April 2004

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Banking on the Environment: A Model Campaign Against Financing Eco-Destruction

The Rainforest Action Network provided information for this article via Paul West, a spokesperson, and Dan Firger, the National Organizer of their Global Finance Campaign, www.ran.org.

After a four-year campaign of creative nonviolent direct action, Citibank, the world's largest financial institution (and most profitable corporation), signed on to a comprehensive environmental policy that sets a new industry standard. This agreement is now serving as a baseline upon which to campaign for improved environmental performance by Citibank (Citi) itself, and the financial industry as a whole.

The Rainforest Action Network (RAN) initiated the campaign after documenting the extensive damage mega-banks are doing to the environment, indigenous people's lands, biodiversity, the world's forests, and the global climate, by lending money to environmentally damaging projects. Examining some of the creative actions that targeted Citi's abuses is instructive for understanding what it takes to take on a major corporation, and win.

In an introductory letter to Citibank in April of 2000, RAN urged Citi to recognize its key role in the destruction of the world's remaining old growth forests and acceleration of climate change, and to take action to address these critical issues. After an initial meeting, Citibank refused to take action.

In September, a campaign was launched on college campuses with credit card boycotts and a job recruitment boycott. Citi reps looking for potential employees quickly left several campuses when faced with questions about environmental abuses during information sessions.

On October 17, 2000, RAN organized the first coordinated Day of Action targeting Citibank. It resulted in 50 actions around the country, ranging from demonstrations, to credit card cut ups, to divestments of accounts.

In December, The Citi Grinch was visited regularly through the month of December by carolers singing tunes of global destruction. Among the holiday songs were "Oil Wells" sung to the tune of "Silver Bells" and "Rudolph the Redlined Reindeer." On February 14, 2001, hundreds of valentines were sent to Sandy Weill, CEO of Citigroup, asking that he show a little love for the planet this Valentine's Day and stop funding rainforest destruction and global warming activities.

On April 11, the second Citigroup Day of Action included 80 actions in 12 countries on five continents around the world. Banner hangings, symbolic deposits of wood chips and oil, and street theater greeted branch managers everywhere. At the World Headquarters in New York City, a New Orleans- style funeral march begged Citi not to put the final nail in the coffin of the earth.

Then, as the internationalization of the campaign intensified, on October 12, dozens of indigenous women and children blockaded a Citigroup-financed oil pipeline being constructed in a pristine Ecuadorian cloudforest reserve. Additional Ecuadorian activists staged a peaceful blockade and occupation high in the mountains of the Mindo Nambillo Cloudforest Reserve to halt construction of the new heavy crude oil pipeline bisecting the protected area and others like it. Citigroup, together with a consortium of multinational banks, provided money for the project.

Students from across the nation gathered at local Citibank branches on October 22, 2001, to shine a light on Citigroup. Wearing sun masks, the demonstrators delivered 12,000 student pledges refusing to do business with the #1 funder of global warming.

"The World is Not for Sale" balloon tour began in Raleigh, NC on March 5, 2002, with a 35-foot inflatable Earth balloon branded with a bar code and reading "For Sale?" Over the course of the next few months, the balloon visited dozens of cities across the country, calling attention to Citi's destructive investment practices.

Intensifying the media pressure and ratcheting up the boycott effort, RAN bought a full page ad in the New York Times on November 13, 2002, replete with photos of environmental destruction caused by Citi-funded projects. The headline read, "Did you know that someone is using your Citigroup credit card without your authorization?" The ad warns Citi customers that the financial giant is quietly using its customers' money to fund the most socially and environmentally destructive projects in the world. The ad calls on Citi customers to cut up their Citi credit cards and refuse to do business with the bank whose lending practices are one of the biggest forces driving forest destruction and global warming.

Because Citibank still refused to negotiate, it was decided to increase the pressure on Citibank by increasing the pace of nonviolent direct action in the US. On November 14, twenty-four activists used U-locks, kryptonite chains, and concrete-filled barrels to simultaneously blockade every Citibank branch in downtown San Francisco's financial district during the morning rush hour. During the blockades, RAN unfurled a banner reading, "Corruption on the Inside, Destruction on the Outside," at one Citibank branch, and inflated a giant Earth balloon at Citicorp Plaza. Simultaneously, two activists in Washington, DC locked themselves to the doors of a Citibank branch across the street from the World Bank building, while others scaled the front of the building to unfurl a banner.

In January 2003, RAN decided to focus efforts on Citibank's corporate headquarters in New York City, through a "Hometown Showdown," a two-month visibility and organizing campaign. Events included regular visits to Citibank branches throughout the city, leafletting at the headquarters, plastering the city with stickers and wheat-paste posters, and helping local student groups to coordinate "Evict Citi" campaigns on their campuses.

Activists hang 9 by 15 meter banner on the building across from Citigroup's Headquarters, NYC. February 20, 2003. Photo" www.ran.org

In the most high-profile campaign action, on February 20, 2003, two activists unfurled a 35 by 50 foot banner from the roof of a building in midtown Manhattan directly across the street from Citigroup headquarters. The banner read, "Forest Destruction and Global Warming? We're Banking on It! Citi: Ethically Bankrupt." The action drew throngs of curious onlookers and supporters, and garnered widespread print and television coverage in the metro New York region and beyond.

During a visit to Cornell University, his alma mater, Citigroup CEO Sandy Weill was greeted on April 3 by dozens of students who held a festive rally and unfurled a banner from the building where he was to speak, reading: "Sandy Weill, Class of '55, Make Us Proud: Stop Funding Destruction!" Inside the lecture hall, six students were forcibly evicted after displaying signs calling on Weill to adopt environmental standards.

To complement the pressure of the nonviolent direct action tactics, RAN began airing a television advertisement blasting Citigroup on cable news channels in New York City, starring celebrities Susan Sarandon, Ed Asner, Daryl Hannah, and Ali McGraw. The ad featured the celebrities cutting up Citi credit cards, showed graphic footage representing the environmental destruction caused by Citi's unethical lending practices, and asked people to join the thousands who had already cut up their Citi credit cards to protest Citi's complete lack of meaningful environmental and social standards.

All this pressure added up. Just hours before planned protests at Citigroup's annual shareholder meeting in New York City on April 15, 2003, Citigroup executives approached RAN to ask for a cease-fire of campaign activities and a period of negotiations towards a permanent policy on environmental standards. RAN told them, "Our door has always been open for real negotiations." As an act of good faith, Citigroup agreed to immediately withdraw funding from the Camisea project in Peru, while RAN agreed to an initial three-month stand down of campaign activities.

"These negotiations were difficult. We had mobilized activists and then, at the last minute, had to ask them to call off the demonstration," explained Dan Firger, National organizer for RAN's Global finance campaign. "We did call off the demo. It was exciting and sort of awkward. There was a lot of suspicion and skepticism about us. The other activists were asking us, 'Is Citigroup just greenwashing? Is RAN selling out?'"

During the negotiations phase RAN agreed not to organize or encourage any protests and to remove inflammatory materials from their website, but not to remove information about the history of the campaign to date.

Dan Firger explained RAN's thought process during the months of campaigning and the negotiations: "There's a false dichotomy between transformative campaigning and concessionary campaigning. Multinational corporate capitalism is exploitive and has to go. We need to revoke corporate charters. So, we need to devise campaigns that expose the exploitive and environmentally destructive heart of capitalism. Yet in order to mobilize people, and in order to make a difference for the earth and indigenous people now, we need to be waging struggles that can win actual concessions. Concessionary campaigning has to do with winning tangible goals in the short term. Many of us who are liberals or so-called radicals have the privilege of waiting for the revolution. But if you're a member of the Uwa indigenous people in Colombia, and your lands are being invaded, or you're an old growth forest that is about to be cut down, you don't have that luxury. We look to gain concessions that have real meaning on the ground, but won't legitimize corporate power. We won't sell out the vision of transforming capitalism, but we do want to act to take the immediate foot off the neck of indigenous communities and the ecosystems that are bearing the brunt of the race to the bottom."

As a result of RAN's campaign and the months-long negotiations, Citibank, on January 22, 2004, agreed to the most far-reaching environmental standards of any bank in the industry. Previously, Citibank had insisted that they were in the business of making money, and that it was the oil companies' business if they were violating human rights with the money they borrowed.

Among the most dramatic of the principles Citi announced was its adoption of the concept of "no-go zones," a notion that will bar it from financing logging activities in tropical forests. It is now the only private US bank to recognize the need for such areas. Citi committed itself to perform greater "due diligence'' studies for projects proposed in "high-caution zones,'' eco-systems regarded as particularly vulnerable or that have an especially high biodiversity or conservation value.

Citibank also pledged to implement new lending practices concerning indigenous areas, which it says would ensure support for indigenous rights, livelihoods and cultural integrity. Nor will the bank lend to companies known to violate local or national laws on illegal logging. On global warming, Citi pledged to report greenhouse gas emissions from all power-sector projects it finances, and, at the same time, to increase its investment in projects that use clean, renewable energy sources. In a related move, the bank said it would soon offer energy-efficient mortgages for U.S. homebuyers, to encourage conservation.

RAN did not get everything it was striving for in its negotiations with Citibank. RAN insists that a policy that truly respected indigenous human rights would require free and prior informed consent before, say, a pipeline could be routed through an indigenous homeland. Plus, while Citigroup agreed to analyze the impact of their lending on the greenhouse effect, they did not agree to reduce lending to projects that accelerate global warming.

RAN is now using the agreement with Citibank as a floor upon which to negotiate with the next 10 largest banks in the US. In the next phase of the campaign, RAN has sent letters to each of them, asking for a response by Earth Day, April 22, 2004. If the banks do not respond with good faith improvements in their policies, RAN will choose another egregious banking eco-violator upon which to focus its creative protest energies. The long term goal is to restructure economies so that we invest in protecting the earth, not destroying it.

Previous Article    Next Article