Rainforest Radicals: A History of Rainforest Action Network and Transnational Organizing

Rainforest Radicals presents the first history of one of the most innovative and successful environmental organizations of the late twentieth century.Rainforest Action Network emerged in 1985, when it took over a fledgling effort to protect rainforests from transnational corporations funding the expansion of tropical cattle ranching.It excelled at using nonviolent, civil disobedience in dramatic campaigns that captured the attention of the public, media, and RAN's corporate adversaries.As a result, two decades later rainforest conservation went from a niche academic topic to a fixture in American popular culture, the rights of Indigenous people had gone from ignored or romanticized to at least considered in discussions of the management of their ancestral homelands, and RAN had scored a series of victories over some of the planet's largest corporations. In Rainforest Radicals David Benac traces the evolution of RAN and radical, transnational grassroots environmentalism through the four