RAN Staff Finds Deforestation And Violence For Palm Oil Unchecked By The RSPO

As the 9thAnnual Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) meeting wrapped up on the island of Borneo, the crisis stemming from the uncontrolled expansion of palm oil plantations into rainforests and communities reached a fever pitch. Consider this: In the few days that RAN’s four staff-member delegation attended the RSPO meeting in SE Asia, the [...]

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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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Thinking Globally, Acting Locally…. A week in the Twin Cities with Matilda Pilacapio

The residents of Minneapolis/St. Paul are living near the fancy headquarters of Cargill, the very corporation that is leveling rainforests in Papua New Guinea to expand their palm oil plantations. Concerned community members are stepping up to do something about the corporation next door!

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First Nations Petition Obama on Native Rights vs. Dirty Energy

How will an Obama Administration handle Native Rights issues in the face of fossil fuel expansion? That’s the question raised in a good article from by Joe Friesen in the Globe and Mail today. Several northern Indigenous leaders will soon visit the President Elect to ask for support in battling dirty oil development on their [...]

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RAN Writes to the FSC

Coming up in November, RAN staff will be attending the FSC General Assembly meeting as one of 350 members of the environmental chamber. The FSC is the only forest certification scheme in the world in which RAN and environmentalists can fight for greater protections – others, like the SFI, won’t even let us in the [...]

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Rainforest Action Network’s Old Growth campaign is entering a new phase

Thanks in part to the support from tens of thousands of RAN activists and supporters, this past June the Grassy Narrows First Nation won an unprecedented victory when AbitibiBowater, the largest paper company in the world, agreed to stop logging in their traditional territory and the provincial government agreed to honor Grassy Narrows’ consent for [...]

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Keepers of the Water: Day 2

In addition to the dozen or so First Nations here, representatives from twenty US and Canadian non governmental organizations have also gathered this week in Ft. Chipewyan. That’s a lot of talking heads and coordinating with this motley can be a challenge in any situation. For a small community like Ft. Chip already overtaxed by [...]

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Keepers of the Water: Day 1

Water is life–that’s the resounding message from the third annual Keepers of the Water Gathering here in Fort Chipewyan, Alberta. More than 400 crowd into the community hall for the opening plenary. Elected leaders from eight First Nations stretching across Alberta, Saskatchewan and the Northwest Territories welcome us in turn at the front. Translators relay [...]

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The Biggest Environmental Victory You’ve Never Heard About

Looking for a little good news? Try this: earlier this month, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty announced the largest forest conservation deal in Canadian history, and set a historic precedent for the rights of Indigenous people at the same time. On July 14th, the Ontario government agreed to prohibit development on at least half of the [...]

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Old Growth Conference Call Recording – click to listen

LINK to the Grassy Conference Call – click here to listen On June 19th, 2008, RAN hosted a conference call to discuss the Old Growth Campaign’s part in the Indigenous lead efforts that brought us to the tremendous news that AbitibiBowater had decided it was time to leave the Whiskey Jack forest in the traditional [...]

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