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This week's Solutionary Woman is Ilyse Hogue, the Global Finance Campaign Director for the Rainforest Action Network and one of the founders of SmartMeme, a nonprofit collective of long term organizers, strategists, trainers and communications professionals.
I interviewed Ilyse for my Big Vision podcast. What follows is a transcript of the interview. You can hear the orginal podcast on Gcast, Odeo or iTunes.
What does Rainforest Action Network do?
Rainforest Action Network was formed 20 years ago around the mission of preserving the world's remaining old growth forests and securing the rights of their traditional inhabitants, the way that that's kind of unfolded over the years is that we act through what we call marketplace democracy, which means that we go out and we try and educate everyday consumers about the corporate participants in the destruction of the rainforest, and during the last ten years we've really understood the interconnectedness between rainforest destruction and climate change, so now we say, hey, we're all participants in this market system, and you need to make your voice heard when you go to Ford motor company and say, "Why aren't you instituting fuel efficiency standards? Why are you still churning out some of the largest vehicles known on the face of the Earth," and similarly we've gained a lot of traction in what we call the global financial sector which is... our supporters really resonanted with the idea that large multi-national banks were making decisions every day that impacted the fate of our global eco-systems, and so we have been able to successfully funnel those voices towards the world's largest banks and pressure them into instituting some comprehensive environmental policies into how they're investing our money.
What do you do as the Global Finance Campaign Director?
I was brought on board seven years ago to start up what we call the global finance campaign, which is to look at the role the big banks play in environmental destruction and how we view the economy as either a tool for destruction or restoration, and as that program grew I became the Director of it and now I do that as well as offer some overall strategic guidance for the organization on how we tackle new projects and what kinds of messages we're sending out to the broader world.
How did you come to this work?
Well I came to this work and I came to this job, very differently, maybe I could start from the beginning.
After college, after some wanderings and living out in nature doing a lot of backpacking, I decided I didn't want to, actually, well, actually let me start, I was a science major in college because I knew that I wanted to study eco-systems and help to preserve them that way. Shortly after college I did some field work, where I was gathering data in an effort to try and clean up some mine tailings in Montana, and after months and months of doing that I had kind of an epiphany that it wasn't for lack of evidence that we weren't changing our behaviour, that the evidence actually existed, that data I was gathering was going towards who was responsible for paying for the clean-up, but at the same time I knew that I could look at this river system and say, "I don't want to swim in this, I don't need to spend tens of thousands of dollars and reams of paper and all this time to prove that it's toxic." And so I thought well, it seems like if we're going to actually change the human patterns that are so severely impacting our environment and communities around the world, maybe there are some other ways to do it.
So I actually moved home to Texas and started to work on a local initiative to do some water resource protection and did everything right. Went through the democractic system, went door-to-door. Got the citizens of Austin to sign their names enough times to get it on the ballot. At the polling place it passed by 75%, that we wanted to protect this watershed, which 75% in an issue-based election is a huge margin. So we went out and celebrated, and then in the subsequent weeks, it became very clear that the developer who wanted to build on the watershed had no intention of abiding by the citizens' rule. He basically went to the state legislature and poured money into state senator and congresspeople's pockets to undercut the local
