Photo: RAN
Rebecca Tarbotton, executive director of the environmental group Rainforest Action Network, died Wednesday while caught in the surf in Mexico near Puerto Vallarta. She was 39.
"The coroner ruled cause of death as asphyxiation from water she breathed in while swimming," the Rainforest Action Network said in a statement issued Friday.
In an environmental movement dominated by middle-aged men in Washington and New York, Tarbotton represented a new generation of green activism, leading a San Francisco-based organization that combines the headline-grabbing direct action protests of Greenpeace, the science-based approach of the Natural Resources Defense Council and the inside-the-boardroom savvy of the Environmental Defense Fund.
Rainforest Action Network, or RAN, isn't as well-known as those green groups but it consistently punches above its weight as evidenced by the deals it has secured from major U.S. corporations like Home Depot to adopt practices that preserve rainforests and endangered species while fighting climate change.
The biggest victory of Tarbotton's two-year tenure leading RAN – and one of the most significant in its 25-year-history – came just two months ago when The Walt Disney Company ended 18 months of negotiations with the group by agreeing to stop procuring paper for its global operations from endangered rainforests in Indonesia and elsewhere.
"Many have noted what a force of nature Becky was, which is true – Disney execs danced for her, timber tycoons ran from RAN because of her," Danny Kennedy, president of Oakland, Calif., solar company Sungevity and a former Greenpeace activist, told me an in e-mail from Australia on Friday.
"But what I'll remember was her sense of fun and her optimism and intellect," he added. "The last six months of conversations I have had with her have been about how to usher in the solutions, like solar, which are coming faster than she or I expected, to the crisis of climate change. She had that rare capacity to know the outrageous truth that the planet isn't dying but rather being killed – and yet she also knew that we, the people of this Earth, can solve that."
A native of Vancouver, Tarbotton died while on vacation in Mexico with family and friends. She is survived by her husband, Mateo Williford, who works for Sungevity, her mother, Mary Tarbotton, and brothers, Jesse Tarbotton and Cameron Tarbotton.
I only met Tarbotton once, at Kennedy's 40th birthday party, but can attest she was like no environmental leader I had encountered. Sipping beer from a plastic cup in the basement of Kennedy's still-under-renovation house, she was direct, engaging and laughed. A lot.
Watch the video below of Tarbotton's keynote speech at RAN's annual gathering in October and you'll get a sense of her personality and strategy. In the talk she lays out RAN's campaign to stop the clear-cutting of Indonesian rainforests, which is a leading source of greenhouse gas emissions and a major threat to endangered species like the Sumatran tiger, and how it pressured Disney to get with the program.
The campaign started in May 2010 when RAN fiber-tested children's books from the big U.S. publishers.
"What we found out was that 60% of all the children's books being sold by the major U.S. publishers contained contained fiber from Indonesia's endangered forests," Tarbotton said.
"So like a good, polite environmental organization, we wrote them all letters and said 'Hey guys, you have a problem,' " she continued. " You have essentially orangutan and tiger extinction in your children's books and that's not the greatest thing so you might want to do deal with that before I have to do something to your nice corporation."
Six publishers immediately came to the table and cut a deal to clean up their supply chains, Tarbotton said. But Disney, which she described as the world's largest publisher of children's books and magazines, resisted.
So RAN staged one of its trademark direct actions, dropping a banner proclaiming "Disney Destroys Rainforests" at the company's Burbank, Calif., headquarters and handcuffing two activists dressed as Mickey and Minnie Mouse – and holding chainsaws – to the gates outside Disney's executive headquarters in one of the nation's biggest media markets.
"As a RAN action goes, I gotta be honest, this wasn't terribly dramatic," Tarbotton said. "But within one week we had six Disney executives right here in our offices in San Francisco saying, 'We want to do something about this.' "
In the end, four RAN negotiators struck a deal with the $87 billion company to purge its entire supply chain, not just children's books, of fiber from endangered rainforests or forests whose harvesting would impact climate change or are the subject of social conflict.
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We need to remember it's bigger than climate change," Tarbotton said as she concluded her speech. "What we're really talking about, if we're honest with ourselves, is transforming everything about the way we live on this planet."
"We're talking about re-embedding the economy within the limits of nature," she said. "That's the project and it's a really long term one."
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