Pacific Environment | Our History

Our History
Championing Collaboration

Building Partnerships and Coalitions That Achieve Results

For nearly 40 years, Pacific Environment has been building networks among grassroots activists and organizations to push those in power to listen to local voices.

Together with over 150 allies and partners in the Pacific Rim, we have shielded tens of thousands of acres of old growth forest; won protections for endangered species; forced oil, gas, mining, and timber companies to heed local concerns; closed dozens of polluting factories along rivers; and changed the way some of the world’s most powerful governance and financial institutions work.

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Pacific Environment works collaboratively with its partners to design the best and most effective way to address environmental and social problems.

Sergei Berezniuk, Phoenix Fund, former partner in Siberia, Russia

Decades of activism lead to environmental and social safeguards for public and private banks. Our successful coalition building, policy analysis and education efforts result in new and improved environmental and social policies and practices for over $130 billion in project funding approved by global finance institutions.
We and coalition partners push a radical clean energy agenda in California and the West Coast. We stop proposed liquefied natural gas terminals on the West Coast and gain passage of one of the nation’s most aggressive climate action plans in the city of Oakland, CA.
We expand our movement building expertise first into China, then the Arctic. Throughout the first decade of the 21st century, we and local partners shield tens of thousands of acres of old growth forest; win protections for endangered species; force oil, gas, mining, and timber companies to heed local concerns; and close dozens of polluting factories along rivers.
We bring together dozens of organizations in a “Ring of Fire” coalition to defend the Pacific Rim’s old-growth forests—the first time we employ a coalition-based advocacy model. Our coalition helps stop the World Trade Organization's 1999 “Global Free Logging Agreement” that would have decimated forests around the world.
We and Russian partners pioneer “follow-the-money” tactics and expose international bank funding for global resource extraction projects. We block financing for a gold mine threatening a World Heritage Site in Kamchatka and force Shell and Exxon to stop dumping toxic waste in coastal waters near Sakhalin Island, home to endangered gray whales.
We begin supporting grassroots activists to protect Russia’s dazzling, ecologically rich wild places from a rush to exploit natural resources after the fall of the Soviet Union. We protect precious old growth forests from logging by multinational corporations and secure protected status for millions of hectares of wilderness.
The organization is founded by lawyer and political scientist Armin Rosencranz. It initially focuses on publishing scientific and academic articles that help define and shape the discussion of emerging global environmental issues and promote the use of international environmental law.