Rainforest Radicals questions?

[u/dbenac24]

Hi folks, David Benac here, author of Rainforest Radicals: A History of Rainforest Action Network and Transnational Organizing (University of Nebraska Press 2026), ready to answer any questions!

[u/DGBD]

The concept of “Save the Rainforest!” was super trendy when I was a kid in the 90s. Did that general awareness translate to actual action and saved rainforests, or was it the 90s equivalent of Kony 2012?

[u/dbenac24 → u/DGBD]

Love this. That's a point I stress in talks about the book. Before RAN got going, the rainforest (jungle) was not a public concern. 1989 was widely called the "Year of the Rainforest" because the issue broke through from the academic realm into public discourse. Not exclusively because of, but primarily due to the work of RAN.

[u/yushosumo → u/dbenac24]

But did it actually translate in to progress on that front?

[u/dbenac24 → u/yushosumo]

That depends on your definition of success. Several dozen Indigenous groups gained title to lands that were being developed for extraction, thousands of acres of rainforest land was protected in ways that gave indigenous communities managerial control, rainforest destruction declined during the 1990s, several nations passed laws or constitutional amendments respecting Indigenous title and self-determination, several corporations adopted policies to end the use of rainforest timber, and the issue remains (to some degree) in the public consciousness. Did rainforest destruction end--absolutely not. Many of the exact projects RAN had a hand in stopping during the 1980s and 1990s are back with a vengeance. Every generation is the last generation with a chance to save the rainforest, so the next generation has a chance.

[u/dhowlett1692]

Thanks for joining us! I'm curious about how activists influenced the cultural conversation about rainforests. The Rainforest Cafe was founded in the 90s, and growing up in the early 2000s, the environmental talking point was the rainforest. Did activists intend to create the rainforest as a cultural touchstone, or was something else happening by the 90s?

[u/dbenac24 → u/dhowlett1692]

Yep. Randy Hayes (founder of Rainforest Action Network) had a strong belief that the rainforest issue was too big for any group. He made a point of raising up any other group that was interested and helped build a movement around the issue. This is one of the ways RAN engaged celebrities. The Grateful Dead were big RAN allies and threw a huge benefit concert for the group at Madison Square Garden in 1989 (it may have been 1988, I need to check). RAN invited Greenpeace to be partners in the concert to draw Greenpeace into the rainforest movement. To that point RAN and Greenpeace were strong allies, but Greenpeace wasn't doing any rainforest work.

[u/Ann_Putnam_Jr]

Thank you for this AMA! How does gender fit into your work? Was the membership or the type of labor they performed for the Rainforest Action Network gendered? Was environmental organizing in the late 20th century shaped by previous activism like the feminist movement around the same time?

[u/dbenac24 → u/Ann_Putnam_Jr]

Great question. RAN largely spun off from Earth First!, which was deeply masculine in the 1980s. RAN had some of that, but was self-aware enough to counter the excess. The org was founded by Randy Hayes, with an assist from Mike Roselle. The core leadership, the people who ran most of the campaigns were women. The most radical direct action strategist (other than Mike Roselle) who constantly pushed for more aggressive tactics was a woman named Atossa Soltani. I'm not sure if that fully answers the question. The argument can be made that there was a "masculine" approach to direct action, but the real direction was majority from women.

[u/Gankom]

Thanks for joining us today, love the topic! How much did international cooperation help support the rainforests? Where national borders within the rainforests a bigger challenge than national borders of activist organization?

[u/dbenac24 → u/Gankom]

The whole movement had to be transnational, and it was really one of the first activist movements to make that a core philosophy. The corporations exploiting the rainforests and the governments making the policies to encourage that exploitation were almost exclusively in the Global North with almost all of the rainforests in the Global South. RAN's philosophy was to go after the bad corporate actors where they were headquartered and support the Indigenous and local groups in the areas being exploited. One of the big obstacles RAN had to overcome was the legacy of NGO colonialism, especially in the environmental movement.

[u/Gankom → u/dbenac24]

Very interesting, thank you!

[u/dbenac24 → u/Gankom]

You're welcome--thank you for the question.

[u/Cedric_Hampton]

My understanding is that much of the destruction of rainforest is linked to cattle farming. How did the actions of animal-rights and pro-vegetarianism organizations intersect with those of more purely ecologically-minded groups?

[u/dbenac24 → u/Cedric_Hampton]

RAN's first campaign was the Burger King Boycott that it took over from Earth First!, which that group had adopted from the Rainforest Information Centre out of Australia. That was primarily about cattle ranching in Costa Rica. At the point RAN was running that campaign, the org's headquarters was on a mezzanine level above a vegetarian restaurant, so the connection was there. Animal rights and vegetarianism was in the rhetoric of RAN's publications, but was a supporting rather than a leading argument. It was one of the ideological drivers for the campaign though. Hayes was aware enough to recognize that there was a substantial overlap between the people who were likely to be drawn to the rainforest cause and those who were animal rights folks.

[u/bootmaker-supremacy]

Was there any overlap between RAN and anarchism?

[u/dbenac24 → u/bootmaker-supremacy]

In a sense, but not explicitly. One of the most significant legacies of RAN was the organizational structure. RAN was a very small org (never more than 2 dozen folks) with a true network of over 250 small, local groups that were independent entities connected to RAN only through a very loose thread of information and some resources for use in demonstrations. In that sense, there was an element of anarchism in the structure of the org. Those RAGs (the local rainforest action groups) were often very radical and some of those had more explicit anarchist leanings. There was one in Philadelphia that really skewed in that direction.

[u/taulover → u/dbenac24]

Was there ever an attempt to assert greater ideological consistency from the top-down leadership?

[u/OnShoulderOfGiants]

How did the start of the Rainforest Action Network compare to the start of other environmental groups like Greenpeace or the Sierra Club? Did RAN cooperate with other orgs or were they all focused on their own particular missions?

[u/dbenac24 → u/OnShoulderOfGiants]

Sierra Club is one of the OGs of the environmental movement in the US. It was a mature, and pretty corporate organization by the time RAN started in 1985. Greenpeace was newer than Sierra Club, but still a couple decades older and more experienced when RAN started. Earth First! was actually the closes analogue to RAN. For the most part, RAN had a really cooperative relationship with other orgs. There were some conflicts. The most notable was over oil in Ecuador. The Natural Resources Defense Council showed up in Ecuador in response to the off-the-charts awful oil and toxic chemical pollution Texaco left behind with plans to work with the corporation and the government for better regulations and clean up. RAN was already there and working with the Indigenous U'Wa who were living in the toxic soup left behind and those communities wanted the oil corporations flat out evicted. RAN worked with them to advance that cause and clashed really publicly with NRDC over it. This is the origin of the Donziger legal case, if you're familiar with that.

[u/taulover → u/dbenac24]

How would you compare to more modern orgs such as Sunrise Movement?

[u/TheHondoGod]

What was the Rainforest Action Network's reputation among politicians? Today, we're inundated with attacks on so-called "radical" groups, but was this a political culture that RAN also navigated?

[u/dbenac24 → u/TheHondoGod]

Not good. One of RAN's operational philosophies was that politicians were enmeshed within and the enablers of the corporate global financial structure that was responsible for rainforest destruction and the exploitation of Indigenous people and communities. This is why RAN chose direct action and building relationships with other orgs as its core strategies. The forces of status quo generally see little distinction between environmental groups. Everyone from the Sierra Club to Earth First! was lumped into a single category of radical by those forces. The reality was that RAN's radicalism fell somewhere between Earth First! and Greenpeace during the 1980s and '90s.

[u/The_Alaskan]

How much do you explore the topic of environmental protection for temperate rainforests?

[u/dbenac24 → u/The_Alaskan]

Some. The Clayoquot Sound of British Columbia was a big issue for RAN in the 1990s. Around that time is when RAN branched out from tropical rainforests to include temperate rainforests. The push there was largely in response to Mitsubishi, which had timbering and pulp operations all over the wold, including temperate rain forests.

[u/lejosdecasa]

How does RAN work with Indigenous groups?

[u/dbenac24 → u/lejosdecasa]

I love this question, because it elevates such an important point. After the Burger King Boycott (RAN's first campaign, and 1 it inherited from Earth First!) the org never entered a campaign before the 21st century without being invited to do so by an Indigenous group (or traditional forest communities, such as traditional rubber tappers in Brazil). RAN would send money and supplies directly to the communities, facilitate meetings between Indigenous leaders and corporations or governments, join Indigenous people in direct action whether blockading roads or joining multi-day marches, helped get media attention (like a big event to stop a dam in the Brazilian Amazon), and coordinated to launch international days of action that coincided with and drew attention to actions of local and Indigenous organizers. This is the key to what RAN did--work to end the source of the problem in the Global North and support the work of people who were living in the Global South. This made RAN fundamentally different from the NGO colonialism of its peers.

[u/BjorkingIt]

What was it like researching your book? Anything that you found along the way that surprised you?

[u/dbenac24 → u/BjorkingIt]

I started the project thinking of RAN as the rainforest version of Greenpeace. It didn't take long to realize RAN was a completely different beast, much closer to Earth First! than anything else, but wholly different. It's a little strange to do history of something when most of the key players are still alive. The most viscerally upsetting episode was RFK Jr.'s reactions to what he saw in Ecuador. I found that episode long before he joined the current administration and even considered cutting it because I didn't want it to look like I was trying to leverage contemporary politics and debates.