Laws of the Jungle

It was a devastating attack ad. Over footage of a dying bird covered in oil and rivers burning in chemical fires, actress Susan Sarandon states: “Thousands are standing against Citigroup, the world’s largest financer of environmental destruction.” It is preceded by Sarandon and fellow actors Daryl Hannah and Ed Asner reading the names of Citibank credit card holders, and then cutting the cards in half. Ali MacGraw snips a card and then Sarandon’s voice-over continues as giant trees fall to the whine of chain saws: “And when you use a Citibank Card, you fund it too.” She cuts another card and adds: “Tell Citibank, ‘Not with my money.’ ” With his gravelly trademark solemnity, Asner concludes: “Stop bankrolling bulldozers. Cut your card.”

Snip.

Sanford I. (“Sandy”) Weill, the CEO (now chairman) of Citigroup--the largest financial services institution in the world--watched the 30-second ad in April 2003. The Rainforest Action Network’s campaign had been building relentlessly for almost three years, and Weill knew the conservation group’s demands: an end to Citigroup’s financing of illegal logging anywhere in the world, no oil drilling in environmentally sensitive “no-go” zones where fragile plants and animals might be endangered and indigenous people displaced, and a phase-out of funding for fossil fuels, which, in the network’s view, contribute to global warming.

Since Citigroup is a leading private funder of global mining, logging and drilling, these were audacious demands with far-reaching implications for how banks and multinational corporations do business in a world of environmental concerns.

But the Rainforest Action Network had chalked up an impressive string of victories since its founding in 1985 by Weill’s nemesis, Randy Hayes. The rowdy grass-roots organization had forced Burger King to cancel contracts for “rain forest beef,” or cattle raised on newly cleared tropical rain forest, especially in Central America. It had induced Occidental Petroleum and Shell to abandon oil pipelines in Colombia that arguably could have destroyed Amazonian rain forests and displaced the native U’wa people. In 1999, the group persuaded Home Depot, the largest seller of wood products in the world, not to buy items manufactured from old-growth trees unless the trees have been certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. In 2003, the network persuaded Boise Cascade to stop logging old-growth forests in Oregon, Canada, Chile and other places around the globe.

“Whether you agree with his tactics or not, Randy has gotten companies to live up to their environmental responsibilities,” says Jim Brumm, executive vice president of Mitsubishi, who duked it out with Hayes and his group in the 1990s over Mitsubishi’s use of old-growth forests for product packaging.

The Boise campaign was particularly bitter, with the Rainforest Action Network’s tax-exempt status attacked and Boise’s brand sullied by the sight of protesters, including musicians such as Bonnie Raitt and John Densmore being arrested on national television in front of the company’s Chicago offices. Perhaps most damaging to Boise’s bottom line, the network persuaded 400 retail customers, including Kinko’s--one of the largest consumers of paper in the country--to stop using Boise’s products until it abandoned old-growth trees. Such a chain of custody now exists that it’s possible to trace paper to the forests from which the trees were cut.

These market campaigns enable “an end run around Washington,” as BusinessWeek has put it, during a political period when “drill-at-full-speed” is the watch-phrase along the Potomac. According to the Vancouver Sun: “With that one statement, Home Depot . . . did more to change logging practices in [British Columbia] than 10 years of environmental wars and decades of government regulations.”

“The two things that Rainforest Action Network does best are kick corporate ass and throw great parties,” said actor-director Tim Robbins upon receiving the group’s 2003 World Rainforest Award.

And the life of this green party is its president, Randy “Hurricane” Hayes.

The streets-to-boardroom style came naturally to Hayes, the contentious 54-year-old son of a long-haul truck driver from Florida, with one grandmother who was part Blackfoot and another grandmother who was part Cherokee. Hayes moved in the ‘70s to San Francisco, presiding over a party house on Jones Street that played host to the city’s rock, writer and environmental communities. He soon gravitated to the Earth Island Institute circle of doers and thinkers around David Brower’s table at Enrico’s, the North Beach bistro. Brower, who had helped save the Grand Canyon from “dam-nation” during his tenure as the first executive director of the Sierra Club, touted a two-edged motto: “Think Green.”

The idea of rain forests--which once covered 12% of the earth’s land mass, serving as the lungs for the planet--was discussed at Enrico’s, and money from Brower’s loose “lunch fund” helped seed the Rainforest Action Network. As the pixilated Hayes improbably aged, he began to think large and long. At a meeting of environmental leaders in Los Angeles in 1992 he proposed a 500-year plan for the planet.

“If you say we need to solve smog and congestion in 20 years, it seems understandably hopeless,” Hayes explains today. “Fifty years, and people are open; 75, and optimism returns. A 500-year plan clears a lot of air.”

But the Citigroup fight was a monumental clash of cultures--ant versus elephant, a $2-million-a-year nonprofit versus a mega-corporation with a market value of more than $200 billion.

The Rainforest Action Network’s timing was good, however. Citigroup was in a bad streak: plummeting profits; investment banking scandals (for which it would pay $300 million in fines); even the allegation that Weill had finessed the entry of Citigroup stock analyst Jack Grubman’s twin boys into an exclusive Manhattan preschool in return for rating AT&T;, a Citigroup client, favorably. Citigroup did not need a rain forest monkey on its back.

The Citigroup campaign was launched in 2000, but a key event occurred in August 2002, when the Rainforest Action Network purchased a full-page ad in the International Herald Tribune while Weill was visiting his grandchildren in Europe. The headline blared: “Put a Face on Global Warming and Forest Destruction.” And there was Weill’s gentle and smiling face, framed beside George W. Bush and James Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank.

Approaching retirement, Weill was concerned about his company’s reputation, and he was puzzled, if not chagrined, to be cast as an environmental villain.

By early 2003, in response to the print portion of the Rainforest campaign, about 20,000 credit cards had been cut, with some of the plastic shards mailed to Weill and some to Hayes’ group. Citibank’s retail branches had been disrupted by demonstrators who chained themselves to entrances in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and New York City. An enormous banner had been unfurled across from Citigroup’s Manhattan headquarters that read, in part: “Citi Ethically Bankrupt.” Weill was personally dogged by activists handing out “Wanted” leaflets, from New York City to his home in Greenwich, Conn.

“My experience with bankers,” says Hayes, “is that if you can sit down with them and open their eyes to a few things they haven’t thought about, then they are often not personally antithetic to the message.”

Hayes delivered his message to Weill at an April 3 lecture given by the executive to several hundred business students at Cornell University. Weill, class of ‘55, had donated more than $200 million to the university. He was describing the upshot of Citibank’s investment banking scandals and speaking of the positive effects of globalization. A young activist stood up and told Weill that many Cornell students were bothered by what they saw as Citigroup’s funding of destructive rain forest projects and, luckily, the founder and president of the Rainforest Action Network happened to be sitting beside her.

“Mr. Weill, meet Mr. Hayes,” said the young woman to a chorus of applause, laughter and boos.

“Well, have him stand up,” Weill said.

“Thank you, Mr. Weill,” Hayes said. “We both want to bring responsibility to business and leave the world a better place than we found it. And although you do not think the world is going to hell in a handbasket, a fair number of people do. I’d like to work together with you to bring environmental responsibility to Citigroup, and I’d also like to invite you to join me in an academic debate on the subject.”

“It’s good to know there are people dedicating their lives to making the world a better place,” replied Weill, diplomatically. “I think the environment is an important issue, and Citigroup is taking steps to address it. We’ll be taking more steps in the future, and we look forward to working with your group and many others on an ongoing basis. I don’t think I have enough experience to join you in an academic debate on this matter, but I look forward to working with you.”

They were two mandarins dancing at arm’s length.

Weill reflected on how embarrassed he had been to be reprimanded by his grandkids over the ad in the International Herald Tribune. Hayes jumped back up and said, “Well, I hope we can run another ad in the future where we are both on the same page, working hand in hand to find a solution to these problems.”

Days later, the star-studded attack ad hit the airwaves.

On April 15, 2003, Citigroup was scheduled to hold its annual shareholder meeting at Carnegie Hall. Michael Brune, executive director of the Rainforest Action Network, had given notice that the group would be there in force. Hours before the meeting, Citigroup executives and the network agreed to start negotiations toward a permanent policy on environmental standards. As an act of good faith, Citigroup agreed to stop arranging financing for a pipeline project in Peru that threatened the rain forest. The Rainforest Action Network agreed to temporarily halt its campaign for three months.

Three months turn into eight, and there is progress, but still no agreement. As the Christmas holidays approach, Hayes and Brune purr for the Oakland airport in Hayes’ hybrid Toyota Prius. They are off to Santa Fe, the first in the group’s annual round of high-donor parties, with actress and card-snipper Ali MacGraw as the advertised draw.

Upon landing, Hayes relays a message to James Gollin, his board chairman: “Hey, dude, I look forward to partying with you, drinking with you, sharing a few Alka-Seltzers with you and, most of all, I’m looking forward to your babe!” Though Hayes counts some of the more politically correct humans in California as his friends, he has never been accused of this himself.

At the Hennington Gallery, Hayes surveys the space, tequila in hand. MacGraw, who has a home in the high desert here, arrives early, but says she must leave soon for a yoga class. Someone comments on the verve with which she scissored her Citibank Card in the attack ad.

“I’ve cut up a lot of credit cards in my time,” she jokes.

“Randy called and asked me to do the ad,” she says in a later phone conversation. “The organization seems so less driven by rage than possibility. It’s so easy to read the paper and go, ‘God, it’s hopeless,’ yet with Randy and RAN, I know they will find a way to effect change.

“Randy has a very deep quality of--he’s very real. He’s authentic, he’s humble, he’s not the poster boy--I’ve only met him twice--but his spirit is . . . ,” she laughs, “infectious. If that ad was the nightmare to make some real thinking happen, then bravo.”

After a round of photos, MacGraw excuses herself. Twelve-year-old tequilas are passed out like Coca-Colas. A man believed to be one of the richest people in the country--an heir to a forest fortune, coincidentally--is asked what he thinks of Hayes.

“Randy is . . . awesome,” he says, speaking in a slow, measured voice. “Change--real change--is like a supertanker. Randy goes straight to the prow and turns the ship.”

An investment banker who knows Weill says of Hayes: “Randy gets the job done. I’m here. I’m having a good time. Understand that this is not on the record.”

Hayes makes a short speech.

“I hung out around the Southwest for 10 years,” he says, “basically as secretary and chauffeur to the Hopi elders, where I learned so much about what long-term thinking is all about, the marriage of the cycles of nature with appropriate technology. You can have a modern society with the accouterments we enjoy without upsetting the balance of the life-support systems of the planet, of Mother Earth. That, in the briefest sense, is what RAN is all about.”

In the middle of dinner, the bride from a wedding party in the next room comes over, perhaps to tongue-lash Hayes about the racket. Instead, she hands him an envelope. It’s a check made out to his group. She wants to start her marriage by doing the right thing, she says.

Brunch the next day is at Gollin’s adobe. Burnt Mexican coffee laced with cinnamon is ladled from a black pot on the stove, while Gollin mixes a libation of the Brazilian liquor cachaca, thickened with mango, tamarind and guava--all rain forest fruits. He calls the concoction a “RANsack.”

Gollin was a rare American working amid the tumult of the Tokyo stock exchange in the ‘80s go-go years. “So you see,” he explains, “RAN is not anti-capitalist. Our board is cutting-edge capitalist. We just believe in doing the right thing: ‘Stop funding the bad stuff. Start funding the good stuff’ “--a Rainforest Action Network motto, as is “Follow the money.”

But would Citigroup use an agreement to make itself look good at the expense of Hayes’ group--what he calls “green-washing?”

“It’s not a cynic who thinks Citigroup, or Burger King, or Home Depot, or Boise Cascade is using Rainforest Action. It’s a realist,” says Hayes, relaxing in Gollin’s hot tub. “In the case of Citi, it’s too early to say who is using whom. A lot of these things are the lesser of two evils. There may not be the giant shift to an ecologically sustainable society, but sometimes the best you can do is dramatically reduce the harm being done to the earth and buy a little more time.

“That’s what I see with Citi. The commitments we’re getting on one level are bold and wonderful, and on the other are really quite weak. But if it dramatically halts deforestation in certain regions, like Indonesia, then it is of consequence.”

Two days later it’s time for another fundraiser. At LAX, Hayes compliments the Budget car rental people on making the Prius available to socially conscious customers. On the freeway, Hayes dials Bonnie Raitt, Woody Harrelson, John Densmore and Ed Asner to let them know he is in town for the donor party that evening. Hayes is jokey, but careful to outline the high points of the campaigns with Boise and Citigroup.

On the way to Pacific Palisades for the party, Hayes cites a string of movies he believes made the rain forest real to millions of people: “At Play in the Fields of the Lord,” “Medicine Man,” “The Emerald Forest” and “FernGully: The Last Rainforest.” One might expect tonight’s event to be a serious Hollywood hoedown. But the overflow crowd at the home of movie producer Bill Benenson and his wife, Laurie, is mostly celeb-free and, unlike Santa Fe, this gathering is squeaky serious--except for Densmore’s joking recollection of his contribution to the Boise campaign.

“I give RAN $150,000 and they get me arrested,” he says.

The after-party is at Chez Jay’s in Santa Monica. It’s almost closing time, but there’s a distraction that Hayes can no longer tolerate. At the bar, a young, tall, blond woman with a bare midriff keeps stretching about, causing her black thong to show. She’s with her boyfriend, who looks like a roadie for a heavy-metal band.

Hayes, who is happily married, walks to the bar to pay his bill. “From our table,” he says to the woman, “I couldn’t help but notice the way your thong . . . .”

The woman lifts a full glass of chardonnay above Hayes’ head. A wet and inglorious finale to the evening seems forthcoming. Then Hayes hangs back his head, opens his mouth and closes his eyes.

The woman stares at the top of his head, then pours the wine down his throat. Hayes’ party leaves before her boyfriend can demonstrate what he thinks of the rain forest.

On a December morning, Hayes is in transition with a new part-time job: sustainability director for the city of Oakland--a title he worries does not fit elegantly on a business card.

“I haven’t really called myself an environmentalist for a while now,” Hayes explains. “I prefer to talk about sustainability from a whole systems perspective: the three E’s--ecology, economics and social equity. We knew back in the late ‘60s that the most fundamental part of building a sustainable society was how you powered it, with efficiency and renewable energy, but it didn’t happen. We didn’t get the job done in the ‘70s, or the ‘80s, or the ‘90s, either. So, let’s do it.”

The mayors of the world’s 100 largest cities have been invited to San Francisco for a green symposium in June 2005--the 60th anniversary of the signing of the United Nations charter. Hayes hopes to green-up much of Northern California with cost-effective light-rail systems, hydrogen buses, tide-power generators under the Golden Gate Bridge, and solar panels atop public schools and participating private businesses. In 1998, he was instrumental in raising about $200 million from two public bond issues in San Francisco--the beginning, he believes, of a self-sustaining network of eco-cities. He offers to show off the roof of Moscone Center, a vast, black, gleaming surface of 5,700 solar panels, one of the largest displays of solar power in the country.

Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown has assigned Hayes the task of developing a new green architectural design for the city’s central police station. Hayes is amused that someone who has been arrested as many times as he has for civil disobedience will help oversee the retrofitting of police headquarters.

Hayes heads for a strategy lunch in San Francisco’s financial district. He explains that there is a snag in the Citigroup negotiations. The World Wildlife Fund wants the bank not to fund a big pipeline through a national park in Turkey. Part test, part professional courtesy, Hayes’ group contemplates holding off on a final agreement with Citigroup until a decision is made.

At the lunch meeting, Ilyse Hogue, director of the Rainforest Action Network’s Global Finance Campaign, recaps the negotiations. Weill came only to the first meeting, at Citigroup’s Manhattan offices, she says, “to put his ownership on the process.” He spoke of his own extensive holdings in upstate New York, where the difference between old-growth and secondary forests is evident. He joked to Michael Brune, “Smile.” Brune scowled harder.

“Citi hadn’t made any agreements so far,” Brune recalls. “I didn’t want to give them premature credit.”

Citigroup officials (who declined to comment for this story) then flew to San Francisco for the next round of meetings at Hayes’ offices. These quarters are homey, with rain forest plants everywhere, and they’re extensive, occupying two floors of a downtown office building. Now the sessions got wonky. The two sides danced around the difference between strict “no-go zones” to protect fragile species and pristine places, and Citigroup’s preferred wording, “high-caution zones.” They settled on “critical natural habitat.” When the topic of climate change caused by projects financed by Citigroup was introduced, the company’s negotiators grew angry. “I think they thought they had given away plenty already,” Hogue says. Hayes recalls that Pamela Flaherty, Citigroup’s senior vice president of global community relations, began to shout.

“Don’t you yell at me, and in my own office!” Brune replied.

“These negotiations are always tough,” says Hogue, whose father is a Citibank-affiliated stockbroker. “We were asking Citigroup to make some pretty dramatic changes. These are emotional moments.”

“Everybody walked out,” Hayes recalls, chuckling. “I’m left sitting there alone. After a while, they all came back.”

On Jan. 22, in San Francisco and New York, an agreement was finally announced. The Rainforest Action Network won its demand that Citigroup cease the funding of illegal logging. Its financing of oil and gas drilling will be run through an environmental litmus as well, watched over by Hayes & Co., under threat of further demonstrations. The concept of the strict “no-go zone” was weakened, labeled as a “high-caution zone,” where development might still be funded, any impacts to be evaluated by Citigroup. As for reducing greenhouse emissions, Hayes’ group is not entirely satisfied, since Citigroup has not yet committed to targets and guidelines.

Still, the Rainforest Action Network placed a full-page ad in the New York Times thanking Citigroup. Pamela Flaherty sent a huge bouquet of flowers to the Rainforest offices.

On another winter day, Hayes fires up his Prius and drives across the Richmond Bridge, contemplating his group’s next target. The answer is always in the back of Hayes’ mind: Follow the money.