Whenever I anticipate travel to a new part of the world, I inevitably create for myself a picture of what that place looks like. Before arriving in Borneo, my mental map of the island was filled with wide, slow-moving rivers winding sinuously through tangled jungle forests for mile after mile. Yesterday, a part of that [...]

Hello! My name is Maia, and I’m from St. Paul, Minnesota. Last fall I got to help form a new RAN Chapter in the Twin Cities! Now I’m happy to announce a new campaign launch targeting General Mills’ use of palm oil.
Palm Oil
In case you don’t know why palm oil is a problem, the increased [...]

For the past four days, three amazing activists have been hanging out in trees near Massey Energy’s Bee Tree Strip Mine. With the treesitters so close to the mine site, blasting is illegal, therefore stopped. The activists – David Aaron Smith, 23, Amber Nitchman, 19 and Eric Blevins, 28, say they will stay in the [...]

Last night the University of Charleston hosted a debate about mountaintop coal removal between Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the CEO of Massey Energy, Don Blankenship. Massey Energy the major player in mountaintop removal – including at Coal River Mountain – where Climate Ground Zero treesitters just halted the blasting.
RAN folks were there, you can [...]

Initial reaction: heartbreak.  The intensity of the connection you feel staring into the eyes of an orangutan is vastly underestimated.  Visiting Km 38, a facility with 18 caged orangutans was an experience not quickly, nor easily, forgotten.  The NGO Borneo Orangutan Survival (BOS) built most of km 38 in response to the 1997/1998 forest [...]