Randy Hayes started one of the most effective environmental organizations in the world, Rainforest Action Network (RAN.org) to advocate the preservation of the world’s forests, their inhabitants, and the natural systems that sustain life. Since its founding in 1985, the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) has worked to protect rainforests and the human rights of those living in and around those forests. From the beginning, RAN has played a key role in strengthening the worldwide rainforest conservation movement through supporting activists in rainforest countries and mobilizing consumers and community action groups throughout the United States.
RAN began its mission by convening the first international rainforest conference, enabling activists from 35 organizations to formulate a plan of action. Other conferences and direct-action campaigns followed, helping to catalyze the growing world rainforest movement. Due to RAN’s multi-media campaigns, the plight of the rainforest has come to the forefront of the public's awareness. Consumers have begun to appreciate the power they have to change things through their purchasing choices. Through the close alliances that RAN has forged with grassroots organizations, the essential work of educating local communities and gathering the critical mass needed to exert effective pressure for change when and where it is needed has taken place. RAN's monthly Action Alerts keep individual members informed about the assaults on the rainforests and what we as individuals can do about them.
Consumer education continues as an essential activity of RAN’s Network. Consumers in the U.S. have begun to understand their critical role in consumption patterns in rainforest deforestation, and how actions here at home can help to protect rainforests abroad. Major goals include limiting the trade in old growth wood products and a ban on the logging of old growth forests. RAN asks fellow consumers not to purchase products made from old growth woods, unless they are verifiably produced from ecologically and socially sound logging operations, and to bring their concerns as socially-conscious consumers to the store manager whenever possible.
Often at great personal risk, Randy Hayes and his organization have successfully fought to save indigenous peoples and the rainforests they live in. Randy Hayes has helped unify diverse peoples and organizations in many countries, from developing nations to post-industrial ones, to finding common ground, common cause, and common interests to save the rainforests that sustain us all.
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