This September, The Coast Range Association, along with partners like 350pdx, Indigenous Environmental Network, Rainforest Action Network, the Pacific Northwest Forest Climate Alliance, and many more, organized a major protest and counter conference in response to the Who Will Own The Forest timber investor conference.
If you aren’t familiar with the Who Will Own the Forest Conference, I’d encourage you to listen to the episode with Brenna Bell of 350pdx, which you can find on this pod feed or at our website, coastrange.org.
The short version is that Who Will Own The Forest is an annual “timberland investment conference” bringing together some of the world’s biggest climate polluters, corporate forest clear-cutters, finance giants, and false climate solutions peddlers. Just to name a few, JP morgan-Chase, weyerhauser, BP, the list goes on and on, but you get the idea. Attendees come from all over the world to scheme on ever more efficient ways to exploit communities and natural resources, sabotage efforts to decarbonize, and extract maximum profits for the 1%.
So in response, we staged a day long protest outside of the conference which drew around two hundred people, and the next day, we held a day long, Forests Over Profits counter conference which was attended by roughly the same number of folks!
There is clearly an appetite for taking on Wall St’s exploitation of forestlands, and I’m so excited to see where this movement goes from here. If you want to learn more or get involved, email me at michael@coastrange.org.
For today’s episode, I’m going to be airing a few clips from our Forests over Profits Conference, and I will be putting out another episode or two highlighting different presentations from the Forests Over Profits Conference soon.
I’m releasing this episode on Indigenous People’s Day, October 9th, So in honor of that, today’s episode will focus on clips from some of our conference’s Indigenous presenters, including an Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) panel discussion and a talk on the commercialization of Huckleberries and other sacred foods.
The Indigenous Environmental Network panel in particular was really powerful and inspiring, but I only have time to air a few clips for our radio edition. I really encourage you to listen to their entire presentation, so I’ll be putting out the full discussion as a bonus episode on this feed.
Links and resources:
CRR #65: Who Will Own The Forest, with Brenna Bell:
More about our campaigns:
https://coastrange.org/
Forestsoverprofits.org
https://www.ienearth.org/
The Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative
False Solutions Alliance
Huckleberry commercialization
Fairy Creek campaign:
-Amazing documentary https://rematriationthefilm.com/
-About Grandma Losah