Author
sheri
Nationwide Tree Free Campus Campaign Launched
University Students in 22 States Pressure Boise Cascade, Others to Protect
Forests
Rainforest Action Network
For Immediate Release, February 27, 2001
Contacts: Jennifer Krill, 415/398-4404, Meighan Davis, SEAC, 919/508-2160
Nationwide Tree Free Campus Campaign Launched
University Students in 22 States Pressure Boise Cascade, Others to Protect
Forests
San Francisco, CA-Student activists opened a new front today in the campaign
against Boise Cascade and other logging companies with the kick-off of a
national „Tree Free Campus Campaign‰. This campaign follows on the heels of
successful student-led market campaigns against Home Depot and other home
improvement retailers and home builders.
„Old Growth logging is a dying industry,‰ asserted Jennifer Krill, Old
Growth Campaigner for the Rainforest Action Network. „This student-led
campaign will tell industry dinosaurs like Boise Cascade that business as
usual just doesn‚t cut it.‰
At more than 30 campuses from Vermont to South Carolina to Oregon, student
organizers teamed up with university personnel to launch the campaign
through activities including student rallies, free distribution of notebooks
made from waste paper, meetings with university presidents, paper displays
in college buildings, and press conferences.
„Just as student activism was instrumental at ending Apartheid in South
Africa, today‚s students are taking a stand against global deforestation,‰
said Meighan Davis with Student Environmental Action Coalition (SEAC) from
Peace College in North Carolina. „Students refuse to buy wood and paper from
endangered forests.‰
The Tree Free Campus Campaign calls for colleges and universities to use
their buying power to purchase from companies that offer forest-friendly
products. Specific campaign demands include a phasing-out of wood and paper
from old growth forests, U.S. public lands, native forests converted to
plantations, and genetically engineered trees, while phasing in wood
products that meet Forest Stewardship Council standards or better, tree free
wood products, and 100% post-consumer content or tree free paper.
Over the past two years top wood users including Home Depot and Kinko‚s have
committed to eliminating the use and sale of old growth wood and give
preference to alternatives. Nearly twenty-five percent of the U.S. lumber
market has pledged to transform its use of wood and paper products.
More than three-quarters of the world's old growth forests have already been
logged and degraded, much within the past three decades. In the United
States, less than five percent of our original forests remain.
The Tree Free Campus Campaign is sponsored by: American Lands Alliance, Free
the Planet!, National Forest Protection Alliance, Rainforest Action Network,
and the Student Environmental Action Coalition. More information can be
found at:
http://www.ran.org/ran_campaigns/old_growth/campus/index.html
# # #
********************************
Shannon Wright
Media and Communications
Rainforest Action Network
415/398-4404, fax 415/398-2732
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