Barnes & Noble and APP and Tigers, Oh My!

To start this blog update, it only makes sense to tell you all what APP is. APP or Asia Pulp & Paper is a giant Indonesian paper company that is extremely unsustainable in its paper manufacturing and is destroying old growth rain forests in Indonesia. Within this old growth forests are ancient species of trees such as the ramin trees which are being driven to extinction despite it being illegal to cut them down. Also being pushed close to extinction are the beautiful Sumatran tigers. Other species living in this quickly depleting habitats are becoming endangered and are in risk of extinction, including the orangutans.

While many big companies have suspended further purchases from APP until this paper company cleans up its act and goes sustainable, there are still some who are refusing to do so. Barnes & Noble is one of those companies where it has been found that the pages used in quite a bit of the books they sell contain ancient and protected trees due to purchases from APP. Therefore, Greenpeace is urging that Barnes & Noble cut their ties with APP until they finally decide to switch to sustainable practices.

To read a bit more about APP and what they're up to, go here. I'd also suggest going here to get a bit more detail about Barnes & Noble and their connection with APP.

Now then, onward to the point of this post (other than the fact that APP needs to stop destroying ancient forests, killing tiger and other species, and demanding Barnes & Noble and other companies to quit ties with APP), I took part in a Save the Sumatran Tigers event this past Saturday morning. It was at first going to be something that including tiger facepainting, but we ran into a bit of 'trouble' when we got to the Barnes & Noble over in Emeryville (East Bay area). Seems that when the small group of Greenpeacers practiced the song once, the security nearby came up to us and demanded that we shut down what we were doing because where we were was a "private area with public access" and we weren't allowed to do any sort of protest there. For quite a while, one of the head Greenpeacers talked with the security woman and eventually the Emeryville city cops were called in. All I will say is that the cops were waaay nicer than the security woman, but I won't go into detail with that.

Basically, in the end, there was no facepainting, but that's okay. I did make last minute tiger ears out of cardstock paper and my Copic markers the night before (this was an event I just barely found out about two days before haha). They worked awesomely until I accidentally ripped one off when running my fnigers through my hair, pffff. Oh well. They were pretty cool though and I was quite proud of them (my Greenpeace friends even thought they were clever~)

Here's a webcam shot I took Friday night of them, haha.

And the back of them, of course~

I didn't really serve much purpose at the event other than moral support and helping with taking pictures as well as video taping the small group while they sang their awesome tiger song to the tune of Eye of the Tiger by Survivor (which was just amaaazinggg). Which brings me to tell you that in the end, we were able to stall security enough to sing the song several times in front of Barnes & Noble and get people to do our text message petition for the short time we were there.

I don't have the video, but once I do or come across it on the Greenpeace website, I'll be sure to give it a nice post of its own here to show you guys. I'm not in it since I was the one recording it, but hey, my presence was still there and that's all that matters~

Here's a couple pictures from the small event (sorry, I'm not in them, haha).

So that's about it. Not too eventful, but still something very important that was also a lot of fun.

Until next update~!

~Sara