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Editor’s Note: Last year when Rainforest Action Network turned 25, AlterNet’s Don Hazen wrote, “Rainforest Action Network has always been a darling of progressives, a group many people respect for all the right reasons. RAN successfully challenges corporate power and remains focused on the grassroots. Over the years, RAN has exercised a creative aggressiveness that larger, more mainstream environmental groups seem to lack.” Now, as the organization is about to celebrate its 26th birthday, RAN’s executive director Rebecca Tarbotton interviews bestselling author and activist Naomi Klein. Much like RAN, Klein has consistently been a voice for economic justice, international people’s movements and environmental sanity. Her sharp critique of corporate power has shaped a generation of activists. This week, Klein heads from New York’s Occupy Wall Street protests to San Francisco where she will be honored with a World Rainforest Award at the annual REVEL.

Naomi Klein and Rebecca Tarbotton were recently together at the Tar Sands Action in Washington, DC, which inspired the following dialogue.

Rebecca Tarbotton: RAN is now in its 26th year, and I’ve been thinking a lot about our corporate campaigning model. As someone with expertise in analyzing corporate power, what have you seen as successful models for shifting the behavior of these multinational giants? Where is their weak underbelly?

Naomi Klein: The terrain is a hell of a lot more complicated than when I published No Logo 11 years ago and targets need to be chosen much more carefully. It sometimes works better not to go after the oil or coal company directly, but to go after the banks that lend them money, or the large corporations that buy their dirty energy (I’m thinking of the Bank of America, Facebook and Royal Bank of Canada campaigns here).

This can be more effective because the banks and corporate customers are less invested in the dirty business model themselves, so they have more flexibility to change course, whereas an oil company or a coal company isn’t going to see the light and stop being an oil or a coal company. It can also work to use national values to our advantage — Scandinavian investors are particularly receptive to ethical concerns. But the truth is that I’ve never believed that we can change the world one corporation at a time. What we can do is use corporate campaigns to make things so uncomfortable for a few big corporate players that this builds leverage for across-the-board regulation, which should always be the goal.