Randy Hayes
Executive Director, Foundation Earth
Founder, Rainforest Action Network
Randy Hayes is Executive Director at Foundation Earth, a non-profit organization rethinking a human order that works within the planet’s life support systems. As a former filmmaker and Rainforest Action Network founder, he is a veteran of many high-visibility corporate accountability campaigns and has advocated for the rights of Indigenous peoples. He served over seven years as President of The City of San Francisco Commission on the Environment and as Director of Sustainability in the office of Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown (four-term governor).
As a wilderness lover, Hayes has explored the High Sierras, the Canadian Rockies, and the rainforests of the Amazon, Central America, Congo, Southeast Asia, Borneo, and Australia. He is a special advisor to the World Future Council. He has been described in the Wall Street Journal as “an environmental pit bull.” He also spent four years working at the International Forum on Globalization, a San Francisco-based think tank tasked with analyzing the cultural, social, political, and environmental impacts of economic globalization. Randy sits on several non-profit Boards of Directors and numerous Boards of Advisors. He guest lectures in Green MBA programs promoting a steady state, circular True Cost Economy.
In 2018, he was awarded a Doctorate in Humane Letters from San Francisco State University where he also received a Master’s degree in Environmental Planning. He was inducted in the university’s Alumni Hall of Fame in 2010. His master’s thesis, the award-winning film The Four Corners, won the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences award for “Best Student Documentary” in 1983. He contributed to Alternatives to Economic Globalization: A Better World is Possible published by San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., in 2004. Not satisfied with short-term thinking, his 500-year seven-point plan offers a vision of a sustainable society and how to get there. His corporate campaign activist peers honored Randy in 2008 with an Individual Achievement Award, given by the Business Ethics Network. His current focus is a strategy to halt the 6th Great Extinction – Nature Needs Half and how do we rebuild post-collapse should industrial humanity continue its serious assault on the planet’s life support systems.
