From Polar Bear Science HT/Cam_S
Dr. Susan Crockford
The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) was created in 1961 to lift funds for wildlife conservation and instantly recruited European royalty to assist entice rich benefactors. At first it was a novel good trigger and for this reason Britain’s royal household, plus their shut buddy David Attenborough, have been loyal supporters for six a long time. Nonetheless, for greater than twenty years, the WWF has not been the benevolent conservation group that it was within the Sixties but these highly effective males assist them with extra vigor than ever.
Prince Philip was the primary president of the WWF-UK however ended his affiliation with the group after they morphed right into a politicized activist group lobbying for the limitation of fossil fuels to curb human-caused world warming. Nonetheless, Prince Charles, now King Charles III, turned much more concerned in WWF propaganda machine and ultimately initiated son William, now inheritor obvious, into doing the identical.
When the WWF started falsely selling itself as a scientific authority a dozen or so years in the past, these naive elite boosters accepted it with out query, parroting unsubstantiated WWF local weather doomsday speaking factors at each alternative. These males don’t converse with an authority of their very own data on this matter: they use their exalted positions to help the WWF and others obtain their utopian dream: destroy for others the capitalism that created their very own wealth and energy.
It’s clear now that most of the targets of the WWF are additionally shared by the World Financial Discussion board (WEF), and that these complement the imaginative and prescient the King and David Attenborough have for the longer term. All of them need a return to a world with fewer those who dwell meager, circumscribed lives whereas the wealthy stick with it their jet-setting methods. The King will foyer once more for his or her collective imaginative and prescient of the world this Friday at Buckingham Palace.
Attenborough additionally spoke out on the subject in particular person just a few weeks in the past (see under) after years of creating documentaries and public statements that make his place very clear. Attenborough turned an official WWF ambassador in 2015, the identical yr that the WWF partnered with Netflix and the BBC to make their first documentary, ‘Our Planet’. The WWF’s warped notion of science prevailed in ‘Our Planet’, so it’s no surprise the documentary is stuffed with deceptive and misleading data. The movie featured the notorious falling walrus fiasco that’s the focus of my guide, Fallen Icon: Sir David Attenborough and the Walrus Deception.
I’ve copied an excerpt under concerning the WWF-Royalty-Attenborough connection as necessary background to understanding the ability construction of the local weather change and animal conservation agenda that’s now being pushed arduous in an emotionally manipulative method. I’ve spent years exhibiting that situations within the pure world are not as dangerous as Attenborough and the WWF insist and so don’t warrant excessive ‘options’ as proposed by King Charles, the WEF, and plenty of who will attend the COP 27. I’ll proceed resisting this utopian fantasy.
Excerpt from Fallen Icon
World Wildlife Fund, aka World Wildlife Fund for Nature
The WWF was based in 1961 by businessmen as a approach to assist increase cash for the newly-formed Worldwide Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which was having monetary bother finishing up its mission to guard species vulnerable to extinction. WWF arrange store at IUCN headquarters in Switzerland, tying the 2 collectively by cash. As a result of it aimed to draw rich benefactors – a lot of whom had a ardour for African safaris – the WWF didn’t condemn looking. It lastly did impose restrictions on looking in 1965 however just for these holding workplace on the WWF, on land ‘put aside for prosperity with WWF cash’. Looking on the whole and even trophy looking particularly was by no means actively discouraged.[i]
Prince Bernhard, consort of Queen Juliana of The Netherlands was the primary high-profile president of WWF Worldwide, whereas Prince Philip, consort of Queen Elizabeth II of the UK, turned the president of WWF-UK. In European royal custom, each have been avid massive recreation hunters and generated appreciable controversy for doing so within the early Sixties whereas selling the brand new WWF conservation group. They each ultimately stopped looking abroad though they saved looking in Europe.[ii]
The WWF had lofty targets from the start but it surely took some time to amass the funds wanted to actually make a distinction. Its first main grant was $38,000 to the Smithsonian Establishment in 1973 to review the tiger inhabitants in Nepal.[iii] Through the years, WWF turned very efficient at its fund elevating and lobbying for conservation causes.[iv] By 2010 it was an exceedingly rich and profitable enterprise: it had workplaces in 82 international locations, greater than 5,000 workers, and a complete working income of €524,963,000 (equal to only below three-quarters of a billion US {dollars} at the moment).[v]
The WWF’s first enterprise into selling the idea of human-caused world warming and its looming disaster seems to have are available in 1999, when it established a ‘Local weather Savers’ program that partnered with firms to assist them scale back greenhouse gasoline emissions.[vi] In 2004, they developed a program to encourage the general public to explain how that they had personally skilled the consequences of human-caused local weather change, who they referred to as ‘local weather witnesses’. Though such tales weren’t verified and subsequently couldn’t be thought-about details or proof, a ‘Local weather Witness Scientific Advisory Panel’ of specialists was established. The job of those specialists was to place a quasi-scientific stamp of approval on the tales of local weather woe.[vii] Have been they, or have been they not, in line with anticipated results of local weather change? Accepted anecdotes have been later printed as ‘Local weather Witness Truth Sheets’ that could possibly be downloaded from the WWF web site.
These preliminary ventures into the local weather change narrative appear to have been the impetus for the WWF to start out positioning and selling itself as a trusted scientific authority on subjects associated to conservation and environmental safety (because it did to the UK Home of Commons in 2014), relatively than merely a fund-raising group whose function was to assist different organizations save species and habitats.[viii] For greater than a decade, it has been rich sufficient to make use of individuals with levels in conservation biology – who we’re inspired to consider as unbiased scientists relatively than activists with college levels – and to fund analysis initiatives we’re inspired to consider as unbiased scientific research relatively than workouts in round reasoning.[ix]
The very nature of the group implies that all staff and associates have a skewed imaginative and prescient of the world and an agenda that should be served, which tends to distort any analysis earlier than it might probably even start.[x] Since 1998, the WWF had been producing a ‘Dwelling Planet Report’ on the state of the planet, based mostly on research of doubtful validity and interpreted by way of the peculiar lens of WWF advocacy. Nonetheless, clearly that wasn’t impactful sufficient – the group lastly branched out into big-ticket local weather change documentaries in 2015, the place their distorted interpretations of science could possibly be changed into high-definition infomercials offered as academic leisure – which is the place Attenborough and the story of Pacific walruses got here into play.[xi]
Earlier than that, nevertheless, the WWF had been helping cash-poor small communities throughout the Arctic (together with Russia, Greenland, Canada and Alaska) shield themselves from polar bear assaults. Polar bear issues throughout the Arctic turned more and more frequent after the flip of the twenty first century as polar bear numbers continued to develop after they obtained worldwide safety from overhunting in 1973.[xii] Nonetheless, the amount of money invested in these packages has been small when thought-about in opposition to the group’s huge wealth. For instance in 2020, WWF-Russia lastly – after greater than a decade of ‘partnership’ – assisted within the buy of an ATV and a snowmobile for the village of Ryrkaipiy in Chukotka, which has had an issue with bears since at the very least 2006; in different areas, WWF trains and pays the small wages for just a few polar bear guards who’re undoubtedly glad to have any amount of money for just a few months (residing as they do in economies the place alternatives to earn cash are uncommon).[xiii]
On the identical time, the WWF exploit these events to indoctrinate native residents and their kids to the present WWF view of the world, which supplies them loyal native contacts they’ll rely on for data and logistical assist. Nonetheless, most critically, these WWF packages are promoted closely to most of the people as ‘good works’: usually, journalists are satisfied to write down about these useful packages, giving the group necessary free publicity.[xiv] On steadiness, the PR worth of those Arctic packages – when it comes to the elevated donations to the WWF they generate – is nearly definitely a lot bigger than the prices to run them, which is without doubt one of the causes the group has turn into so wealthy.
David Attenborough has had an extended affiliation with the WWF in Britain. WWF-UK was the primary nationwide group established after WWF-Worldwide was fashioned. In 1961, Prince Philip (Duke of Edinburgh, husband to Queen Elizabeth II) served as its first president, from 1961 to 1982, a task his son Prince Charles took on in 2011. Remarkably, Prince Philip withdrew his assist for the group when the WWF started its aggressive marketing campaign in opposition to world warming, whilst his son Charles turned a extra fervent advocate.[xv] Attenborough by no means had such an epiphany: he got here on board the WWF-UK together with the royal household within the early Sixties and has served as an official WWF ‘Ambassador’ since at the very least June 2015.[xvi]
Attenborough has all the time held the WWF in excessive regard – even after it morphed from a conservation fund-raising group of the IUCN right into a billion greenback conglomerate that required many tens of millions of {dollars} in donations yearly simply to cowl working bills and lobbying actions. Not being a scientist himself and subsequently in a position to know higher, he trusts the scientific authority of the WWF: if they are saying a Sixth Mass Extinction is imminent or that unsustainable human exercise is pushing the planet’s pure methods that assist life on Earth to the sting, he not solely believes them however enthusiastically passes alongside the message.[xvii] It’s subsequently hardly shocking that Attenborough would see a enterprise deal to make a documentary with the WWF as a beautiful alternative.
[i] Schwarzenbach, A. 2011:81
[ii] Kay 2014; Farhoud and Strains 2021
[iii] Schwarzenbach, A. 2011; WWF no date
[iv] Laframboise 2012
[v] Glüsing and Klawitter 2012; Laframboise 2011a; WWF 2011; shortly after this time, WWF-Worldwide appears to have stopped producing a doc that exhibits its complete holdings (every subsidiary nation produces its personal), which obscures the immense wealth of the mother or father firm.
[vi] WWF, no date
[vii] Laframboise 2011a; Laframboise 2011b; https://wwf.panda.org/?117540/Local weather-Witness-Truth-Sheets [2009]
[viii] Laframboise 2014
[ix] Given 1993; Horton et al. 2016; Noss 1999; Westcott 2016; WWF 2016a; WWF 2018; WWF 2020b
[x] https://www.worldwildlife.org/publications
[xi] WWF 2016a; WWF 2018; https://wwf.panda.org/wwf_news/?345490/Our-Planet-highlights-need-for-global-action-to-protect-nature
[xii] Crockford 2019c; Wilder et al. 2017
[xiii] https://arcticwwf.org/newsroom/tales/tatyana-minenko-the-polar-bear-patrol-chief/ [Ryrkaipiy, 25 March 2020; https://www.worldwildlife.org/stories/one-arctic-town-s-very-busy-polar-bear-patrol [East Greenland, 26 Feb 2018]
[xiv] Zerehi 2016
[xv] Booker 2017
[xvi] WWF 2016a
[xvii] BBC 2019c; Westcott 2016; WWF 2016b; https://www.inverse.com/article/39394-david-attenborough-sixth-mass-extinction
