When Rainforest Action Network began in 1985, it had little of what usually makes an organization powerful. It had no large budget, no legal department, no steady access to politicians, and no formal way to force corporations or development banks to change. It had Randy Hayes, a wide activist network, a way to connect distant forest destruction to everyday choices, and a willingness to use tactics many mainstream environmental groups avoided.
David Benac’s new book, Rainforest Radicals: A History of Rainforest Action Network and Transnational Organizing, explains how that combination became effective. RAN’s early campaigns targeted Burger King over rainforest beef, True Geothermal in Hawai‘i, the World Bank over development projects, and Mitsubishi over tropical timber. Together, they show how a small San Francisco-based group helped bring tropical deforestation, Indigenous rights, and corporate accountability into late twentieth-century environmental politics.
Benac, an environmental and public historian, came to the subject through archival research on the timber industry in the Pacific Northwest. RAN appeared in the papers of MacMillan Bloedel and in records of a grassroots campaign against clear-cutting in British Columbia’s coastal rainforests. That trail led him to Hayes and then to a wider oral-history project with activists, allies, and contemporaries.
RAN’s early thinking drew from Earth First!, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and Australia’s Rainforest Information Centre. The group used nonviolent direct action, boycotts, media spectacle, and decentralized organizing. It also placed Indigenous self-determination near the center of its mission, when many national environmental groups still treated forests mainly as ecological spaces rather than homelands, cultural landscapes, and political territories.
For RAN, “radical” meant looking for the causes of tropical deforestation in systems linking corporations, banks, governments, consumer demand, and development policy. Its campaigns targeted pressure points in those systems. Benac does not present RAN as a simple model for today’s movements. Instead, he shows how strategy, persistence, coalition-building, and sustained pressure can give small groups leverage in fights usually dominated by larger institutions.
The interview: How an activist network built pressure without political power
