Hayes, an award-winning documentary filmmaker, founded RAN in 1985 and, with bold direct action campaigns, built it into the primary American advocate not only for tropical rainforests, but also for its temperate cousins in places like the Pacific Northwest, British Columbia and Alaska. In its first year, RAN took on no less a target than the World Bank, fighting to reform its environmentally destructive loan practices.

When polite meetings wouldn't work, RAN staged civil disobedience actions, CEO confrontations and boycotts. San Franciscans soon got used to the sight of Hayes in handcuffs. The boycott list rapidly expanded, to include Burger King, Scott Paper, Conoco and Texaco.

"The environmental movement is full of reasonable people," says Hayes, making it clear that he is not one of them. Direct action works, he says, pointing to $2 billion in rainforest contracts in the Amazon and Indonesia that have been stopped through RAN's work.

After a decade of effective pressure on the lumber lobby, however, RAN is broadening its approach with a new campaign aimed at the Big Three corporate logging companies-Mitsubishi, MacMillan-Bloedel and Georgia-Pacific. Mitsubishi, hasn't yet mended its ways, but it was concerned enough about the boycott to arrange a meeting between Hayes and its CEO, Minouri Makihara.

RAN has also developed a practical, four-page 500-Year Plan that outlines how, over time, the world could, by international agreement, protect all remaining primary forests (providing economic compensation to the host countries), allow secondary forests to mature, and restrict sustainable logging to special commercial zones.

The plan encourages alternative fiber development, and advocates a reduction in wood and paper use by 7.5 percent a year. Hayes says the plan "gets us closer and closer to the root causes of the social and ecological crises at the end of the industrial era."