSX

Over the past 12 years, RAN has supported through our Protect-an-Acre small grants both Defense and Ecological Conservation of Intag (DECOIN) and Community Defense Council in the Intag region in the western Andes of Ecuador, a cloud forest ecosystem that is a globally significant biological hot spot. For 2 decades now, communities there have successfully [...]

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REDD Forest Agreement Still Missing Basic Elements for Sustainability

As negotiations wrapped up in Barcelona at the UN Climate Talks, the opportunity for a robust agreement to reduce emissions from deforestation and degradation in developing countries (REDD) is dangling from a wire. The latest negotiating text, which parties will be working on at the opening of the Copenhagen UNFCCC COP15, contains no provisions to [...]

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What do you do when RBC’s lawyers threaten to sue you?

Several weeks ago – while we were busy organizing a banner hang at the headquarters of Royal Bank of Canada, the world’s biggest funder of the tar sands – a senior lawyer from RBC faxed us a very polite letter, letting us know that if we didn’t stop using their corporate logo in our campaign [...]

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