Nearly 100 days of continuous prayer on-site at Segorea Te (also known as Glen Cove) near San Francisco, California, has precipitated a precedent-setting victory for the protection of a sacred site and ancestral burial site near Vallejo, California. Here’s the good news: Yesterday, the Yocha Dehe and Cortina tribes established a cultural easement and settlement [...]
Continue reading...Friday, July 15, 2011
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 [...]
Continue reading...Tuesday, July 12, 2011
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 [...]
Continue reading...Thursday, July 7, 2011
I’ve only been in Indonesia for a few days and already I’ve heard multiple accounts of intimidation, corruption, kidnapping, torture and even murder suffered by our allies here who have been bold enough to speak out and resist the destruction of their forests and villages by palm oil and pulp and paper companies. But I [...]
Continue reading...Monday, June 6, 2011
“Everyone has the right to a final resting place. Our ancestors deserve to have a resting place on their original land without the threat of being removed for the sake of a park.” – Corrina Gould, Chochenyo/Karkin Ohlone A spiritual encampment to protect a Bay Area sacred site is now in its 50th day. Local [...]
Continue reading...Monday, May 16, 2011
UPDATE: On October 11, 2012, Disney announced a comprehensive paper policy that maximizes its use of environmentally superior papers like recycled and eliminates controversial sources like those connected to Indonesian rainforest destruction. For more info, visit www.ran.org/disney. Young or old, when one thinks of the Walt Disney Company, the first images that come to mind are almost certainly [...]
Continue reading...Thursday, March 31, 2011
After fighting for the return of their ancestral lands for more than a decade, the people of Long Teran Kenan in Malaysian Borneo took a stand earlier this month and reclaimed part of their homeland with a decisive and peaceful act of collective resistance. Their territory had been taken from them and converted into oil [...]
Continue reading...Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Never mind the 18 billion gallons of toxic oil waste still contaminating the Amazon rainforest, which Chevron refuses to take responsibility for. The company has promised to behave itself this time. I say that not to make light of an obviously very serious situation, but to point out how ludicrous it is that even as [...]
Continue reading...Thursday, March 17, 2011
Research shows that carbon offsets aren’t working to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and stall global warming. That’s why RAN has founded the Climate Action Fund. In theory, a carbon offset is a reduction in emissions of carbon or greenhouse gases made in order to compensate for or to offset an emission made elsewhere. Rather than [...]
Continue reading...Monday, March 7, 2011
As oil giant Chevron has pursued its “distract, distort, and delay” strategy to evade responsibility for polluting Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest, the company has found U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan to be very sympathetic to its claims. According to a brief just filed by the Ecuadorean plaintiffs’ US lawyer, Kaplan might even have gone so far [...]
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Thursday, July 21, 2011
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