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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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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What Do Environmentalists And Animal Rights Activists Have In Common?

What do the environmental and animal rights movements have in common? More than you might think, including a profound love of certain vegan products that mark an intersection of our work to create a more just and sustainable future for all of Earth’s inhabitants. This past weekend I had the pleasure of participating in a [...]

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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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Leading Rainforest Destroyer APP Issues Attack on RAN’s Credibility

Here at RAN, attacks on our organization are often a sign that our tactics are working.  Just such an affirmation arrived last week, when logging giant Asia Pulp and Paper (APP) went to great lengths in an attempt to challenge the validity of a case study report recently released by RAN that profiles the devastating [...]

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Mickey and Minnie Protest Disney Rainforest Destruction at Company HQ

Early this morning, two activists supporting Rainforest Action Network unfurled a 35 foot banner across The Walt Disney Company’s two-story entrance arch that reads “Disney: Destroying Indonesia’s Rainforests.” Beneath them, Mickey and Minnie Mouse locked down to the main entrance gates to the company’s Burbank headquarters—blockading Disney’s executives from arriving to work through the main [...]

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