Divest Wall Street Forestry

Working Group

The Divestment working group focuses on pushing back against Wall Street exploitation of private forest lands and communities, as well as highlighting the connections between industrial extractive forestry, climate change, and Wall Street finance. We aim to build a bigger movement against industrial logging corporations through vibrant and engaging actions.

Over the last decade, the climate movement has succeeded in building powerful momentum through grassroots organizing pressuring institutions to divest their money from the fossil fuel industry. However, we’re already starting to see some of that divested money being re-invested in so-called “green capital” and industrial forestry, which is a major contributor to the climate crisis and which greenwashes the destructive impacts of extractive forestry on local communities and ecosystems. We aim to build a collaborative climate justice & forest defense movement that compels divestment from all destructive industries fueling the climate crisis and that invests in real solutions and a just transition for all communities.

To join or get involved with the working group, or if you have questions about our work, contact Michael (michael@coastrange.org).

Our current work includes:

- Organizing resistance to “Who Will Own The Forest (WWOTF)” an annual corporate timberland investment conference in Portland, Oregon. Who Will Own The Forest brings together some of the world’s biggest climate polluters, corporate clear-cutters, finance giants, and false climate solutions peddlers, to network and scheme on how to extract maximum short-term returns from while devastating our communities and the climate. Learn more at forestsoverprofits.org.

- A campaign against TIAA (Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America), which through its subsidiary Nuveen Natural Capital, owns the Portland-based logging company Greenwood Resources. TIAA is also heavily invested in the fossil fuel industry, and is funding industrial agriculture & forestry companies that have been especially damaging to Black farmers, communities of color, and indigenous peoples. Through the campaign against TIAA we connect the climate movement and forest defense movement, and domestic and international struggles for justice. Learn more about TIAA at tiaa-divest.org/.