COMMON DREAMS | Mainstream Green Groups Cave In on Climate

Note – This article has been endorsed by James Hansen.

Published on Tuesday, April 20, 2010 by CommonDreams.org

Mainstream Green Groups Cave In on Climate

Dangerously Allow Industry to Set Agenda

by Gary Houser and Cory Morningstar

“Governments will not put young people and nature above special financial interests without great public pressure. Such pressure is not possible as long as big environmental organizations provide cover. So the best hope is this — individuals must demand that the leaders change course or they will lose support.” – Dr. James Hansen

With climate scientists warning that we are in a global emergency and tipping points leading to runaway catastrophe will be crossed unless carbon pollution is rapidly reduced, one would expect groups identified as environmental defenders to be shifting into high gear. Instead, we are witnessing the unspeakably tragic spectacle of a mainstream environmental movement allowing itself to be seduced and co-opted by the very forces it should be vehemently opposing. At the very moment when moral leadership and courage are needed the most, what we see is a colossal failure of both – with potentially irreversible consequences for our civilization. If Congress chooses an inadequate response to the crisis, policies can get “locked in” which virtually guarantee that these tipping points are crossed. These organizations are using their significant financial resources to create a public impression that the “environmental community” has given its “stamp of approval” to this policy and to marginalize the voices of the genuine grassroots activists who represent the heart and soul of the climate movement. With nothing less than the future of the planet at stake, these groups must now be publicly challenged and held accountable for their actions.

The stage has been set for this necessary debate by publication of Johann Hari’s excellent commentary entitled “The Wrong Kind of Green“. In this piece, Hari provides important insight into some of the relevant history. He describes how in the 1980s and 1990s some of the larger environmental groups began to adopt a policy often called “corporate engagement”. The basic idea was that by participating in “partnerships” with corporations – some involving receipt of monetary contributions – there would be opportunity to exert positive influence.

It is not possible to look into the minds of those who promoted this shift. Perhaps there was a sincere hope that corporations would be moved toward more responsible behavior. Whatever the case, the critically important task at this time is not to evaluate possible motives but rather the real life consequences. To do so honestly, all self-interested blinders must be set aside.

The truth is that this policy has created a “slippery slope” leading to severely compromised stances – nowhere more apparent than in regard to the over-arching issue of climate. In 2007, a coalition was formed between corporations and environmental organizations called the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, or USCAP – whose purpose was to influence U.S. climate legislation. Some of the large groups that joined were Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), the Nature Conservancy, and National Wildlife Foundation. In January 2009, USCAP presented its proposals and these became the framework of the Waxman-Markey bill.

The physical context is that previously projected worst case scenarios are already being surpassed and humanity is running out of time. Ice is melting far more rapidly than expected, releasing the “albedo effect” where open water absorbs more heat and accelerates further melting. The normally quite cautious National Science Foundation is ringing alarm bells about the methane – a greenhouse gas over 30 times as powerful as CO2 – now venting from the Siberian seabeds. According to the NSF statement: “Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.” These are only two examples of “reinforcing feedbacks” that can significantly move the process closer to tipping points.

Within a context so dire that in reality a war-time level of mobilization is needed, what kind of legislation is being offered? First of all, the emission reduction targets themselves – apart from the theoretical strategies for achieving them – categorically ignore the science. The goals do not even aim at stabilization at 350 ppm (let alone the lower figures more likely to be necessary) and the time frame for enacting meaningful reductions is not even remotely close to the speed needed to prevent disaster.

Beyond the issue of targets is that of reduction strategies. USCAP would like to see a trillion dollar carbon market put into place, where traders can claim “pollution rights” to the sky and seek profits from the exchange of such “rights”. Such a system – which would determine whether life-supporting ecosystems survive or collapse – would be placed into the same manipulative hands on Wall Street that brought on the financial meltdown. As this commentary goes to press, several traders in the European carbon market (the world’s prototype) have been arrested in connection with a

), NRDC and EDF are sending their own people to promote it at carbon trade conferences.

The next immoral concession is to allow the industry to “buy” its way out of actually reducing emissions by supporting so-called “offsets” – such as forest preservation projects in the developing world. Sounding plausible in theory, offsets are actually riddled with verification issues and defects such as loggers simply moving elsewhere. But the bottomline “wrong” here is that any form of offsetting should never be looked at as an alternative to reducing emissions. It should only be seen as an additional action to take.

Then there is the unbelievable capitulation represented by the removal of EPA authority to regulate coal-burning. Now that the EPA has finally been empowered by the Supreme Court to act against a carbon-fueled ecocide, this ability has been effectively stripped from the House bill without a murmur from the USCAP “greens”. The result of all these concessions is a pathetically weak bill that the Congressional Budget Office estimates will not even begin to reduce emissions until 2018. Other studies indicate that if all available offsets are used, reductions could actually be postponed an astonishing 19 years until 2029.

The USCAP “greens” proclaim that their positions are being driven by “political expediency”. But there is a stunning “disconnect” which these groups have been reticent to address. How does one negotiate with a melting iceberg? Can the inexorable laws of physics be placed “on hold” while emission reductions are scuttled in a process of political “horse-trading”? What is the meaning of “expediency” when it leads to the collapse of society as we know it? John Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Reseach, stated at the “4 Degrees and Beyond” conference at Oxford that “political reality must be grounded in physical reality or it is completely useless”.

The Sierra Club is experiencing what may be a positive change in leadership and to its credit has not adopted the policy of “corporate engagement” described, yet it has failed to truly mobilize its base against the dangerous shortcomings of the USCAP endorsed legislation. In 2008, the Sierra Club bestowed its highest honor – the John Muir Award – to climate scientist Dr. James Hansen. In presenting the award, Sierra Club President Allison Chin said: “He is truly a hero for preserving the environment”. How does the Sierra Club reconcile the honoring of this man for warning the world and then essentially ignore his core message that present climate legislation is based on false solutions that will waste precious time?

NRDC and EDF, on the other hand, have gone far beyond mere silence. While their websites claim a dedication to public service ( NRDC’s motto is “The Earth’s Best Defense”), they have been actively promoting the USCAP accomodation. If they had not lost sight of their original missions, they would have sought out members of Congress willing to stand up to the fossil fuel industry and used their resources (in 2008, NRDC had an operational budget of 87 million dollars) to throw weight behind them. Instead of emboldening this kind of voice, they have done the exact opposite by allowing industry to define what is “feasible”.

The real climate movement – the one with its backbone intact and composed of grassroots activists and principled groups like Friends of the Earth and Center for Biological Diversity – is already in a “David versus Goliath” situation as it tries to confront the most powerful lobby in the country. But that task has been made infinitely more difficult by these big budget groups using their money to isolate and “box in” the smaller ones.

We close this commentary with the following direct appeal to both the leadership and the members of these groups that have chosen the path of accommodation:

The verdict is in. Your experiment in “corporate engagement” has resulted in a disastrous failure that now threatens the planet. We fully expected the massive campaign from the fossil fuel industry to strip any substance from this legislation. But you have blindsided those of us who are fighting with all our hearts for the future of the earth. Your coffers have grown and now you are using this money to drown us out.

Your stance does not represent those in the grassroots movement, many of whom are young and see the disasters that are looming within their own lifetimes. In your comfortable offices, you do not speak for those willing to put themselves on the line and engage in nonviolent civil disobedience against the very forces you seek to accomodate. The rationale for your corporate “partnerships” was the issue of exerting influence. But the question begging to be asked is who influenced whom? Though your treasury is more full, what truly has been gained and what has been lost?

Your intentions may have been honorable, but the agenda of “defending earth” has been hijacked. Along the way, your vision became blurred and you lost sight of this mission. In this “experiment’, you are the ones who have been “had”. It now appears to have been a terrible Faustian bargain, and we are all paying the price. At the very moment of greatest need for an empowered public advocacy in the face of the most overwhelming threat in human history, your leadership is not to be found.

Your accommodation and your defense of abominably weak Congressional legislation has already had a destructive global impact. It was this legislation that set the bar intolerably low in Copenhagen and instigated a “race to the bottom”. The entire world-wide movement for climate sanity has become blocked by the denial, blindness, and paralysis embodied in U.S. climate policy. When you take this stance in the name of “defending the earth”, you are actually creating an insidious and dangerous deception.

For the sake of the planet, we appeal to your organizations to reclaim the integrity of your original visions. The position you presently advocate will squander the precious little time we have to implement true reductions before the irreversible tipping points are crossed. The stakes could not be higher. We ask that you join hands with the grassroots activists and groups and support the following eight points:

1) Officially recognize that we are truly in a global emergency and that irreversible tipping points are likely to be crossed if humanity does not act in time;

2) Officially recognize that this emergency is of such a magnitude that a war time level of mobilization is needed in order to effectively deal with it;

3) Stand squarely for the necessity that climate legislation be based on the setting of emission reduction targets and a time frame which are defined by the science;

4) Due to the severe ecosystem damage that will ensue in response to a 2 degree (celsius) rise, an overall goal of no more than one degree (celsius) rise must be sought;

5) Clearly renounce cap and trade and offsets as false solutions that will squander precious time;

6) Stand squarely against any attempt in Congress to strip EPA of its authority to regulate carbon;

7) Support a comprehensive approach to the crisis that combines elements of legislation, regulation, and public investment;

8) Support a legislative component based on a continually rising carbon fee with a 100% distribution of the proceeds to U.S. citizens, with the amount of the fee determined by an emission reduction schedule driven by science.

We also ask the members of these groups to withhold their organizational support until their leadership recognizes the necessity of these changes. On this defining issue of our time, may we strive to remove the barriers that divide us and work together.

Gary Houser is a public interest writer, documentary producer, and activist with Climate SOS seeking to raise awareness within the religious community (here) about the moral issues at stake and working to create a more empowered climate movement.

Cory Morningstar, in addition to being a mom, is an activist with Canadians for Action on Climate Change and has collated latest scientific findings here.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/04/20-1

NY gave environmental org. absurd $3.7M profit for forest | Nature Conservancy

By FREDRIC U. DICKER State Editor

Last Updated: 11:08 AM, April 5, 2010

EXCLUSIVE

ALBANY — Gov. Paterson’s administration handed an enormously wealthy environmental group a staggering 57 percent profit on a large tract of wilderness land — even as property values collapsed across New York, a probe by The Post has found.

The little-noticed green giveaway of taxpayer cash occurred in October 2008, as the state Department of Environmental Conservation paid The Nature Conservancy nearly $10 million for 20,000 acres of Adirondack wilderness that the group purchased for $6.3 million just a few years earlier.

Official state records examined by The Post and statements by local officials show the purchase price was heavily inflated and relied on outdated appraisals from a year earlier, when real-estate values in New York and other parts of the nation were still skyrocketing.

GREEN FEES: Adirondack Park official Frederick Monroe said the state “grossly overpaid” The Nature Conservancy for 20,000 acres of upstate wilderness.

Adirondack Park Local Government Review Board Executive Director Frederick Monroe said the state “grossly overpaid” for the property.

“I’ve suspected there’s some sort of close relationship between the state and TNC that resulted in this price, because it didn’t reflect the true market value,” Monroe said.

The price paid for the land was also out of line with property values recorded at the state Office of Real Property Services. Records for Clinton County show a mere 14.4 percent increase in value for forest land from the time The Nature Conservancy bought the property in January 2005 to when it sold it to the state, for inclusion in the park, in October 2008.

Several county and town officials insisted the state paid far too high a price for the land.

“This price was not indicative of property values in the area generally,” said James Gonyo, Clinton County’s director of real property tax services.

“The price paid was higher than we would have assessed it at and, as a result, we will not use it as a valid sale on which to base assessments in the future.”

Saranac Councilman Jerry Delaney, in whose town the bulk of the land is located, called the sale “a horrible deal all the way around.

“Ten percent a year is a good return on land, but 57 percent in three years? I think it’s clear the state has a cozy relationship with The Nature Conservancy.”

Sources told The Post that Paterson — and former governors George Pataki and Eliot Spitzer, in office when the appraisals were conducted — viewed the conservancy as an influential organization whose support they wanted.

“Paterson, Spitzer and Pataki saw the ‘enviros’ as the good guys with lots of influential friends, and their view was, ‘If they can give them a few extra million dollars of public money, why not?’ ” said a prominent New York official, who has had contact with The Nature Conservancy.

Pataki selected prominent Manhattan lawyer Ira Millstein in 2004 — a year after he was named to a special Nature Conservancy advisory panel — to draft governance principles for state authorities.

The price paid to the preservation group also appears to contradict a pledge made by TNC when it acquired the heavily wooded land from Domtar, an international lumber and paper company.

A press release issued at the time said TNC promised to “hold the land on behalf of New York state” and quoted Pataki referring to the environmental group as a “partner” with the state.

The statement suggested to many that New York intended to reimburse TNC for the cost of acquisition, plus any expenses, once it had the funds to complete the purchase.

TNC, which has $6 billion in assets and employs 3,500 people, has an extremely close working relationship with the DEC and even has members of its staff working in the agency’s Albany headquarters as part of a natural heritage program.

Connie Prickett, a spokeswoman for TNC, said, “The question of why the state paid that much is a question that needs to be directed to the state.”

The practice appears to be continuing.

The Post has learned that a Paterson-administration plan to buy a large tract of land near the state-owned Belleayre Mountain in the Catskills is being blocked by Comptroller Tom DiNapoli out of concern that Albany is preparing to spend “millions more” than the property is worth, said a source.

DEC spokesman Yancy Roy conceded the 2008 crash of the national economy is a legitimate question,” but he insisted the wheels of state government just turn too slowly for the falling property values of the Adirondack land to have been addressed.

“Key elements of the transaction had occurred before then,” said Roy.

“The state process is much slower than, say, a private home sale. It takes months,” continued Roy. “The notion that the state wanted to ‘reward’ TNC is absurd.”

fredric.dicker@nypost.com
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/ny_tung_dqC1aNOJsYGrDZov9t6v1I#ixzz0keF3KYp5

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/ny_tung_dqC1aNOJsYGrDZov9t6v1I

Richard Sandor: “Junk bonds to carbon cop-out” | The Nature Conservancy

Richard Sandor: “Junk bonds to carbon cop-out”

By Chris Lang, 25th March 2010

In the 1970s, Richard Sandor was one of the originators of interest rate derivatives. In the 1980s, he made a fortune at Drexel Burnham Lambert, where he developed “collateral mortgage obligations”. In the 1980s and 1990s he helped develop pollution trading. And as founder of the Chicago Climate Exchange, he’s been described as the “father of carbon trading”.

In 2007, he was named as a hero of the environment by Time magazine. “Sandor is an innovator and a great booster of new markets, and he had the vision to create something out of nothing,” writes James Cameron in Time. Creating something (money) out of nothing (carbon offsets) is a good description of the carbon market. “And he’s always been phenomenal at making money,” Cameron writes. Last year, Sandor earned US$1 million.

Since 2000, Sandor has been a director of American Electric Power, the biggest coal burner in the USA. AEP has teamed up with The Nature Conservancy for two controversial REDD-type projects: the Noel Kempff project in Bolivia and the Guaraqueçaba project in Brazil. And where does AEP plan to sell its carbon credits from the Noel Kempff project? The Chicago Climate Exchange. Cozy.

In February 2009, in

on Al Jazeera, Sandor explained that “The mess in the financial markets is related to opaqueness, which doesn’t exist on exchanges.” But an article in the current issue of Private Eye reveals that Sandor’s operations in the climate business seem to be pretty murky.

Of course, this isn’t only about Sandor. As Larry Lohmann, of the UK-based organisation The Corner House, points out, “There are close parallels between the rampant financial innovations behind the current financial crisis and the innovations feeding carbon trading.” A Corner House Briefing, from September 2009, “When Markets are Poison: Learning about Climate Policy from the Financial Crisis” is available here (pdf file, 568 KB).

Here’s the Al Jazeera debate, where Patrick Bond, Director of the Centre for Civil Society, University of KwaZulu-Natal, corrects some of Sandor’s myths, followed by the article in Private Eye. “I think in fact that many of these emissions markets are full of chancers”, Bond notes on Al Jazeera.

JUNK BONDS TO CARBON COP-OUT

Private Eye, No. 1258, 19 March – 1 April 2010

CARBON emissions trading might be useless at tackling climate change but it is proving to be highly profitable for the financial engineers behind it – men like the godfather of pollution trading, an American called Richard Sandor, who was one of the founders of financial derivatives in the 1980s at junk bond trader Drexel Burnham Lambert.

It was at Drexel Burnham Lambert that Sandor pioneered the “collateral mortgage obligations” that eventually brought the financial markets to their knees. He was also architect of the first pollution permit trading scheme (in sulphur emissions) in the US in the 1990s.

Today he chairs the company controlling more than 80 percent of EU carbon emissions trading, Climate Exchange plc, which regularly launches “innovative” carbon products such as daily futures contracts and has set up trading exchanges in China, Canada and Australia. Sandor meanwhile has been a big mover behind plans for a mandatory trading system in the US that would see his company’s income multiply.

‘Significant long-term growth potential’

Under Sandor and chief executive and offshore insurance specialist Neil Eckert, Climate Exchange plc owns the European Climate Exchange based in London’s Bishopsgate, as well as the Chicago Climate Exchange and the Chicago Climate Futures Exchange. Business is especially booming in London, as Eckert boasted in a results announcement last week: “ECX had a wonderful year and with the continuing EU discussion of an anticipated 30 percent cut [in emissions] by 2020 and particularly the move to 100 percent auctioning [of allowances] in 2011, shows significant long-term growth potential.”

Last year Sandor earned $1m and Eckert £575,000. Sandor’s shares in the company are worth more that £40m, and Eckert’s around £5m on top of £7m worth of options. These riches came on the back of operating profits last year of £11.5m, made almost entirely in London where trading in £70bn worth of emissions allowances by the European exchange’s 100 members, including such renowned environmentalists as Shell, Barclays and RBS, earned the exchange £11.4m.

Not that any of this finds its way into the government’s coffers in the form of tax that might be invested in slightly more useful environmental measures. Climate Exchange plc is registered in the tax haven of the Isle of Man, where, according to its accounts, “it is subject to tax at zero percent” having been set up there when it was simply a fund company in order to avoid capital gains tax. But the company also claims that its operating subsidiaries “are resident in various jurisdictions where they are subject to local rates of taxation”.

Same name, different company

In Britain this might be thought to refer to the company ostensibly running the exchange in Bishopsgate, European Climate Exchange Ltd. But its accounts, filed quietly at Companies House, show that it is owned by an Irish company with, er, exactly same the same name: European Climate Exchange Ltd. It is this Irish company, registered at its lawyer’s office at 70 Sir John Rogerson’s Quay in Dublin (without a trading exchange in sight and only a company secretary to be found there), that earns the commissions.

The synonymous British company is reimbursed for its costs of running the exchange while the profits that accumulate in Dublin are then returned to its ultimate parent company, Climate Exchange plc, in the Isle of Man in the form of tax-free interest payments on the substantial loans from Douglas that fund the operation.

This kind of tax planning requires plenty of carbon-intensive jetting off to board meetings in whichever countries the directors want their companies to be tax resident. As a Climate Exchange plc spokesman told the Eye: “They’re always travelling.” This might not do much for the planet but it’ll be good for business when airlines are forced into the trading scheme from 2012.

http://www.redd-monitor.org/2010/03/25/richard-sandor-junk-bonds-to-carbon-cop-out/

BIG GREEN | Inside the Nature Conservancy 2003 | Washington Post

BIG GREEN | Inside the Nature Conservancy

Nonprofit Land Bank Amasses Billions

Charity Builds Assets on Corporate Partnerships

By David B. Ottaway and Joe Stephens

Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, May 4, 2003

First of three articles

The Arlington-based Nature Conservancy has blossomed into the world’s richest environmental group, amassing $3 billion in assets by pledging to save precious places. Known for its advertisements decorated with forests, streams and the soothing voice of actor Paul Newman, the 52-year-old charity preserves millions of acres across the nation.

Yet the Conservancy has logged forests, engineered a $64 million deal paving the way for opulent houses on fragile grasslands and drilled for natural gas under the last breeding ground of an endangered bird species.

The nonprofit Conservancy has traveled far beyond its humble beginnings, when it relied on small donors and acquired a few small plots at a time. Its governing board and advisory council now include executives and directors from one or more oil companies, chemical producers, auto manufacturers, mining concerns, logging operations and coal-burning electric utilities.

Some of those corporations have paid millions in environmental fines. Last year, they and other corporations donated $225 million to the Conservancy — an amount approaching that given by individuals.

Today, the million-member Conservancy itself is something of a corporate juggernaut, Big Green. It is also the leading proponent of a brand of environmentalism that promotes compromise between conservation and corporate America.

While the Conservancy has done much to preserve green spaces, its strategy of combining conservation and business, including its own pursuit of for-profit ventures, has led to some costly misadventures and awkward positions:

* The drilling foray, on the Texas Gulf Coast, turned into a fiasco. Not only did some endangered birds die after the Conservancy started drilling, but the charity also sold natural gas owned by someone else and kept the profits. The Conservancy and its partners settled a resulting lawsuit last year for $10 million.

* In Virginia, the Conservancy has invested in a number of for-profit businesses on the Eastern Shore: a bed-and-breakfast, an oyster-and-clam farm, an "heirloom" sweet-potato-chip operation, a seaside home development. The businesses failed, leaving a $24 million debt.

* The Conservancy has profited by selling its name and logo to companies, which use the image to gain what one corporate executive calls "reputational value." A Conservancy focus group study found that a few participants said accepting corporate cash in certain cases would be "the equivalent of a payoff."

* The charity engages in numerous financial transactions with members of the Conservancy family — governing board members and their companies, state and regional trustees, longtime supporters. The nonprofit organization has bought land and services from board members’ companies, and it has declined to release property appraisals from the deals. It has sold choice Conservancy land to past and present trustees through its "conservation buyers" program, which offers steep discounts in exchange for development restrictions. It has lent cash to its executives, including $1.55 million to its president.

* The Conservancy’s mission makes it reluctant to take positions on some leading environmental issues, including global warming and drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Corporations represented on the Conservancy’s board and advisory council have lobbied nationally on the corporate side of the issues. A Conservancy official said the group avoids criticizing the environmental records of its corporate board members.

* Some of the charity’s scientists have complained that the organization has drifted from its stated commitment to the "best available science." One scientist complained in an internal 2001 Conservancy study: "Science is not understood or supported by senior managers and state directors. [The] entire focus is on land deals." Said another: "I am not convinced [the Conservancy] is science-based, as we claim."

While Conservancy officials now acknowledge that the charity made mistakes in Texas and Virginia, they dismiss them as isolated incidents and stoutly defend their philosophy and initiatives as a pragmatic strategy for conservation in the 21st century.

Conservancy officials say their approach — which falls under a larger environmental philosophy known as "compatible development" — allows them to leverage corporate America’s wealth to achieve conservation on a massive scale. Instead of insisting in every case on the pristine preservation of land, the charity practices the art of the possible, its officials said.

"There are trade-offs in conservation," Conservancy President Steven J. McCormick said in an interview. "We make a judgment that less than 100 percent is acceptable."

Along the way, the Conservancy hopes to entice companies into more environmentally friendly practices. Alliances with logging companies, for example, have protected thousands of acres from development, even though logging on the land often continues, McCormick said.

"Some of our brethren say we’re dealing with the devil, but I say quite the contrary," said Conservancy official Michael Horak. "Some of the deals we’re making are quite extraordinary."

Today, the organization says it manages 7 million preserved acres through a variety of means and owns 2 million outright. Much of that land is held in 1,400 nature preserves, which it describes as the world’s largest private sanctuary system.

In late 2000, the nonprofit purchased the Palmyra Atoll, 15,500 acres of coral reefs, islets and lagoons 1,000 miles south of Hawaii. Last year, Conservancy researchers on Borneo discovered a large number of orangutans, which the organization said increased the known population by 10 percent. Also that year, the Conservancy acquired the 100,000-acre Baca Ranch, the final step toward creating the Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado.

Supporters say that the organization’s enormous wealth has enhanced its influence, within the environmental movement and with the government. Last year, the Conservancy received $105 million in government consulting fees and other payments.

Respected naturalists praise the Conservancy’s programs. Along with the chief executive officers, the Conservancy’s board has included prominent scientists and academics. Even some critics acknowledge that global environmental health would suffer without the charity’s resources devoted to land preservation. Still, some former high-ranking Conservancy officials believe the organization has grown too close to business.

"It was the wrong decision to get so close to industry," said David Morine, who headed the charity’s land acquisition for 15 years and helped pioneer the group’s corporate ties. "Business got in under the tent, and we are the ones who invited them in.

"These corporate executives are carnivorous. You bring them in, and they just take over."

Morine now says letting them inwas "the biggestmistake in my life."

Becoming Big Green

The Nature Conservancy opened its doors in 1951 with a handful of staffers laboring out of a Washington office shared with another environmental group.

Early on, the Conservancy settled on buying land as its special niche in the environmental movement. In 1955, the Conservancy chipped in to help buy 60 acres of river gorge in New York and Connecticut. That simple strategy — raising cash to buy raw land — became known within the group as "bucks and acres."

Environmentalism bloomed with the publication of Rachel Carson’s "Silent Spring" in 1962 and the sixties’ activism that would result in the first "Earth Day" in 1970. In those days of turmoil, the Conservancy grew slowly but steadily and kept to its quiet land-acquisition strategy.

In the 1980s, the Conservancy’s nonconfrontational approach paid off. The numbers tell the story. That decade, its revenue grew from $58 million to $222 million, and its staff surged from 77 to 933 employees.

In the 1990s, the age of the bubble economy and lavish corporate largess, astonishing growth occurred. Corporate donations mushroomed from $1.8 million in 1993 to $225 million last year. (The Washington Post Co. is a regular contributor, last year giving $1,500.) By 2002, Conservancy revenue had reached $972 million, more than 10 times the size of Sierra Club revenue.

Today, the Conservancy oversees 3,200 employees in 528 offices scattered across every state and 30 countries. The organization has many of the trappings of a Fortune 500 company: global reach, consumer focus groups, meetings with world leaders, sophisticated marketing and cost-benefit analysis applied to conservation. The group’s "worldwide" headquarters is in an eight-story, $28 million building in Arlington.

"I really believe that in the next century that the most influential institutions on the planet will be nongovernmental organizations," McCormick said in a speech at the Conservancy’s 50th anniversary meeting in October 2001. "I believe the Nature Conservancy will set that pattern."

The Conservancy now boasts 1,900 corporate sponsors. Eastman Kodak Co. vice president Hays Bell recently described the Conservancy as a "natural choice" for partnerships because there was "no conflict potential." The Conference Board, a nonprofit that advises businesses, said in a report on partnerships with environmental groups that the Conservancy is especially popular with corporate executives because of its "dependability in joint ventures."

McCormick said: "By working with corporations, which control a lot of land, which are very influential, we think we make a big difference."

The Conservancy’s relationships with Fortune 500 corporations have become institutionalized. Its unpaid 38-member Board of Governors has included past and present executives and directors of major industrial corporations: John F. Smith Jr., chairman of General Motors, the world’s largest car manufacturer; E. Linn Draper Jr., chairman of American Electric Power Co., the nation’s largest electricity producer; A. D. "Pete" Correll, chairman of Georgia-Pacific Corp., the country’s second-biggest paper products business; and A.W. "Bill" Dahlberg, former chairman of Southern Co., another leading power producer.

Some of these companies face pressure from more confrontational environmental groups and from government regulators.

A recent study of utilities by the Natural Resources Defense Council and others named American Electric the largest U.S. air polluter. American Electric’s operations in Cheshire, Ohio, have turned that quaint river town into a ghost. Sulfur dioxide emissions from one of the company’s plants have at times enveloped Cheshire, prompting the utility to buy out most of the 221 residents, who agreed not to sue. A utility spokesman said the plant is clean, but its operations were encroaching on the community.

Elsewhere, the utility is fighting a lawsuit filed by the Environmental Protection Agency alleging Clean Air Act violations.

American Electric has joined the Conservancy in an $11 million forest preservation initiative in Bolivia. If the concept were approved by federal regulators, the project one day would supply the company with "pollution credits." That would lessen its need to install costly emissions controls at its U.S. plants.

Opponents of the Conservancy’s approach argue that corporations have seized control of the charity from within.

"The Conservancy brings in corporate board members who don’t know much about conservation — or even care that much about it," said Huey Johnson, the former head of the Conservancy’s western U.S. operations and a founder of the Trust for Public Land. Two years ago, he won the United Nations’ top environmental award.

The Conservancy offers corporations seats on its International Leadership Council for $25,000 and up. Once there, executives can "meet individually with Nature Conservancy staff to discuss environmental issues of specific importance to the member company," Conservancy literature states.

Council members include Pacific Gas and Electric Co., which paid $333 million to settle claims that its plants polluted water and caused cancer among nearby residents, a legal battle dramatized in the film "Erin Brockovich."

Another member is Dow Chemical Co., owner of Union Carbide. Last year, the Conservancy’s Louisiana chapter gave Dow its conservation leadership award for expanding a greenbelt bird sanctuary around its plant in Plaquemine, La. The plant also has drawn the attention of a grand jury investigating vinyl chloride contamination of area water, Dow officials recently confirmed.

Avoiding Controversy

Sometimes, the Conservancy’s nonconfrontational approach puts it on the sidelines of the major environmental issues of the day.

In Alaska, the Conservancy has stood silent as environmentalists battle proposed oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The decision to skirt the fight followed intense debate in 2001 by the Conservancy’s board, which yielded in the end to the wishes of its Texas and Alaska chapters, senior Conservancy officials said.

Two major oil companies that support the Alaska drilling — BP and Exxon Mobil — hold Conservancy leadership council seats. Exxon Mobil has donated $5 million to the Conservancy. Another supporter of drilling, Phillips Alaska Inc., has given at least $1 million, records show.

McCormick defended the Conservancy’s refusal to choose sides between what he called "ideological factions" in the Alaska debate. He described the issue as "not an argument for the Nature Conservancy." Getting involved, he said, could "completely drain our credibility." He concluded: "It’s more courageous to stay on principle and get conservation through some concessions from those who use the land."

The Conservancy also has been among the last environmental groups to recognize global warming and the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Two of the Conservancy’s strongest corporate supporters, Exxon Mobil and GM, have opposed stiff emission-cutting efforts.

Exxon Mobil for years led the Global Climate Coalition, an industry group that debunked global warming. Exxon Mobil has long been a leading lobbyist against the Kyoto accord to reduce emissions.

One environmental group, Environmental Defense, has dubbed GM "Global Warmer Number One" because its vehicles are a major source of carbon-dioxide emissions. GM Chairman Smith headed the Conservancy’s $1 billion fundraising campaign, and over the past decade the company has given the Conservancy cash and vehicles worth $22 million.

"Twenty-two million dollars is going to go a long way to help preserve biodiversity," said Terry Pritchett, GM’s director of global climate issues.

McCormick finally took up the global warming issue in the Conservancy’s bimonthly magazine in the fall of 2001.

"Typically, the Conservancy has avoided the political debate over global warming," McCormick wrote. "But we haven’t buried our institutional head in the sand."

He said that climate change was "real," and the Conservancy needed to figure out how to confront it "with a cool temper and a vigilant eye for solutions."

Last year, the Conservancy launched an initiative adopting the approach that would supply corporations with pollution credits.

GM contributed $10 million to the plan.

Greenwashing

Scientists rate the conversion of land to human habitat — urban sprawl — as Earth’s greatest menace. "Sprawl is without a doubt the most pervasive threat," an unidentified Conservancy scientist wrote in response to a survey in 2001, obtained by The Post. "Failure to recognize and address this threat on all levels, not just buying land, will result in a mission-critical policy failure."

Despite such assessments, the Conservancy has forged a close partnership with Centex Corp., one of the nation’s largest residential construction firms. Centex and its subsidiaries have built almost 400,000 houses, many at 28 sites ringing the District of Columbia.

Centex and its divisions have given and pledged $3 million to the Conservancy. Centex sits on the Conservancy’s leadership council, and the chairman of Centex Homes served on a Conservancy advisory board. Two years ago, a Conservancy chapter in Texas gave Centex Homes its Conservation Leadership Award for "corporations that have shown leadership in and dedication to conserving natural resources."

Centex also has helped the Conservancy retain its claim of having 1 million members. The charity handed out more than 40,000 free memberships to Centex employees and customers, a November 2001 Conservancy memo said. Other corporations, including Enron, also have given away memberships.

Although its advertisements feature photographs of dense forests, the Conservancy is allied with two of the nation’s biggest tree consumers, Georgia-Pacific Corp. and International Paper Co.

The Conservancy defends its partnerships with loggers by arguing that it has persuaded them to adopt more conservation-friendly methods — reduced clear-cutting, fewer access roads and wider buffer zones along rivers and streams. The Conservancy says it has also made loggers more sensitive to endangered species, such as the red cockaded woodpecker. Company spokespersons agree.

The Dogwood Alliance, a coalition of 70 grass-roots environmental groups, says the change in methods is superficial and the damage remains considerable. Further, the partnership gives loggers a public relations boost from "greenwashing," Dogwood and other environmental groups charge.

Georgia-Pacific and International Paper have used the Conservancy "to pull the wool over the public’s eyes," said Trevor Fitzgibbon, Dogwood’s former spokesman. "It makes it seem they are doing great things for the environment when what they’re doing is destroying the South’s natural heritage."

For nearly a decade, the Conservancy helped Georgia-Pacific manage environmental risks arising from its logging along North Carolina’s Lower Roanoke River.

"It has absolutely changed GP’s image," said Georgia-Pacific Chairman Correll, a Conservancy board member.

For its part, Georgia-Pacific has been generous to the Conservancy, donating $3 million in 2000 alone.

International Paper is on the Conservancy’s leadership council. In 1998, the company sold 185,000 acres of Maine forest to the Conservancy for $35 million. The Conservancy then contracted with a Maine company to log 136,000 acres of the land to help offset costs.

McCormick sits with International Paper on the American Forest and Paper Association’s Sustainable Forestry Board, a panel set up by the industry to certify that loggers are being eco-friendly.

Such ties create a "commonality of interest" between the Conservancy and International Paper, said Tom Jorling, a company vice president. "This enablesus to get more legitimacy because the Conservancy has the kind of reputation it does."

Board Conflicts

The Internal Revenue Service requires charities to disclose all business deals they do with board members or their corporations. At the Conservancy, the list of such conflicts of interest is long.

Millions have gone toward property deals with such companies, including $7.88 million in transactions with Georgia-Pacific. In 1999, the Conservancy paid a Georgia-Pacific subsidiary $380,000 for 1,100 acres in Maine. In 2000, the Conservancy paid $7.5 million to the same subsidiary for 9,500 acres in Louisiana, much of it stripped of trees by clear-cutting, Conservancy documents show. The charity got a $1 million discount, according to an internal document.

Conservancy officials said the land purchases were guided by "the best available science" and based on an independent appraisal and scientific review, which they declined to make public. They said Correll recused himself from voting on the purchases.

The Conservancy’s business with board members and their companies also extends to purchases of products, legal assistance and even development rights.

The Conservancy paid Orvis Services Co. $649,000 in 1998 for placing some development restrictions on its private, 1,600-acre Florida hunting preserve, records show. The chief executive of the closely associated Orvis sat on the Conservancy’s board.

The Conservancy also allowed S.C. Johnson & Sons Inc. to use the Conservancy logo in ads for toilet cleaner and other products, receiving $100,000 in return. The corporation’s chairman sat on the nonprofit’s board.

The Conservancy told the IRS that the board members in those instances recused themselves from voting on the transactions. Since July 1, 1998, the Conservancy has reported that 11 of its board members or their companies have engaged in one or more financial transactions with the charity.

In a written response to Post questions, the Conservancy said that each deal was "entirely appropriate" and that most included discounts or donations. Such deals are permissible under IRS rules if the charity documents that its board members and their companies have not profited unduly.

Conservancy Board Chairman Anthony P. Grassi, retired chief financial officer of Credit Suisse First Boston Inc., said he sees nothing unethical in the Conservancy’s doing business with board members.

Still, such financial transactions are discouraged in the nonprofit world. Known as "self-dealing," the arrangements can lead to revocation of an organization’s tax-free status if the charities cannot show that they have guarded against potential abuse.

Guidelines established by the nonprofit advisory group BoardSource say: "Good judgment is affected if [a] board member’s personal or professional concerns conflict with the best interest of the organization. . . . Even the appearance of a conflict of interest can damage the organization’s reputation."

Credibility and Trust

While publicly enthusiastic about working with industry, Conservancy officials remain privately concerned about image. Recently, the Conservancy contracted with Wirthlin Worldwide, a consultant on consumer tastes, to conduct focus groups on the issue.

A June 2001 Wirthlin report, obtained by The Post, reassured Conservancy executives that the participants considered corporate partnerships "generally good." But it cautioned about the potential downside of selling a nonprofit’s credibility and trust.

"There was a general feeling that some partnerships are created to fool or manipulate," the report said. Some of those polled worried the Conservancy might be helping the companies present a "false image to the public."

The participants were tested on their reactions to the Conservancy’s hypothetical relationships with various companies: Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., Anheuser-Busch Cos., Wal-Mart Stores Inc., BP Amoco, Intel Corp. and Cadillac.

Among the results: most participants expressed negative feelings about partnerships with Anheuser-Busch ("bad"), Wal-Mart ("absurd") and BP ("inappropriate"). There is no indication that they were told BP sits on the Conservancy’s leadership council.

"Many feel a relationship between [the Conservancy] and an oil company is inherently incompatible," the report said.

The study focused in part on industries with which the Conservancy had what researchers described as an "inherent conflict of interest." Not only oil, but logging, mining, and power generation. Some participants considered taking cash from such industries unethical.

"There is a minority who feel that by accepting a financial contribution, [the
Conservancy] would be sending out a message that they condone the business practices of that company," the report said. "To this minority,accepting financial contributions from these types of companies is the equivalent of a payoff."

Logo for Sale

Toilet cleaner is not the only product associated with the Conservancy.

The Conservancy has rented its name and logo for use on neckties, breakfast cereal, coffee and credit cards. Companies pay six-figure fees to stamp the Conservancy’s oak leaf on their packaging. Conservancy vice president Michael Coda, who developed the program, describes logo sales as a "very good deal" for the nonprofit.

"A partnership with the Nature Conservancy is good business!" Conservancy literature says, stressing that its members are "upscale, urban, and have annual incomes averaging $50,000."

The practice offends some consumer activists. When affixed on a raisin bran box, the logo does not guarantee the product inside is more environmentally friendly than the next brand on the supermarket shelf, activists say.

"That’s misleading — a consumer is going to think that that breakfast cereal was produced with some kind of sustainable agriculture," said Urvashi Rangan of Consumers Union, a watchdog group that tracks logo usage and publishes Consumer Reports magazine.

General Mills’ Nature Valley granola bars have displayed the Conservancy logo since 1998. "There is nothing more environmentally friendly" about the product, Rangan said. "We have a big problem with that."

There is also no disclosure on the snacks that, until last fall, a General Mills Inc. corporate director sat on the Conservancy’s board. "That’s a huge conflict of interest," Rangan said. Senior Conservancy officials said they were unaware of Nature Valley’s ties to their former board member.

Staff researchers Alice Crites and Lucy Shackelford contributed to this article.

NEXT: Pursuit of Profit

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/26/AR2007062600803.html

WWF Mines The Green Gold Rush To The Amazon: Making $60 billion From Fear

WWF Mines The Green Gold Rush To The Amazon: Making $60 billion From Fear

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–>Appearing in the Booker column (and on Watts up with that?) is an account of how the “conservation” group WWF hopes to turn Amazonian trees into billions of dollars, all in the name of saving the planet. The background briefing on which Booker relied is posted below, detailing how the rainforests are to become a monstrous cash-making machine, writes Richard North:

The Amazon – a “green gold-rush”

The WWF and other green campaign groups talking up the destruction of the Amazon rainforests are among those who stand to make billions of dollars from the scare. This “green gold-rush” involves taking control of huge tracts of rainforest supposedly to stop them being chopped down, and selling carbon credits gained from carbon dioxide emissions they claim will be “saved”.

Backed by a $30 million grant from the World Bank, the WWF has already partnered in a pilot scheme to manage 20 million acres in Brazil. If their plans get the go-ahead in Mexico at the end of the year, the forests will be worth over $60 billion in “carbon credits”, paid for by consumers in “rich” countries through their electricity bills and in increased prices for goods and services.
The prospect of a billion-dollar windfall explains the sharp reaction to the “Amazongate” scandal, in which the IPCC falsely claimed that up to 40 percent of the rainforest could be at risk from even a slight drop in rainfall.

Here, the IPCC was caught out again making unsubstantiated claims based on a WWF report. But unlike the “Glaciergate” affair where its claim that Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035 was conceded to be an “error”, the IPCC stood firm on its Amazon claim, stating that the assertion was “correct”. What makes the difference is that there is no serious money locked into melting glaciers. Amazonian trees, however, are potentially worth billions.

In standing its ground, the IPCC was strongly supported by the WWF, and by Daniel Nepstad, a senior scientist from the US Woods Hole Research Centre. Relying on an assiduously fostered reputation as a leading expert on the effects of climate change in the Amazon rainforests, Nepstad – who works closely with the WWF – posted on the Centre’s website a personal statement endorsing “the correctness of the IPCC’s statement”. Bizarrely, his own research failed in any way to substantiate the claim.

The carbon trading agenda

Behind this very public defence lies a network of financial interests, not least on the board of the Woods Hole Research Centre, which counts several former and current equity fund managers responsible for billions of dollars-worth of private investments. The board is chaired by Lawrence Huntington – formerly of Fiduciary Trust International. Members include Joseph Robinson of MidMark Capital and Joshua Goldberg of Altamont Capital Partners, massively wealthy investment funds.

And at the centre of the advocacy for the development of “financial instruments” which it is hoped will generate billions in income is Nepstad himself (pictured below).

In 2007, Nepstad, who is the highest-paid Woods Hole staff member (although not the most senior) with a salary package of over $175,000, published a paper asserting that if the droughts of the last decade continued into the future, approximately 55 percent of the forests of the Amazon would be “cleared, logged, damaged by drought or burned over the next 20 years.” Emerging carbon market incentives, he claimed, could help prevent deforestation.

The Woods Hole interest had earlier been declared in March 2006 when Richard Houghton, a senior scientist and deputy director of the centre sent a memorandum to the secretariat of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) on developing a scheme called “Reducing emissions from deforestation in developing countries” (REDD). “Carbon credits represent the largest potential flow of revenue in support of sustainable development in tropical forest regions,” he then stated.

REDD had, in fact, been a long time coming. The basis of a system had been set up by the 1997 Kyoto climate treaty, known as the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), administered by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Through this, third world countries which reduced CO2 emissions could turn their savings into “carbon credits” which could be sold to industries in developed countries.

Crucially, the CDM only applied to energy production and some industrial processes, and did not extend to forests. After intensive lobbying, though – and despite considerable European scepticism – in 2001, the parties to the Kyoto Protocol officially approved the use of plantations for generating carbon credits.

The EU, however, decided not to allow these credits to be swapped in its emissions trading system, drastically reducing their potential value. The concept was further weakened by the considerable difficulty in proving how much carbon biomass projects actually saved over their brief and uncertain lifetimes. Estimates varied ten-fold, which damaged the credibility of the emerging voluntary market in carbon “offsets”, which were being used to test the concept of forest-generated carbon credits.

Nevertheless, many industrial plantation companies were still hoping for the scheme to be fully developed so that they could sell carbon credits to top up their finances. And in that aspiration they had powerful champions, the World Bank in Washington (pictured), Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy and, especially, WWF.

Their mechanism to bring forests fully into the CDM was REDD, which first appeared as an agenda item in December 2005, at the 11th session of the Conference of Parties to the Climate Change Convention (COP 11) in Montréal. Two years later, at COP 13 in Bali, it had become “the big new idea to save the planet from runaway climate change.”

The scheme was to comprise two parts. First, there is a set-up fund to create “reserves” or “protected areas” (PAs), where deforestation would be prevented (This fund has already been set up and is currently worth $4.5 billion, made up from donations from Norway, France and four other countries). Secondly, the CDM kicks in. Each ton of carbon dioxide “saved” in the protected areas becomes a carbon credit, sold to industrialists in the developed world to allow them to continue emitting CO2. By this means, the funds come rolling in.

Thus, REDD had become a vehicle for building a billion-dollar global fund to take control of hundreds of millions of acres of rainforest throughout the world, a giant cash machine.

Amazon Region Protected Areas Project (ARPA)

Long before REDD had become a formal proposal, WWF had been heavily engaged in Brazil, campaigning to save the rainforests. But a major turning point was reached when, in 1998, Brazilian President Cardoso endorsed a WWF “Forests for Life” programme goal of protecting at least 10 percent of all of the country’s forest types as a national priority.

However, at the same time, the country was in an economic crisis and the government was scaling back environmental funding, even refusing foreign donations of $25 million pledged to support environmental measures. This gave WWF the opportunity for its coup, a chance to set up what was to become a pilot scheme for REDD. With the World Bank, Brazilian government agencies and environmental specialists, it set up a task force to develop its plan.

At that time, there was a loose-knit under-funded network of national parks, poorly administered by federal and state governments. Driven by WWF, the idea was to establish a massive extension to the system, not under the direct control of the Brazilian authorities but of the NGOs themselves. This “take over” was to become the Amazon Region Protected Areas Project (ARPA).

To finance its plan, the WWF then obtained $18 million seed funding from the San Francisco-based Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. This was topped up with $15 million from the German government, paid through the state-owned KfW Entwicklungsbank. Then its Brazilian partner, FUNBIO (The Brazilian Biodiversity Fund) – an NGO which had been started in 1996 with a $20 million grant from the Global Environment Facility – contributed $18 million, donated by the Brazilian government.

Fronting FUNBIO, the WWF then orchestrated a formal application for a grant from its partner, the World Bank. Predictably, in 2002, the Bank donated $30 million from public funds. It also arranged for its small grants division, the GEF to donate $500,000 to a trust fund to help maintain the areas.

The funding was sufficient to set up 20 million acres of new protected areas (10 million of “strict protection” PAs and 10 million of sustainable use). ARPA had become a reality. Announced in August 2002, it included what was to become the world’s largest reserve, the Tumucumaque Mountains National Park – consisting of 9,500,000 acres of pristine rainforest.

Situated in the extreme north of the country, bordering French Guiana (see map, right: area in green), this vast park had no roads leading in or out, almost no accessibility by air, rivers that have yet to be navigated and virtually no human inhabitants. Access is by river or helicopter. And so difficult is the terrain that a WWF expedition to the northern boundary took three weeks. At least four people returned with medical problems: two with infected feet and two with malaria.

The very remoteness of this region underlines a central point. There was virtually no risk of deforestation or commercial exploitation. Although there had been some mining in the area, even the WWF was forced to concede that the damage was “smaller than predicted.”

Then, as the WWF itself admits, the bulk of the deforestation is taking place in south and southeast, with some coastal areas and a band in the centre along the main river, where water transport is possible. As to the Tumucumaque park, the WWF assessed the risk of deforestation as “nil”- in common with most of the other ARPA strict protection areas (see maps below – click to enlarge).

The Plan develops

Nevertheless, by the end of 2006, WWF had the bulk of its areas established, which cleared the way for the next stage of its plan. In April 2007, it and the World Bank formalised their already very close association with the launch of a Global Forest Alliance.

By combining forces and “working with partners in government, civil society, and the business sector,” said the WWF, “Alliance partners leverage support and results to reverse the process of forest loss and degradation.” The World Bank, for its part, was to provide a $250 million start-up fund which it called the “avoided deforestation” project.

Apart from the Amazon, a prime target was one million hectares of classified “conservation forest” in West Papua, New Guinea, where tribes were complaining of evictions from their traditional lands. The WWF was already negotiating with the Indonesian government to set up a management scheme.

Meanwhile, Woods Hole Research Centre had been at work. Representing itself to the world as a scientific institute, it is in fact an advocacy group from the same wellspring as WWF. Its founder, George M Woodwell (pictured), is a former chairman of the board of trustees and currently a member of the National Council of the WWF. He thus shares its values and objectives.

Woodwell is also a founding trustee of the World Resources Institute, another advocacy group. It is currently chaired by James A Harmon, Chairman of the investment group Harmon & Co and a director of Questar Corporation, an integrated natural gas exploration, distribution and pipeline company. He is also senior advisor to the Rothschild Group. Additionally, the Institute counts as a board member Al Gore, chairman of Generation Investment Management, a company with strong interests in carbon trading.

Funded heavily by the Moore foundation, to the tune of over $7 million, and working in partnership with the WWF on the Tumucumaque project, in May 2008 Woods Hole Research Centre, alongside the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil, came up with the “Holy Grail”, a methodology for calculating the carbon “savings” from managing rainforests.

With this, they estimated that areas protected by the ARPA programme would save 5.1 gigatons of CO2 emissions by 2050. Based on the UNFCCC valuation for a ton of CO2 at $12.50, that equated to over $60 billion-worth of carbon credits. This “finding” was presented that month to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, meeting in Bonn and the work was also adopted by the World Bank.

The WWF campaign

With this essential piece in place, the WWF then started an intensive lobbying campaign. Working with the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), it produced a report to argue that: “The new generation of carbon funds must address the need for a sustained reduction in carbon emissions … “.

Crucially, it complained that forest projects were “not yet recognised under the Clean Development Mechanism” The agenda was clear. WWF and its allies wanted a new treaty, to be agreed by the then forthcoming Copenhagen climate summit, to include forests in the CDM.

To that effect, WWF released a detailed policy checklist for delegates, setting out “legal and regulatory requirements to stimulate REDD activities”. Its proposal for carbon credits, tied in with a US “cap and trade” system, could provide revenues of up to $4-$5 billion per year for REDD activities.

Ramping up the publicity, it then argued that: “Aggressive action to reduce (and ultimately halt) emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) must be part of any serious policy to address the climate crisis…”. Without REDD, WWF averred, “keeping global average surface temperature increase below 2°C will likely be impossible.”

To support the case, it mobilised its allies, pulling together a raft of Brazilian NGOs with Greenpeace, Conservation International, and Friends of the Earth to launch “the National Pact to Acknowledge the Value of the Forest and to End Amazon Deforestation.”

It also set up the WWF Forest Carbon Network Initiative again arguing that carbon finance would play a critical role in reducing global greenhouse gas emissions. As such, it declared, the development of carbon finance mechanisms had “emerged” as a major part of WWF’s conservation finance portfolio.

Simultaneously, it launched an Amazon Fund, inviting sponsorship contributions of $50 to preserve one acre of Amazonian rainforest for 20 years, using the opportunity to argue for placing a price on carbon through a cap-and-trade programme. By this means, it said, “keeping forests intact becomes economically valuable. Climate policy can then help realize this value for countries and communities that choose to protect forests.” Halving global emissions from deforestation could produce $3.7 trillion in net benefits to the global economy, it claimed.

Then, to lock in its preferred option, WWF launched a spirited campaign against biofuels, funding a study which argued that preventing deforestation was better for “biodiversity and climate” than clearing virgin forest and planting energy crops such as oil-palm plantations.

In the run-up to the Copenhagen summit, it was now Nepstad’s turn to increase the pressure. As lead author of an article in the prestigious Science journal, he argued for the REDD mechanism, “payments for tropical forest carbon credits under a U.S. cap-and-trade system” and the need to raise $7 to $18 billion to stop forest clearance. One of his co-authors, Frank Merry, gave his address as the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, while another had his as the Environmental Defense Fund in Washington.

Opposition to REDD

Meanwhile, the programme was not without its critics. A small, UK-based charity, the Forest Peoples Programme expressed concern that some conservation schemes to establish wilderness reserves also denied forest-dwellers’ rights. Cut off from their ancestral territories, it said, forest peoples face poverty, the erosion of their customary institutions, loss of identity and cultural collapse.

Campaigner Chris Lang, founder of “REDD Monitor“, saw the scheme as a new way of “breathing life into the scam of carbon trading”. REDD could involve the biggest ever transfer of control over forests – to international carbon financiers and polluting companies, he said.

By September 2009, Scientific American was retailing the fears of Marcus Colchester of the Forest Peoples Programme. “We see a risk that the prospect of getting a lot of money for biodiversity could lead to indigenous peoples’ concerns falling by the wayside,” he said. Tom Goldtooth of the Indigenous Environmental Network was concerned that increasing the financial value of forests could lead to “the biggest land grab of all time.”

Expectations that things would be any different because the schemes are run by conservation groups do not appear to be fulfilled. An account of a scheme run by WWF partner, The Nature Conservancy, on Brazil’s Atlantic Coast at Guaraqueçaba, details massive “injustices”, the NGO trampling over the rights of local people.

Financed with $18 million by General Motors, Chevron and American Electric Power, this organisation – with the familiar mix of financiers on its board – created three reserves covering a total of 20,235 hectares. The commercial tie-up was seen as exposing REDD simply as a means to help polluting corporations to “offset” their emissions, without leading to any overall drop in CO2 emissions. The NGOs were simply the “front” organisations, the acceptable public face.

Other writers see REDD as “Tribal Peoples Versus Carbon Cowboys”, arguing that the scheme will bring indigenous peoples “massive disruption and little benefit.” Jonathan Mazower, of Survival International, notes that where outsiders place monetary value on land where indigenous people live, they “always almost suffer”. His organisation has produced a report condemning the whole system.

Reinforcing the concern, the International Forum of Indigenous Peoples on Climate Change stated: “REDD will increase the violation of our human rights, our rights to our lands, territories and resources, steal our land, cause forced evictions, prevent access and threaten indigenous agriculture practices, destroy biodiversity and culture diversity and cause social conflicts.”

When it came to the Copenhagen summit, no final agreement was reached on a climate treaty. But, much to the relief of WWF and its allies, elements of REDD – now known as “REDD+” were agreed. And, for the critics of the scheme, it looked as if their worst fears had been realised. In the small print of the proposal, there had been an explicit reference to the need to safeguard indigenous peoples. But, when it came to the actual Copenhagen accord, there was no mention of rights or safeguards at all. Yet this will go forward for final agreement at Mexico at end of the year.

Eco-imperialism

As a “conservation” group, the WWF is seen by many as having an unhealthily close relationship with big business. In 2007, for instance, it entered into a partnership with the drinks giant Coca-Cola, taking a fee of $20 million as part of an agreement to tackle its “water footprint”.

It incurred the ire of The Ecologist and other environmental groups for supporting actions of the Roundtable on Responsible Soy (RTRS), which it co-founded in 2004. This grouping comprises producers, finance, trade & industry representatives, NGOs, certification bodies and universities.

Members range from Monsanto, Syngenta, Cargill, Bunge to Unilever, Shell, BP, Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy, WWF and producers such as Gruppo André Maggi – the world’s largest soybean producer based in Brazil.

Despite its concern for deforestation – in which soya growing is heavily implicated – WWF endorsed an RTRS criterion that could allow “responsible” soy to be grown on land that was deforested as recently as May 2009. And soy can still be labelled “responsible” when harvested from lands deforested after May 2009 if the producer could demonstrate that it was not prime forest or an area of High Conservation Value, or land belonging to local peoples.

On the ground, freelance writer Glenda Freeman, a native of New Zealand/Aotearoa, describes WWF activities as “Green Imperialism“, labelling this giant, corporate organisation a “BINGO” (Big International Non-governmental Organisation). She complains that WWF intervention keeps native populations “idle and dependent” while creating the problem it hoped to solve.

Anonymous authors of a publication entitled, “People Against Foreign NGO Neocolonialism” – a group of dissident environmentalists – state that foreign conservation conglomerates “whitewash effort to please donors so that the big bucks will keep flowing.” They contradict claims that these groups have had any real conservation impact.

Speaking of efforts in Papua New Guinea (PNG), they assert that, “With the help of willing donors such as AUS-AID, UNDP, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Moore Foundation, any possibility of achieving lasting conservation of PNG’s biodiversity is being destroyed in the here and now… The international conservation NGOs in PNG are proving to be a model of how not to do either conservation or development”.

Organisations such as WWF, Conservation International and The Nature Conservancy are accused of having caused “the atrophy of what would have been a natural evolution of a truly indigenous conservation movement.” Corporate, hierarchical models of conservation based upon outside foreign experts – often with little in-country knowledge or concern – threaten the world’s rainforest as surely as logging, agriculture, etc.

And in a commentary that could have been written with the Tumucumaque Mountains National Park in mind, they note that uninhabited forests that are impossible to log or destroy in any other way are pointed out, without the hint of a snicker, as being “forests we have saved” by these neocolonialist NGOs.

Lines are drawn on the map to show the new conservation areas. Yes, the big boys say they’re achieving a lot of conservation in PNG and they’ve got the maps to prove it. It’s all a whitewash effort to please donors so that the big bucks will keep flowing.

Writers Lim Soomin and Dr. Steven Shirley, of Keimyung International College, Daegu, Republic of Korea, are equally critical. Within Brazil, they say, the WWF’s efforts have created concern from both business and political groups that want to integrate the massive potential of the Amazon into the country’s economy through dam building, mining projects, highways, ports, logging and agricultural exports.

Running counter to these domestic plans, they write, are international efforts promoted by the WWF and other NGOs that seek to restrict Brazil’s business and industry from utilizing the natural resources. Essentially, these groups are seeking to ban Brazilians from using what is Brazil’s unless a foreign government or bureaucracy gives permission.

Meanwhile, the campaigning group Friends of Peoples Close to Nature complained of the World Bank’s “lies and deception with WWF”, noting in particular that “projects to promote new markets in carbon have despoiled landscapes and ruined livelihoods.”

A giant international corporation

In the introduction to the book Eco-Imperialism: Green power, Black death by Paul Driessen, we read of the “ideological environmental movement.”

This, we are told, imposes the views of mostly wealthy, comfortable Americans and Europeans on mostly poor, desperate Africans, Asians and Latin Americans. It violates these people’s most basic human rights, denying them economic opportunities, the chance for better lives, the right to rid their countries of diseases that were vanquished long ago in Europe and the United States.

Worst of all, in league with the European Union, United Nations and other bureaucracies, the movement stifles vigorous, responsible debate over energy, pesticides and biotechnology. It prevents needy nations from using the very technologies that developed countries employed to become rich, comfortable and free of disease. And it sends millions of infants, children, men and women to early graves every year.

This ideological environmental movement, we are thus informed, is a powerful $4 billion-a-year US industry, an $8 billion-a-year international gorilla. And WWF is one of the major players. Like the profit-making international corporations it so freely criticises – into which it has crawled into bed, taking their money – the WWF itself is a massive international corporation,. Its declared income for 2008 was €447 million, including €107.7 million for its international arm.

This enables it to finance a massive publicity effort, giving it privileged access to the media, and to governments and international agencies – from which it draws much of its funding.

Ranged against this corporate giant is a disparate, ill-funded range of individuals and groups, with only a small fraction of its resources. Inevitably, the voice of WWF is heard loudest, drowning out complaints and concerns.

That much also applies to its field activities. Where, as is so often, it is operating in remote areas, there is rarely an independent voice or observer capable of recording what precisely happens. Much of what we know of WWF’s activities, therefore, comes from WWF itself, inevitably spun in its own favour.

A self-serving industry

The greatest criticism, however, is that the organisation is manifestly self-serving. Certainly, no one can argue that WWF is not personally rewarding for some of its officers. The current CEO of the US branch, Carter S Roberts (pictured left), is paid “compensation” of $439,327.

Before joining WWF he spent 15 years at The Nature Conservancy. Earlier in his career, he led marketing and management teams at Gillette, Procter and Gamble and at Dun and Bradstreet, where he advised companies including RJR/Nabisco and Coca-Cola. The associations reinforce the impression of a small clique dominating the environmental charity “industry” and the closeness between that industry and the commercial corporates.

As to the Amazon venture, this perhaps is the clearest example of the self-serving ethos, best illustrated by comparison with what an effective conservation programme might seek to achieve.

In this, it is widely recognised that the greatest pressure on the forests is through clearance to make way for agriculture, including soya, sugar growing for ethanol production, and cattle ranching. In fact, according to Greenpeace, cattle ranching currently accounts for 80 percent of forest clearance (see map below).

However, as WWF has acknowledged, the bulk of this clearance is in the south and east. And, as Greenpeace reports, the maximum pressure is in the southernmost state of Mato Grosso. On the other hand, there is no cattle ranching in the extreme north and west, where the bulk of the WWF protected areas are situated, and neither is the land suitable for soya or sugar cane growing.

It follows, therefore, that for an “avoided deforestation” project to have most effect, it should be located in areas where the forest is most at risk – i.e., in the south or east, and especially in the Mato Grosso. To locate projects in the uninhabited north, or the sparsely inhabited, inaccessible west, cannot be considered a high priority.

Furthermore, as is pointed out in a report from the Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg, for maximum carbon sequestration, the most effective option is reforestation of deforested areas. This is also the best conservation and biodiversity option.

As to a finance system based wholly or largely on carbon credits, there were “considerable risks for perverse incentives regarding these objectives.” Firstly, the potentially huge number of credits that would become available if the entire global forest mass was included in the CDM would crash the carbon price. This would give CO2 producers a “get out of jail free” card, reducing their incentive to adopt carbon reduction technologies by allowing them to acquire cheap credits and maintain a “business as usual” profile.

Secondly, a simplistic, market-based system such as CDM would not discriminate between priority areas, which tend to be problematic, and the “low hanging fruit”. This is recognised by the Freiburg report – which was commissioned by Greenpeace – where reference is made to “leakage”, the displacement of emissions, rather than any absolute reduction.

Such nuanced arguments, with other reservations set out in further reports, seem to be absent from the WWF case. While Greenpeace opposes the universal adoption of the CDM mechanism, and proposes focusing on priority areas, WWF persists in making shrill demands for unrestricted carbon trading. Without this, it says, “keeping global average surface temperature increase below 2°C will likely be impossible.”

A human-centric approach

In contrast to the wildlife-centric approach of the WWF, and the environmental activism of Greenpeace, the World Rainforest Movement (WRM) and organisations such as Survival International, take a human-centric approach.

Securing the land rights of indigenous people, and rigorously enforcing them, they argue, is the best way of preventing damaging exploitation of the forests. And, as Survival International illustrates, environmental degradation and human rights abuses often go hand-in-hand.

Other issues, such as illegal logging, are primarily matters for law enforcement. While NGOs have proved of considerable value in pointing out lapses in enforcement – and worse – as well as reporting illegal activities to the authorities, establishment of extremely expensive protected areas is hardly necessary for such functions to be performed. The revenue-generating potential of monitoring activities, however, is very low.

In it for the money

Taken at face value, and certainly at the valuation placed upon its enterprise by WWF, setting up protected areas in the Amazon rainforests is wholly benign. From a robust, climate-sceptic stance, however, attempting to lock carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere is a waste of time and effort. On the other hand, even if the entire climate change agenda is accepted unreservedly, the enterprise still fails to pass muster – on numerous counts.

In the first instance, the ARPA project is extraordinarily expensive. The $80 million spent is more than ten times the entire income of a charity such as Survival International. Arguably, with considerably less funds, it achieves a great deal more than this exercise.

Secondly, even if the enterprise could be considered good value in isolation, it would be very hard to argue that the areas chosen – in the context of the damage being done elsewhere – represent the main or even an important priority. The resource expended, undoubtedly, could achieve more in other areas.

Thirdly, the reserves are a high maintenance exercise and are not economically viable. They require a constant flow of funds from external sources – thus generating the need for the carbon trading scheme. A less ambitious – or more pragmatic – scheme which achieved less than perfection but which was economically self-sustaining, would achieve more overall. Such a model, though, does not seem to have been considered.

Fourthly, the projects seem to have been set up in anticipation of the need for continued external funding, essentially creating a demand for financial scheme that would otherwise have no justification. Effectively, one could see the ARPA scheme as a Trojan Horse for trading in forest carbon.

Fifth, the actual amount of carbon saved would be minimal, and only a fraction of what could be saved if other options were taken up, such as reforestation.

Sixth, the trading in forest carbon would destabilise the CDM, crashing the carbon price and obviate the need for industrial CO2 producers to invest in “clean” technologies. Longer-term, it would reduce the amount of finance available for forest preservation and restitution, as funds were diverted to harvesting “low hanging fruit”.

Seventh, the programme is an interference in the internal affairs of host nations, distorting national priorities and absolving – or even preventing – those nations developing environmental protection schemes attuned to their own specific needs. It also risks damaging the rights of indigenous peoples, and creating dependency cultures.

In terms of climate change mitigation, conservation or any similar aspect, therefore, there is nothing to commend this WWF strategy. It is wholly malign. From the WWF stance, however, there are many advantages.

Firstly, the scheme would generate significant income for the pioneer, which happens to be WWF. It also generates funds for donor countries, either directly or indirectly by subsidising environmental programmes which would otherwise have to be tax-funded. This ensures cordial relations between the NGO and the governments on which they rely for access and permission to operate.

Secondly, it is a high-profile activity with a strong “feel-good” quotient which is likely to be attractive to private and corporate donors. It allows the claim that “we are saving the forests” – and the planet.

The effect of this, incidentally, can be seen in the report of KFW Entwicklungsbank, which cites project manager Jens Ochtrop. He says: “There is practically no more illegal felling of trees, planting of soybean fields or grazing of cattle in the ARPA areas. The protection by ARPA also affects land speculators and illegal tree fellers. They keep away”.

But then, in the inaccessible Tumucumaque Mountains National Park and other strict protection areas, there was no illegal felling of trees, planting of soybean fields or grazing of cattle. One could make a similar case for the success of a wild elephant eradication scheme in Croydon High Street or Brooklyn.

Thirdly, the activity is politically “safe”. It avoids confrontation with vested interests in the host country, which might then provoke a political backlash and curtailment of (revenue-generating) activities. It also positions the organisation away from the areas of highest degradation and thus absolves WWF from having to intervene – or report abuse – which might upset actual or potential corporate sponsors and allies.

Fourth, carbon trading itself presents a very valuable income stream for investment and finance houses, which are well-represented on the boards of environmental charity allies and donor foundations. All of these can be relied upon to provide generous support for future activities, funded in part from carbon trading.

Fifth, forest credits available in significant numbers would reduce overall the costs of emitting CO2 for many industrial enterprises and eliminate the need for expensive CO2 reduction technology – and many of these industrial enterprises are generous funders of the environmental movement.

Chris Land, again puts some this in perspective, noting that the Indonesian government is fond of REDD, “not least because it hopes to gain millions of dollars worth of funding through REDD.”

He also notes that countries in the north are keen to fund REDD in Indonesia, not least because it allows them to greenwash continued oil extraction. Norway’s StatoilHydro, he says, is developing oil projects in Indonesia. Meanwhile, Norway’s Ambassador to Indonesia, Eivind Homme can claim that, “Norway is financing the UN REDD program, one of the pilot projects on climate change, in Indonesia.”

That identifies a final element. The scheme allows national governments to be seen to be “doing something” on climate change, while avoiding excessive burdens on their industries, on which they rely for taxation and employment. Governments are increasingly important financiers of environmental NGOs, and will tend to favour those who support their agendas.

Putting this all together, one does not need a public admission from WWF to assert – with great confidence – that the motivation behind its current Amazon schemes is money. Similar motivation can be seen in other environmental groups, including the Woods Hole Research Centre.

Above all, to keep the money flowing, there must be continued alarums about “climate change” and its impact on rainforests. Without global warming, of course, there would still be pressure on the forests from logging, from agricultural encroachment and other land use. But it would be difficult to sustain such a large cash flow from dealing with these problems, or legitimise intervention in what would then be the internal affairs of host nations.

Climate change – à la WWF – therefore, affords both cash and an excuse to intervene. If it didn’t actually exist, it would surely have to be invented.

– As reported by RN

Noel Kempff project is ‘saving the forest’ by forcing destruction elsewhere

Calculating the value of carbon in trees | Nature Conservancy Exploitation

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• Comment | Refresh

• By Olga Swarthout

  From Holly, MI, 02/27/2010

  These relatively small tribes of indiginous people have suffered throughout history like the American native Indians.
  In the 16th century they were victimized by European geo-political machinations that gave Brazil to the Portugese and the rest of S. America to Spain ( see the award winning 1980’s movie THE MISSION, starring Robert DeNiro, Jeremy Irons and Liam Neeson ). In the 20th century they were again disenfranchised by Brazil’s massive agricultural development. The government ultimately gave them safe haven deep in the high forests bordering Argentina. Today, even that land is not safe for the Indians.

  By Larry Tobos

  From MI, 02/26/2010

  Nothing new here: “civilized” people taking advantage and forcing “savages” to remain that way so we can have “big oil” enjoying the same old bonanza. Just appaled by the story, and you categorizing it as a “green” story. Sincerely,
  Laurentiu (Larry) Tobos

Conservation Refugees

When protecting nature means kicking people out

by Mark Dowie

A LOW FOG ENVELOPS THE STEEP and remote valleys of southwestern Uganda most mornings, as birds found only in this small corner of the continent rise in chorus and the great apes drink from clear streams. Days in the dense montane forest are quiet and steamy. Nights are an exaltation of insects and primate howling. For thousands of years the Batwa people thrived in this soundscape, in such close harmony with the forest that early-twentieth-century wildlife biologists who studied the flora and fauna of the region barely noticed their existence. They were, as one naturalist noted, “part of the fauna.”

In the 1930s, Ugandan leaders were persuaded by international conservationists that this area was threatened by loggers, miners, and other extractive interests. In response, three forest reserves were created—the Mgahinga, the Echuya, and the Bwindi—all of which overlapped with the Batwa’s ancestral territory. For sixty years these reserves simply existed on paper, which kept them off-limits to extractors. And the Batwa stayed on, living as they had for generations, in reciprocity with the diverse biota that first drew conservationists to the region.

However, when the reserves were formally designated as national parks in 1991 and a bureaucracy was created and funded by the World Bank’s Global Environment Facility to manage them, a rumor was in circulation that the Batwa were hunting and eating silverback gorillas, which by that time were widely recognized as a threatened species and also, increasingly, as a featured attraction for ecotourists from Europe and America. Gorillas were being disturbed and even poached, the Batwa admitted, but by Bahutu, Batutsi, Bantu, and other tribes who invaded the forest from outside villages. The Batwa, who felt a strong kinship with the great apes, adamantly denied killing them. Nonetheless, under pressure from traditional Western conservationists, who had come to believe that wilderness and human community were incompatible, the Batwa were forcibly expelled from their homeland.

These forests are so dense that the Batwa lost perspective when they first came out. Some even stepped in front of moving vehicles. Now they are living in shabby squatter camps on the perimeter of the parks, without running water or sanitation. In one more generation their forest-based culture—songs, rituals, traditions, and stories—will be gone.

It’s no secret that millions of native peoples around the world have been pushed off their land to make room for big oil, big metal, big timber, and big agriculture. But few people realize that the same thing has happened for a much nobler cause: land and wildlife conservation. Today the list of culture-wrecking institutions put forth by tribal leaders on almost every continent includes not only Shell, Texaco, Freeport, and Bechtel, but also more surprising names like Conservation International (CI), The Nature Conservancy (TNC), the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). Even the more culturally sensitive World Conservation Union (IUCN) might get a mention.

In early 2004 a United Nations meeting was convened in New York for the ninth year in a row to push for passage of a resolution protecting the territorial and human rights of indigenous peoples. The UN draft declaration states: “Indigenous peoples shall not be forcibly removed from their lands or territories. No relocation shall take place without the free and informed consent of the indigenous peoples concerned and after agreement on just and fair compensation and, where possible, with the option to return.” During the meeting an indigenous delegate who did not identify herself rose to state that while extractive industries were still a serious threat to their welfare and cultural integrity, their new and biggest enemy was “conservation.”

Later that spring, at a Vancouver, British Columbia, meeting of the International Forum on Indigenous Mapping, all two hundred delegates signed a declaration stating that the “activities of conservation organizations now represent the single biggest threat to the integrity of indigenous lands.” These rhetorical jabs have shaken the international conservation community, as have a subsequent spate of critical articles and studies, two of them conducted by the Ford Foundation, calling big conservation to task for its historical mistreatment of indigenous peoples.

“We are enemies of conservation,” declared Maasai leader Martin Saning’o, standing before a session of the November 2004 World Conservation Congress sponsored by IUCN in Bangkok, Thailand. The nomadic Maasai, who have over the past thirty years lost most of their grazing range to conservation projects throughout eastern Africa, hadn’t always felt that way. In fact, Saning’o reminded his audience, “…we were the original conservationists.” The room was hushed as he quietly explained how pastoral and nomadic cattlemen have traditionally protected their range: “Our ways of farming pollinated diverse seed species and maintained corridors between ecosystems.” Then he tried to fathom the strange version of land conservation that has impoverished his people, more than one hundred thousand of whom have been displaced from southern Kenya and the Serengeti Plains of Tanzania. Like the Batwa, the Maasai have not been fairly compensated. Their culture is dissolving and they live in poverty.

“We don’t want to be like you,” Saning’o told a room of shocked white faces. “We want you to be like us. We are here to change your minds. You cannot accomplish conservation without us.”

Although he might not have realized it, Saning’o was speaking for a growing worldwide movement of indigenous peoples who think of themselves as conservation refugees. Not to be confused with ecological refugees—people forced to abandon their homelands as a result of unbearable heat, drought, desertification, flooding, disease, or other consequences of climate chaos—conservation refugees are removed from their lands involuntarily, either forcibly or through a variety of less coercive measures. The gentler, more benign methods are sometimes called “soft eviction” or “voluntary resettlement,” though the latter is contestable. Soft or hard, the main complaint heard in the makeshift villages bordering parks and at meetings like the World Conservation Congress in Bangkok is that relocation often occurs with the tacit approval or benign neglect of one of the five big international nongovernmental conservation organizations, or as they have been nicknamed by indigenous leaders, the BINGOs. Indigenous peoples are often left out of the process entirely.

Curious about this brand of conservation that puts the rights of nature before the rights of people, I set out last autumn to meet the issue face to face. I visited with tribal members on three continents who were grappling with the consequences of Western conservation and found an alarming similarity among the stories I heard.

KHON NOI, MATRIARCH OF A REMOTE mountain village, huddles next to an open-pit stove in the loose, brightly colored clothes that identify her as Karen, the most populous of six tribes found in the lush, mountainous reaches of far northern Thailand. Her village of sixty-five families has been in the same wide valley for over two hundred years. She chews betel, spitting its bright red juice into the fire, and speaks softly through black teeth. She tells me I can use her name, as long as I don’t identify her village.

“The government has no idea who I am,” she says. “The only person in the village they know by name is the ‘headman’ they appointed to represent us in government negotiations. They were here last week, in military uniforms, to tell us we could no longer practice rotational agriculture in this valley. If they knew that someone here was saying bad things about them they would come back again and move us out.”

In a recent outburst of environmental enthusiasm stimulated by generous financial offerings from the Global Environment Facility, the Thai government has been creating national parks as fast as the Royal Forest Department can map them. Ten years ago there was barely a park to be found in Thailand, and because those few that existed were unmarked “paper parks,” few Thais even knew they were there. Now there are 114 land parks and 24 marine parks on the map. Almost twenty-five thousand square kilometers, most of which are occupied by hill and fishing tribes, are now managed by the forest department as protected areas.

“Men in uniform just appeared one day, out of nowhere, showing their guns,” Kohn Noi recalls, “and telling us that we were now living in a national park. That was the first we knew of it. Our own guns were confiscated . . . no more hunting, no more trapping, no more snaring, and no more “slash and burn.” That’s what they call our agriculture. We call it crop rotation and we’ve been doing it in this valley for over two hundred years. Soon we will be forced to sell rice to pay for greens and legumes we are no longer allowed to grow here. Hunting we can live without, as we raise chickens, pigs, and buffalo. But rotational farming is our way of life.”

A week before our conversation, and a short flight south of Noi’s village, six thousand conservationists were attending the World Conservation Congress in Bangkok. At that conference and elsewhere, big conservation has denied that they are party to the evictions while generating reams of promotional material about their affection for, and close relationships with, indigenous peoples. “We recognize that indigenous people have perhaps the deepest understanding of the Earth’s living resources,” says Conservation International chairman and CEO Peter Seligman, adding that, “we firmly believe that indigenous people must have ownership, control and title of their lands.” Such messages are carefully projected toward major funders of conservation, which in response to the aforementioned Ford Foundation reports and other press have become increasingly sensitive to indigenous peoples and their struggles for cultural survival.

Financial support for international conservation has in recent years expanded well beyond the individuals and family foundations that seeded the movement to include very large foundations like Ford, MacArthur, and Gordon and Betty Moore, as well as the World Bank, its Global Environment Facility, foreign governments, USAID, a host of bilateral and multilateral banks, and transnational corporations. During the 1990s USAID alone pumped almost $300 million into the international conservation movement, which it had come to regard as a vital adjunct to economic prosperity. The five largest conservation organizations, CI, TNC, and WWF among them, absorbed over 70 percent of that expenditure. Indigenous communities received none of it. The Moore Foundation made a singular ten-year commitment of nearly $280 million, the largest environmental grant in history, to just one organization—Conservation International. And all of the BINGOs have become increasingly corporate in recent years, both in orientation and affiliation. The Nature Conservancy now boasts almost two thousand corporate sponsors, while Conservation International has received about $9 million from its two hundred fifty corporate “partners.”

With that kind of financial and political leverage, as well as chapters in almost every country of the world, millions of loyal members, and nine-figure budgets, CI, WWF, and TNC have undertaken a hugely expanded global push to increase the number of so-called protected areas (PAs)—parks, reserves, wildlife sanctuaries, and corridors created to preserve biological diversity. In 1962, there were some 1,000 official PAs worldwide. Today there are 108,000, with more being added every day. The total area of land now under conservation protection worldwide has doubled since 1990, when the World Parks Commission set a goal of protecting 10 percent of the planet’s surface. That goal has been exceeded, with over 12 percent of all land, a total area of 11.75 million square miles, now protected. That’s an area greater than the entire land mass of Africa.

During the 1990s the African nation of Chad increased the amount of national land under protection from 0.1 to 9.1 percent. All of that land had been previously inhabited by what are now an estimated six hundred thousand conservation refugees. No other country besides India, which officially admits to 1.6 million, is even counting this growing new class of refugees. World estimates offered by the UN, IUCN, and a few anthropologists range from 5 million to tens of millions. Charles Geisler, a sociologist at Cornell University who has studied displacements in Africa, is certain the number on that continent alone exceeds 14 million.

The true worldwide figure, if it were ever known, would depend upon the semantics of words like “eviction,” “displacement,” and “refugee,” over which parties on all sides of the issue argue endlessly. The larger point is that conservation refugees exist on every continent but Antarctica, and by most accounts live far more difficult lives than they once did, banished from lands they thrived on for hundreds, even thousands of years.

John Muir, a forefather of the American conservation movement, argued that “wilderness” should be cleared of all inhabitants and set aside to satisfy the urbane human’s need for recreation and spiritual renewal. It was a sentiment that became national policy with the passage of the 1964 Wilderness Act, which defined wilderness as a place “where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” One should not be surprised to find hardy residues of these sentiments among traditional conservation groups. The preference for “virgin” wilderness has lingered on in a movement that has tended to value all nature but human nature, and refused to recognize the positive wildness in human beings.

Expulsions continue around the world to this day. The Indian government, which evicted one hundred thousand adivasis (rural peoples) in Assam between April and July of 2002, estimates that 2 or 3 million more will be displaced over the next decade. The policy is largely in response to a 1993 lawsuit brought by WWF, which demanded that the government increase PAs by 8 percent, mostly in order to protect tiger habitat. A more immediate threat involves the impending removal of several Mayan communities from the Montes Azules region of Chiapas, Mexico, a process begun in the mid-1970s with the intent to preserve virgin tropical forest, which could still quite easily spark a civil war. Conservation International is deeply immersed in that controversy, as are a host of extractive industries.

Tribal people, who tend to think and plan in generations, rather than weeks, months, and years, are still waiting to be paid the consideration promised. Of course the UN draft declaration is the prize because it must be ratified by so many nations. The declaration has failed to pass so far mainly because powerful leaders such as Tony Blair and George Bush threaten to veto it, arguing that there is not and should never be such a thing as collective human rights.

Sadly, the human rights and global conservation communities remain at serious odds over the question of displacement, each side blaming the other for the particular crisis they perceive. Conservation biologists argue that by allowing native populations to grow, hunt, and gather in protected areas, anthropologists, cultural preservationists, and other supporters of indigenous rights become complicit in the decline of biological diversity. Some, like the Wildlife Conservation Society’s outspoken president, Steven Sanderson, believe that the entire global conservation agenda has been “hijacked” by advocates for indigenous peoples, placing wildlife and biodiversity in peril. “Forest peoples and their representatives may speak for the forest,” Sanderson has said, “They may speak for their version of the forest; but they do not speak for the forest we want to conserve.” WCS, originally the New York Zoological Society, is a BINGO lesser in size and stature than the likes of TNC and CI, but more insistent than its colleagues that indigenous territorial rights, while a valid social issue, should be of no concern to wildlife conservationists.

Market-based solutions put forth by human rights groups, which may have been implemented with the best of social and ecological intentions, share a lamentable outcome, barely discernible behind a smoke screen of slick promotion. In almost every case indigenous people are moved into the money economy without the means to participate in it fully. They become permanently indentured as park rangers (never wardens), porters, waiters, harvesters, or, if they manage to learn a European language, ecotour guides. Under this model, “conservation” edges ever closer to “development,” while native communities are assimilated into the lowest ranks of national cultures.

It should be no surprise, then, that tribal peoples regard conservationists as just another colonizer—an extension of the deadening forces of economic and cultural hegemony. Whole societies like the Batwa, the Maasai, the Ashinika of Peru, the Gwi and Gana Bushmen of Botswana, the Karen and Hmong of Southeast Asia, and the Huarani of Ecuador are being transformed from independent and self-sustaining into deeply dependent and poor communities.

WHEN I TRAVELED THROUGHOUT MESOAMERICA and the Andean-Amazon watershed last fall visiting staff members of CI, TNC, WCS, and WWF I was looking for signs that an awakening was on the horizon. The field staff I met were acutely aware that the spirit of exclusion survives in the headquarters of their organizations, alongside a subtle but real prejudice against “unscientific” native wisdom. Dan Campbell, TNC’s director in Belize, conceded, “We have an organization that sometimes tries to employ models that don’t fit the culture of nations where we work.” And Joy Grant, in the same office, said that as a consequence of a protracted disagreement with the indigenous peoples of Belize, local people “are now the key to everything we do.”

“We are arrogant,” was the confession of a CI executive working in South America, who asked me not to identify her. I was heartened by her admission until she went on to suggest that this was merely a minor character flaw. In fact, arrogance was cited by almost all of the nearly one hundred indigenous leaders I met with as a major impediment to constructive communication with big conservation.

If field observations and field workers’ sentiments trickle up to the headquarters of CI and the other BINGOs, there could be a happy ending to this story. There are already positive working models of socially sensitive conservation on every continent, particularly in Australia, Bolivia, Nepal, and Canada, where national laws that protect native land rights leave foreign conservationists no choice but to join hands with indigenous communities and work out creative ways to protect wildlife habitat and sustain biodiversity while allowing indigenous citizens to thrive in their traditional settlements.

In most such cases it is the native people who initiate the creation of a reserve, which is more likely to be called an “indigenous protected area” (IPA) or a “community conservation area” (CCA). IPAs are an invention of Australian aboriginals, many of whom have regained ownership and territorial autonomy under new treaties with the national government, and CCAs are appearing around the world, from Lao fishing villages along the Mekong River to the Mataven Forest in Colombia, where six indigenous tribes live in 152 villages bordering a four-million-acre ecologically intact reserve.

The Kayapo, a nation of Amazonian Indians with whom the Brazilian government and CI have formed a co-operative conservation project, is another such example. Kayapo leaders, renowned for their militancy, openly refused to be treated like just another stakeholder in a two-way deal between a national government and a conservation NGO, as is so often the case with co-operative management plans. Throughout negotiations they insisted upon being an equal player at the table, with equal rights and land sovereignty. As a consequence, the Xingu National Park, the continent’s first Indian-owned park, was created to protect the lifeways of the Kayapo and other indigenous Amazonians who are determined to remain within the park’s boundaries.

In many locations, once a CCA is established and territorial rights are assured, the founding community invites a BINGO to send its ecologists and wildlife biologists to share in the task of protecting biodiversity by combining Western scientific methodology with indigenous ecological knowledge. And on occasion they will ask for help negotiating with reluctant governments. For example, the Guarani Izoceños people in Bolivia invited the Wildlife Conservation Society to mediate a comanagement agreement with their government, which today allows the tribe to manage and own part of the new Kaa-Iya del Gran Chaco National Park.

TOO MUCH HOPE SHOULD PROBABLY NOT be placed in a handful of successful co-management models, however. The unrestrained corporate lust for energy, hardwood, medicines, and strategic metals is still a considerable threat to indigenous communities, arguably a larger threat than conservation. But the lines between the two are being blurred. Particularly problematic is the fact that international conservation organizations remain comfortable working in close quarters with some of the most aggressive global resource prospectors, such as Boise Cascade, Chevron-Texaco, Mitsubishi, Conoco-Phillips, International Paper, Rio Tinto Mining, Shell, and Weyerhauser, all of whom are members of a CI-created entity called the Center for Environmental Leadership in Business. Of course if the BINGOs were to renounce their corporate partners, they would forfeit millions of dollars in revenue and access to global power without which they sincerely believe they could not be effective.

And there are some respected and influential conservation biologists who still strongly support top-down, centralized “fortress” conservation. Duke University’s John Terborgh, for example, author of the classic Requiem for Nature, believes that co-management projects and CCAs are a huge mistake. “My feeling is that a park should be a park, and it shouldn’t have any resident people in it,” he says. He bases his argument on three decades of research in Peru’s Manu National Park, where native Machiguenga Indians fish and hunt animals with traditional weapons. Terborgh is concerned that they will acquire motorboats, guns, and chainsaws used by their fellow tribesmen outside the park, and that biodiversity will suffer. Then there’s paleontologist Richard Leakey, who at the 2003 World Parks Congress in South Africa set off a firestorm of protest by denying the very existence of indigenous peoples in Kenya, his homeland, and arguing that “the global interest in biodiversity might sometimes trump the rights of local people.”

Yet many conservationists are beginning to realize that most of the areas they have sought to protect are rich in biodiversity precisely because the people who were living there had come to understand the value and mechanisms of biological diversity. Some will even admit that wrecking the lives of 10 million or more poor, powerless people has been an enormous mistake—not only a moral, social, philosophical, and economic mistake, but an ecological one as well. Others have learned from experience that national parks and protected areas surrounded by angry, hungry people who describe themselves as “enemies of conservation” are generally doomed to fail.

More and more conservationists seem to be wondering how, after setting aside a “protected” land mass the size of Africa, global biodiversity continues to decline. Might there be something terribly wrong with this plan—particularly after the Convention on Biological Diversity has documented the astounding fact that in Africa, where so many parks and reserves have been created and where indigenous evictions run highest, 90 percent of biodiversity lies outside of protected areas? If we want to preserve biodiversity in the far reaches of the globe, places that are in many cases still occupied by indigenous people living in ways that are ecologically sustainable, history is showing us that the dumbest thing we can do is kick them out.

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/161/

Conservation Refugees

The Hundred-Year Conflict between Global Conservation and Native Peoples

Mark Dowie

Table of Contents and Sample Chapters

Since 1900, more than 108,000 officially protected conservation areas have been established worldwide, largely at the urging of five international conservation organizations. About half of these areas were occupied or regularly used by indigenous peoples. Millions who had been living sustainably on their land for generations were displaced in the interests of conservation. In Conservation Refugees, Mark Dowie tells this story.

This is a “good guy vs. good guy” story, Dowie writes; the indigenous peoples’ movement and conservation organizations have a vital common goal—to protect biological diversity—and could work effectively and powerfully together to protect the planet and preserve species and ecosystem diversity. Yet for more than a hundred years, these two forces have been at odds. The result: thousands of unmanageable protected areas and native peoples reduced to poaching and trespassing on their ancestral lands or “assimilated” but permanently indentured on the lowest rungs of the economy.

Dowie begins with the story of Yosemite National Park, which by the turn of the twentieth century established a template for bitter encounters between native peoples and conservation. He then describes the experiences of other groups, ranging from the Ogiek and Maasai of eastern Africa and the Pygmies of Central Africa to the Karen of Thailand and the Adevasis of India. He also discusses such issues as differing definitions of “nature” and “wilderness,” the influence of the “BINGOs” (Big International NGOs, including the Worldwide Fund for Nature, Conservation International, and The Nature Conservancy), the need for Western scientists to respect and honor traditional lifeways, and the need for native peoples to blend their traditional knowledge with the knowledge of modern ecology. When conservationists and native peoples acknowledge the interdependence of biodiversity conservation and cultural survival, Dowie writes, they can together create a new and much more effective paradigm for conservation.

About the Author

Award-winning journalist Mark Dowie is the author of Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century, American Foundations: An Investigative History (both published by the MIT Press), and four other books.

Reviews

“A beautiful balance of critique and sympathy.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Unlike a fine wine, Mark Dowie has not mellowed with age. This book proves it.”
—John Passacantando, former Executive Director, Greenpeace USA

“Mark Dowie is, pound for pound, one of the best investigative journalists around.”
—Studs Terkel, author of Working

“As a journalist, Mark Dowie has always been a few steps ahead of the pack, and with Conservation Refugees he’s once again staked out a difficult and fascinating terrain: the indigenous peoples that, all the way back to the founding of Yosemite, have been invisible or worse to the conservation movement. A vision of wilderness that makes no place for people has long held sway in environmental circles, but there are signs it is coming to an end—and not a moment too soon. Dowie’s book advances the critical work of developing a new, more encompassing vision of nature, which makes it one of the most important contributions to conservation in many years.”–Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food

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