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Rebecca Tarbotton
Born	Rebecca Tarbotton 1973 British Columbia
Occupation	Environmental Activist
Nationality	Canadian
Education	McGill University University of British Columbia

Rebecca Tarbotton an environmental, human rights, and food activist. Currently Executive Director at Rainforest Action Network, she has over 15 years of experience in non-profit grassroots leadership, strategic planning, and a strong track record in developing and scaling up winning programs and campaigns.

Activism and Career

Tarbotton's activism stems from a career spent largely overseas, seeing the reach of corporate policies firsthand. Although she started as an environmental researcher among Indigenous communities on Baffin Island in her native Canada, Tarbotton spent eight years in Ladakh, also known as Little Tibet, a remote region on the Tibetan plateau. Joining the Right Livelihood Award-winning Helena Norberg-Hodge at The Ladakh Project (now the International Society for Ecology and Culture (ISEC), Tarbotton worked with local communities to support their traditional food and farming systems. While there, she helped grow the Women's Alliance of Ladakh, a local women farmer’s group, from a membership of seven women to 4,000 members. Of this experience, Tarbotton says:

Working with those women, helping them build alternatives to the western development model that was being imposed on their communities, was a foundational experience for me. It showed me that local wisdom is a powerful tool for change and that true solutions, when grounded in deep respect for cultural traditions, ecological wisdom and creativity can both improve quality of life and build a future where people live in harmony with nature.

Corporations don’t see any of that. They are structurally disembodied from local realities and are beholden to the bottom line. It’s local communities and ecosystems that bear the brunt of this model of doing business, and their destruction rarely shows up on the balance sheet.

A commitment to community-led solutions drew Tarbotton to the UK, where she worked in the local food movement. “As recently as the late nineties, the idea of ‘local food’ was still considered a bit wacky” says Tarbotton. “Organic was gaining popularity, but the local food movement was just getting off the ground. We spent a lot of time convincing all sorts of people that shrinking the distance between farmer and consumer was one of the most important ways to build a sustainable foodsystem, but corporate interests kept getting in the way.” Seeking a more direct way of challenging corporate power, Tarbotton moved to California where shejoined the growing movement against genetically modified food. She took on the role of campaign coordinator for a state-wide coalition of farmer, consumer and advocacy groups working to stop the spread of genetically modified seeds inCalifornia, county by county.

“We were winning county-level GMO seed bans and moratoriums when we realized that Big Ag wasstriking back, slipping seed preemption bills into state legislatures without anyone realizing it,” she recalls. “These bills essentially prevented any community from making decisions about what was planted within their boundaries. We knew that California was bound to be on the list and so we mounted a campaign to stopped Big Ag from doing the same thing here. After a long battle, we won.”

Tarbotton now leads Rainforest Action Network as Executive Director, the first woman to hold the position in RAN's 27 year history. Before becoming Executive Director, Tarbotton led campaigns at RAN against one of the most invisible, yet potent forces behind environmental destruction: financing of fossil fuel projects by large American banks. Tarbotton went toe to toe with some of the nation’s most powerful CEOs to successfully negotiate for the creation of a sector-wide bank policy statement known as the Carbon Principles. The policy put limits on the financing of new coal-fired power plants, creating a pivotal moment in the battle to curtail the construction of 200 planned new coal plants.

Tarbotton is a regular panelist at international and human rights conferences, has been featured in major international media outlets, and published numerous articles on her areas of expertise. She is a regular contributor to The Huffington Post and other major media outlets, and has been a fellow at the Oakland Institute, a BankTrack committee member, and winner of the UK-based Derek Cooper Award for Investigative/Campaigning Journalism.

Education

Tarbotton earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Geography from McGill University and a Master’s Degree in Community and Regional Planning from the University of British Columbia.