Rainforest Relief is a mostly volunteer-based environmental organization that has become a nationally recognized leader in rainforest wood research and campaigning. Our main office is in New York City and we have a chapter in Portland, Oregon as well as part-time staff and volunteers working in New York, Los Angeles, New Jersey and Costa Rica.

Tim Keating, a co-founder of the organization in 1989, is currently the Executive Director.

Resulting from our contact with people dwelling in and around rainforests, Rainforest Relief responds to a clear need for organizations in industrial countries to reduce consumption of materials destructively taken from rainforests.

Research reveals that logging is the largest single factor leading to tropical deforestation, as the cutting and road building associated with the timber industry opens avenues into rainforests. This initiates a chain of destruction that can include more logging, mining, slash-and-burn clearing for cattle grazing and conversion for chemical-intensive industrial agriculture. Most of the resultant products are exported to northern industrialized countries.

It is for these reasons that Rainforest Relief committed to reducing the US demand for unsustainable tropical imports, especially timber. Since our founding in 1989, RR has become the lead group in the US working to end the imports and use of unsustainable tropical woods.

Since we began campaigning in earnest in 1991, we’ve prevented the use of more unsustainable tropical woods than any group in US history. As a small organization, our victories speak for themselves. Cities and towns from California to Florida to New York have ended their use of rainforest woods or shifted to independently certified woods in response to Rainforest Relief campaigns.

In fact, our campaigns have also generated the four largest single purchases of tropical wood from forest operations that are independently certified and accredited by the Forest Stewardship Council, thus encouragin a standard of ecological integrity and social benefit in logging operations (however, Rainforest Relief does not advocate the use of certified wood from old-growth forests).

As well, major companies have come around, scaling back the sale of rainforest woods or ending their use in store construction, either switching to or sticking with more environmentally preferable alternatives.

Rainforest Relief was instrumental in the campaign to stop The Home Depot’s sales of old-growth rainforest woods. RR ensured that the campaign was as much about The Home Depot’s tropical imports (such as lauan plywood and doors, mahogany entry doors, ramin dowels and tool handles, etc). RR wrote the report, Stealing Home: The Old Growth Rainforests of The Home Depot, detailing The Home Depot’s rainforest woods and their suppliers, and we created what became the ‘Dead Rainforest Tour’, a campaign tactic that was used across the continent and became critically important as a means of deflecting The Home Depot’s denials. The success of Rainforest Relief’s focus on tropical woods was acknowledged in HD’s own press statement — the company specifically mentioned “lauan” and “tool handles”, products that Rainforest Relief was first to target.

Rainforest Relief has worked hard to highlight the destruction of rainforests for the drilling and transporting of petroleum. We’ve worked for many years with Judith Kimerling, author of Amazon Crude. Judith has worked directly with the affected peoples of Ecuador's Oriente to hold Texaco accountable for their more than 17.5 million gallons of oil spilled in the formerly pristine rainforests of Ecuador. We also worked with Project Underground, Rainforest Action Network, Amazon Watch and other groups in the international effort to stop Occidental Petroleum from drilling in the indigenous territory of the U’wa people, in the cloud forests of Colombia. Rainforest Relief’s demonstrations led to a meeting with Al Gore, whose family owned a large amount of stock in the company, and also helped push Fidelity Investments, the oil company’s largest shareholder, to divest from Occidental’s operations.

Rainforest Relief has re-ignited the debate of rainforest destruction in leading media outlets from publications like The New York Times, Financial Times and Business Week to major network affiliates such as CNN and Fox News.

In addition to communicating through mass media, Rainforest Relief has, since 1991, directly reached thousands through our presentations, given at schools and colleges, conferences and to civic groups across the US. The presentation is visually captivating using photographs we’ve taken, tracing the trail of rainforest products such as wood, aluminum, gold and coffee from their destructive extraction to the aisles of the supermarkets, department stores, do-it-yourself home centers, furniture stores, gas stations, lumber yards, boardwalks, piers, docks and park benches of the US. Images of destruction abound where the vibrant ecological cathedrals of still-pristine rainforests once stood.

With contacts around the world, we have recently begun implementing plans to provide alternatives to destructive extraction of rainforest resources internationally. Helping to empower people whose homes are being destroyed by loggers and clear-cutters has not only created cross-cultural networks of rainforest defense, but created initiatives for sustainable development that spare forests and allow for greater autonomy for people living in and around them. For instance, our ForestBanana™ project in Costa Rica has begun to help expand the markets for bananas grown organically under the shade of diverse forests by locally-controlled coöperatives of small-scale farmers.

The figures regarding our effectiveness are significant: over 11 million board feet of tropical wood shipments have been prevented, sparing an estimated 1.1 million acres of rainforests from logging. With a comparatively small budget, Rainforest Relief has been able to accomplish significant victories for the protection of rainforests.

The wave of illegal and rapacious loggers in the tropics is wiping out rainforests around the world, with much of the resulting wood ending up in US boardwalks, bridges, benches and other waterfront redevelopment projects, furniture stores, DIY and hardware stores, decks, siding and floors in our homes, truck bodies, trailers, RVs, dowels, rakes, mops and cue stix — even pencils. As it stands, this wave is eliminating over 400 species a day — lost forever to the greatest Mass Extinction to have occurred on Earth in the last 65 million years.

We need a wave of our own to counter this destruction. Let’s work in the present together to create that wave in the future. We did it with elephant ivory, we did it whale meat and bones, we did it with tuna harvested by killing dolphins — now we must do it with rainforest-destructive wood, petroleum, gold, bananas, coffee, chocolate and flowers.

Contact us today to donate, volunteer and get involved.



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