Each month I donate a portion of the proceeds from Indie Fixx and the Indie Fixx Shop to a different charitable organization. The organizations I choose vary from those that provide humanitarian support, focus on the arts, provide for environmental stewardship, are concerned with animal welfare and other issues and causes that are near and dear to me.
This month, I chose to donate to the Rainforest Action Network’s Protect-An-Acre Fund mostly after reading and hearing how biofuels may actually be contributing to global warming rather than helping to alleviate it. Founded in 1993, Protect-An-Acre’s goal is to protect the world’s rainforests and the rights of their inhabitants by providing financial aid to traditionally under-funded organizations and communities in temperate, tropical and boreal forest regions.
Protect-An-Acre is very different from rainforest buy-an-acre programs, which don’t necessarily address the real problems of the region and the people who actually live on the land. Instead, Protect-an-Acre works to protect threatened areas and to empower the indigenous inhabitants of the targeted areas by helping them gain legal recognition of their territory, establishing protected reserves that recognize the rights of local communities, developing locally-based alternative economic initiatives, assisting in community organization, promoting environmental education and practicing resistance to destructive practices such as logging, fossil fuel development and large-scale infrastructure projects in forest areas.
