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Randy Hayes

Whether or not we have turned the corner is debatable, but the earth has
truly been in the balance. On the margins of this conflict in the trenches
of politics, in the vastness of the oceans, across the length and breadth
of the earth, and in the battle for hearts and minds, the foot soldiers do
contend. Few armies have fought as long or as hard as the veteran troups
of the Rainforest Action Network.

Randy Hayes is the Founder and President of the Rainforest Action Network (RAN). This is a group well known by friends and foes alike in the ongoing battle over the fate of the world’s forests. They have won spectacular victories in the effort to convince corporations worldwide to adopt forest-friendly practices.

The Rainforest Action Network’s world headquarters is currently in a fifth-floor suite on the south side of Pine between Battery and Sansome in the heart of San Francisco’s financial district. The interior suite seemed almost luxuriantly rainforest-like. The windows of the older building were all opened, and maritime fall air poured in. Most of the florescent lamps were disconnected, and track lighting and other incandescent lamps stood amidst the desks and the plants. It may have been partly because of the ambience, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a rainforest in an office space.

For ten years, until 1985 when RAN was founded, Randy Hayes lived in Oraibi, Hopiland, in the heart of the Hopi reservation in northwest Arizona. A thoughtful man in his forties, with graying hair and serene eyes, Hayes took a moment early in our interview to describe some of his time among the Hopi, who are reputed to have the oldest permanent villages in North America. The Hopi believe that prior to our recorded history, the earth had experienced the rise and fall of a huge industrial civilization, which consumed and wasted the earth and then perished. This cautionary tale, Hayes suggested, can be applied to our own times, and humans have a choice whether or not to allow history to repeat itself.

The Rainforest Action Network is known for direct action crusades to save trees. They have succeeded in convincing many corporations, Burger King and Home Depot among them, to adopt forest friendly corporate policies. Their tactics sometimes include spectacular feats of derring-do, including climbing the outsides of skyscrapers and dropping huge banners with messages demanding change. The giant banner tactic was attempted most recently in Boise Idaho, in a protest action against Boise Cascade, and Hayes smiled as he recalled they had to use their backup plan, inflating a 12 story dinosaur, when the climbers failed to get a banner unfurled. Not only was the dinosaur a great billboard, bigger and fatter than the Colossus of Rhodes, but being a dinosaur, it was a great reminder of the alleged “prehistoric” practices of Boise Cascade.

RAN focuses their efforts, according to Hayes, at “those in the industrial north who have their foot on the throat of the rainforest.” They have about 15,000 members, including about 150 “Rainforest Action Groups,” trained groups of activists. These “RAGs” are typically either 5 to 10 member groups of young college students, or 30 to 40 member groups of long-time activists; many of these groups have been together ten years or more. It was RAN, Hayes acknowledged, who provided nonviolence

training
for many of the anti-globalist groups that protested earlier this year in Seattle, then in Washington D.C., as well as at both the Democratic and Republican conventions. Not comfortable with military metaphors, Hayes reluctantly termed the forces of Rainforest Action Network and Greenpeace as “armies” in the environmental movement, “not much compared to Exxon and the like, but within the scheme of the environmental movement the biggest and best we have.”

The largest retailer of wood products in the world, Home Depot, apparently agrees, because RAN pressure recently led them to adopt a no-old-growth policy. Burger King, under pressure from RAN, has recently adopted a policy to no longer purchase beef grown on deforested land. RAN also convinced the largest homebuilders in the U.S., Kaufman & Broad, Syntex, and others, to adopt a no-old-growth wood policy. Countless other victories have made RAN a respected voice in the dialogue between business and environmentalists.

RAN, said Hayes, is currently focusing pressure on the world’s major private banks, trying to convince them to adopt a “comprehensive set of social and ecological policies.” The priority for RAN is to preserve
original rainforest, which still occupies 6% of the entire land surface of the planet. Hayes mentioned several hotspots, including New Guinea, the “Amazon of Southeast Asia,” where to this day, vast stands of original rainforest remain precariously intact.

Hayes mentioned the major world environmental organizations are beginning to cooperate, by overlaying their areas of interest and identifying “high conservation value forests” where they will all begin to
coordinate their preservation efforts. Principal among these groups are the International Union for Conservation of Nature, World Wildlife Fund, Greenpeace International, Friends of the Earth International, Conservation International, World Rainforest Movement, and the Climate Action Network. This cooperation represents a great opportunity, according to Hayes, for much more effective rainforest preservation efforts.

Hayes pointed out that there are only four major forests left in the world; Siberia, the Congo, the Amazon, and the Pacific Northwest of North America. When asked if the people of the south had a point when they
protest it’s hypocritical for northern environmental interests to urge them to leave their forests intact, when the north has already destroyed 95% of their original forests, Hayes had several comments. “First of all, who in the south is doing the protesting?” he asked. Often the voices of protest represent the logging and ranching interests, and their representatives in government. Continuing, Hayes said, “two wrongs don’t make a right, and the industrial north should probably compensate the south for preserving their forest.” Finally, Hayes emphasized that RAN focuses their efforts not at the south, but at pressuring the corporations in the industrial north who provide the demand for wood products without regard for the source.

There are 30 full time employees at the Rainforest Action Network headquarters. After we had talked for awhile, I was introduced by Randy Hayes to Jessica, a Markets Campaigner for RAN, who studies rainforest ecology and the impacts of logging in Africa, Southeast Asia, North, Central and South America, and Australia. Happy to have the time of such an expert, I took the opportunity to learn from her more about trees and efforts to save them. According to Jessica, certified timber sales, where the logging companies have had their practices audited and approved by a legitimate certification organization, only account for a minute percent of the U.S. timber harvest, and an even smaller percent of the world timber harvest.

While there are seven well-regarded international timber certification organizations, there are only two in the U.S., the non-profit program of the Rainforest Alliance called Smartwood and the for profit program of Scientific Certification Systems. There is also the Forest Stewardship Council, which accredits certifiers. About five years ago, timber industry forces organized the Sustainable Forestry Initiative . The problem with this timber industry certification group, according to Jessica, is that nearly all of the existing practices of the timber industry are endorsed by the association.

Jessica noted that environmental awareness among consumers is steadily growing and a majority of the public is now informed and vocal about not wanting to buy wood from endangered or old growth forests. Retailers, especially the Do-It-Yourself stores and home builders, are responding to the message from their customers, and in the past year alone, over 25% of the wood market in the US has pledged to stop buying wood from endangered forests. The old ways of industrial logging in old growth, primary and endangered forests are unjustifiable and will soon be a thing of the past, Jessica stated. Earlier, Hayes had identified Boise Cascade in North America, and Mitsubishi Trading Company in Tokyo, Japan, as the worst enemies of forests in the U.S. and in the World, respectively.

Hayes asked me to ask EcoWorld readers if there is any truth to the rumor that the priceless wood of old growth Central American “Purple Heart” trees is being hoarded. Reportedly, intact logs are being coated with paraffin and sunk in harbors to be retrieved on the day when they are all gone, extinct, and the wood will fetch a higher price than ever. Anybody heard about this?

Armed by RAN with information about trees and how to save them, printed on paper made from agricultural byproducts, left RAN’s offices, buying a fresh Panini sandwich made with San Francisco’s inimitable sourdough bread from a street vendor on the way to my car. Thank God for automatic transmissions. Telephone. Eat. Drive.

San Francisco is a beautiful city, especially in the Fall, but it took me nearly an hour to drive from their offices to the Bay Bridge. I went south down Battery, a direct route from the financial district to
the onramp of the Bay Bridge and one of the only ways to get across Market from the north. It was a whopping 1.5 miles of absolute gridlock on a sunny Thursday in November. Though the air was fresh and clean, I longed for a chance to sit in a grove of redwoods, instead of a traffic jam. Once I finally got onto the bridge, the traffic flowed again and everything was good.

The best thing that ever happened to me was going to Central America to help treeplanters. I was fortunate to have a first-hand look at some of their finest work, when I went there with Stuart Conway, an EcoWorld Hero and co-founder of the reforesting group, Trees Water and People.

“Caben Tres” is a way to sum up Stuart Conway’s driving in the hills of Guatemala, or Honduras, or El Salvador. He took me with him on a whirlwind two week tour of his tree nurseries and watershed protection projects in June 1998. The rainy season was just starting, the civil wars were over, and the roads were filled with sugar cane trucks with trailers so wide they seemed to overhang both shoulders of the road.

Caben tres is Spanish for “three fit,” which was Stuart’s amiable rejoinder whenever I’d ask him if he had to pass on blind curves. We tore through the outback of all three Central American countries in Toyota pickup trucks, from the hot, humid lowlands of Guatemala to rush hour in San Salvador. I guess it just wasn’t our number, because we always got to the next stop in one piece.

When you see so many nurseries and so many lush forested hillsides, so many recovered year-round streams of water held and purified by new forests, so much good work for the earth and the people on it, you can believe it really might not be that hard for everyone to come together and save the earth.

At a park in the heart of San Salvador, I recall standing in a great shadehouse, with huge metal tubes supporting the shadecloth, arrayed like a row of giant croquet hoops. The structure was 20′ high and 40′ wide and nearly 100′ long, and it was filled with baby trees. Many of the trees were seedlings in micro-thin plastic bags (bolsas), which were lined up side by side so when you looked down on them they formed a honeycomb. That place must have held 10,000 trees. Through the mesh you could see a soccer game being played in a dusty dirt field, with the nearby grass reserved for the spectators.

In the mountains west of Tegucigalpa, just upstream from the city of Suyapa, we visited a watershed where the forest was intact. Beautiful tropical pines marched up the canyon as far as the eye could see. In the northwest reaches of El Salvador, near the town of El Coco, we went to another watershed where the forest still existed. Hiking into the heart of this forest, the temperature cooled, and in the moist canyon bottom a running spring yielded water pure enough to drink on the spot. In both of these places, and elsewhere, new forests bordered the original forests. These deforested barren areas were filled with tree seedlings planted by communities that had realized that their water supply (as well as protection against landslides) depended on nurturing healthy and abundant forests.

Our job, besides visiting all of the tree nurseries and watersheds that Stuart had helped establish, was to take all of these projects under the umbrella of his new organization, Trees Water and People, headquartered in Ft. Collins, Colorado. To do that, we visited local foundations, mostly in the capital cities, as well as international aid organizations that had offices locally. Invariably Stuart would launch into a presentation in Spanish that I think I memorized by the time our trip neared the end. Not that I understood much of it, but I think I nodded at the right times.

Stuart Conway has been living half in the U.S., half in Central America for about 25 years now. He and his wife Jennie Bramhall joined the Peace Corps, went to Guatemala for their honeymoon, and didn’t come home for three years. They lived and worked in a small town just south of the beautiful highland colonial city of Antigua. Since then, they return to Central America several times a year, specializing in helping small communities grow trees and protect their watersheds.

Stuart co-founded Trees Water and People (the name grows on you) in 1998 with Richard Fox, a veteran forest arborist, who specializes in North American forest preservation and watershed protection. Both of them moved with their families to Ft. Collins, Colorado, rolled up their sleeves and got their organization up and running. They work along with a small staff in a lofty 2nd floor suite in an old brick and timber building on College Avenue between downtown and the University. Towering Plains Cottonwoods hang huge limbs overhead (Cottonwoods decorate the whole city, and why they aren’t planting new ones is beyond me), and just one block north the main train line intersects the street. If you call them and hear a roar in the background, it’s just a freight train about two hours on the tracks from Denver.

Ft. Collins isn’t quite yet a home away from home for me, but I’ve been there a lot as a volunteer. Have you ever spent an evening calling potential donors on the phone? There’s a lot of ways to build a nonprofit, and that’s one of them. At least I was in a cool room, up in their loft, with a big steam radiator and an old window you can actually open. And books about trees everywhere. It was quite a heavenly spot from which to make cold calls. One guy actually gave us $1,000 after a call. That was a good call.

Downtown Ft. Collins is one of the oldest, biggest little cities in Northern Colorado. There’s really no other good sized towns between Denver to the south (and Boulder’s grown into Denver), and Cheyenne, Wyoming to the north. With a bustling University and some high-tech companies moving in, the several streets of the old downtown get pretty lively at night. We ate once at the “Rio Grande”, a venerable and one-of-a-kind old Mexican bar and restaurant. The Rio Grande has extremely high-ceilings with floor-to-ceiling windows, a huge spacious old bar, and a dining room that was half Victorian, half Southwestern. Nicely done. Powerful margaritas. Delicious hot spicy food.

When the folks at Trees Water and People aren’t providing funds and expert assistance growing trees and protecting watersheds in Central America, they are working closer to home, protecting watersheds in the Rocky Mountains of the U.S. This is Richard Fox’s area, and he brings to his work a lifetime of experience in forests throughout America, but mostly in the Rockies. In his time, Richard has had crews of planters where, using a special planting tool, each person could plant up to 1,000 trees per day. I didn’t believe him, but we timed the motions, and I did the math. I guess it’s true. We could have fun with this! One thousand people could plant a million trees a day. A billion trees in less than three years!

Planting trees is only part of the solution, though, and managing a forest and a watershed is complex work that is never done. Richard’s trees and watershed protection has so far enlisted the support of communities throughout Colorado and Wyoming, mostly along the “Front Range,” the eastern slopes of the Rockies.

Trees Water and People have several specific projects they are focusing on these days, one of the most interesting ones is helping a company in Nicaragua manufacture and sell fuel-efficient stoves. Stuart will be down in Central America again in November 2000; two weeks, four countries. Drive carefully, my friend!

Samuel Gruber looks like a cat who’s had a few lives. He is a man without pretense, a man with so much personal credibility you wonder if he was ever young and crazy. This single-minded EcoWorld Hero has been saving sharks for nigh on forty years. Though he’s in his early sixties, in spite of or perhaps because of his lifelong devotion to his passion, Dr. Gruber appears a much younger man.

In September 2000, I heard Dr. Samuel Gruber speak at the Moss Landing Marine Laboratory, in a beautiful new building nestled in the dunes just south of the Moss Landing marina. Behind us loomed the centerpiece of Moss Landing, and of the Monterey Bay for that matter: the great square lattice and twin 150 foot chimneys of Moss Landing Power Plant. We were right in the middle of the great beach that runs in a gentle 30 mile crescent between Carmel and Santa Cruz, broken only by the Pajaro Estuary, and close by, the small town and harbor of Moss Landing.

Dr. Samuel Gruber

Samuel Gruber is undaunted by a twenty year mortal struggle with lymphoma, not to mention forty years of sorties underwater with sharks in nothing but scuba gear (Doc Gruber, not the sharks). He was also undaunted by the high-tech lights in the high-tech auditorium that nobody could figure out how to dim. We viewed his slide projections, invisible in the light, then in the dark where he couldn’t even see his notes, then in the light, then in the dark, and eventually in an acceptable half-light.

The shark is the apex predator of the oceans, which means ocean ecosystems, just like land ecosystems, will experience a profound ripple effect if sharks become extinct. Sharks, like Redwood trees, come from a much earlier evolutionary epoch, and as such they are completely unlike fish or seafaring mammals such as dolphins and whales. Unlike most fish, sharks have a relatively long life span, about 50 years, and reproduce very slowly, females usually only having one or two offspring, and only every other year. Moreover, sharks don’t reach reproductive age until they are nine.

Today sharks are on the retreat, being killed at a rate far beyond their long-term ability to regenerate. If this rate of shark hunting continues much longer, the population of most shark species will become so low it will be impossible for them to increase their numbers naturally. They will be like the condor, becoming a “welfare species” if they are to survive. Not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with saving a species that way.

Lemon sharks migrate across the American shoreline regions of the Atlantic from New Jersey to Montevideo, and from Brazil to Bimini. Dr. Gruber tracks them, tagging them with GIS transmitters and noting where they breed and where they travel. Dr. Gruber frequently swims with the lemon sharks at his research station in Bimini, where sharks breed in the mangrove forested swamps. Once recently, Dr. Gruber had to stop his swimming long enough to prevent a multi-national hotel chain from replacing the lemon shark nurseries, situated in some of the choicest mangrove lagoons in all of the gulf stream, with a group of hotels. Instead of a lagoon, they were poised to construct a giant salt-water swimming pool, excavated, cleared of flora and fauna, boasting beaches of imported white sand and swim-up bars, maybe even an artificial wave machine.

Thankfully, there will be no mega-resorts terraforming Bimini anytime soon. But there are other concerns. Doc Gruber’s research station is balanced precariously on wood stilts that will snap in the first hurricane. It’s been a long time since a hurricane hit Bimini. They’re due. Undaunted, and set up in a structure made of matchsticks in the path of hurricanes, Dr. Grubers research station operates year-round, with a staff of marine biologists from around the U.S. and the world. To retrofit this facility to withstand the average hurricane would cost $240K. Any takers?

The Bimini Research Station

In spite of sparse funds, Doc Gruber’s message is getting out, and the world is awakening to the fact that sharks are more than just killing machines as portrayed in the movies and the media. Doc jokes that more people are killed each year by beating up broken soft drink machines, which then fall onto them and crush them (it’s true), than are killed by sharks in the ocean. One might eat a shark steak, typically, with a revengeful relish, as though sharks were fecund vermin, deserving of being stamped out wherever found, like cockroaches. But they are not cockroaches, rather, they are of the same importance as African Lions, Siberian Tigers, Grizzly Bears, Jaguars, highly intelligent, not very adaptable, slow to reproduce, imperiled throughout their range, and at the top of the food chain. They are the apex predators and crucial indicator species for 70% of the earth’s surface.

As we strip-mine the oceans to general exhaustion for food, sharks are subjected to a particularly woeful fate, being caught and mutilated merely for their dorsal fins. They are netted and released, minus one fin, and left to die a lingering horrible death to satiate the appalling yet fashionable taste for shark fin soup.

Doc. Gruber is a true EcoWorld Hero, and someone should buy him some new stilts for his lab in Bimini.

To help Dr. Gruber contact him at:

Bimini Biological Field Station

9300 SW 99 St

Miami FL 33176-2050