For nearly two decades, Pacific Environment has been partnering with the communities that depend on the Pacific Rim’s ecological riches to preserve these shared treasures.With our partners, we’ve shielded millions of acres of forest, we’ve won protections for endangered species, we’ve forced oil, gas and mining companies to apply higher standards to resource extraction projects, and we’ve changed the way some of the world’s most powerful financial institutions approach development lending.
In addition to our direct contribution to environmental conservation around the Pacific Rim, Pacific Environment has also played an important role in strengthening relations between environmental organizations in developed and developing countries. A central tenet of our work has been that local, community-based organizations should have as much influence on environmental decision-making as large international groups. As such, Pacific Environment has shaped new approaches to international environmental work by listening to our partners and finding ways to provide direct support to community groups around the Pacific Rim.
Nearly two decades after our founding, Pacific Environment has forged a movement involving dozens of grassroots environmental groups in Russia, China and elsewhere around the Pacific Rim. And years later, we continue to partner with the region’s environmental heroes to achieve victories and create change: In 2004, Pacific Environment and our partners stopped a proposed pipeline that would have bisected Tunka National Park, south of Lake Baikal, and we forced Royal Dutch/Shell to reroute proposed under-sea pipelines near Russia’s Sakhalin Island that would impact the critically endangered Western Pacific Gray Whale. Of course, there’s much more work to be done!
