This site has lately been littered with ads for IFAW. This crowd rakes in millions upon millions of dollars per year to save whales and seals etc. but seems to do sweet bugger-all about actually stopping them from being killed. Lots of boats floating around Canada with people in orange survival suits, but no real action, especially in places like Namibia that are off the mainstream media's radar screen. IFAW has been raising cash off the back of the Namibian seal cull for years but has never intervened substantively to stop it. Their southern African campaign was for years headed up by an advertising/pr guy called David Barritt who worked as the spindoctor for South Africa's biggest fraudster, Brett Kebble (think Enron personified).

Grist might do well to look into IFAW and where their money goes (hint: start by finding the property value of their founder, Davies', mansion in Florida) and then have a long, hard think about continuing to run their advertising.

Whiskerfish

Thanks, Whiskerfish, they looked rather dodgy to me.  I went to their site once, silently wished them well, and never thereafter paid them any mind.

Pity, though, is it not, if organizations professedly concerned with the welfare of wildlife come to be believed to be no more than false, slick, money-collecting operations.

Chickens are our cousins! So are other sensitive animals! Enough is enough! No more factory farms!

David,
in response to your irony:
"I tell you, that story fills me with confidence in the mainstream environmental movement!"

I'd report that the same perverse outcomes occur here in Europe.

Certain influences withing the MEM here are dead set against the global climate policy framework of Contraction & Convergence,
for reasons that have not been made clear in 15 years' debate,
which has now resulted in a bizarre statement by one such influence
at the recent UNFCCC session in Bonn.

John Lanchberry of the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds)
and strategist for the Stop Climate Chaos Coalition [SCCC],
has finally confirmed that SCCC will afterall not have a 'position'
on the future of global climate policy
as the movement apparently cannot agree what the position should be.

"We do not think," he said in Bonn earlier this week, "that it is
helpful to have an organising principle in this matter."

Which neatly ignores the reality that principle always precedes practice,
whether by design or by default,
and the operating principle that Lanchberry is promoting is that of appeasement.

And these organizations mop up hundreds of millions of £s/yr !

With freinds like these, who needs Exxon ?

Regards,

Bill

Pretty much look in any direction and you will find stories of insularity, incompetence and petty turf wars within the environmental movement.  I am not suggesting that something about this movement makes it worse than other ones (say, labor unions).  All movements suffer from dysfunction.  But if you are expecting high-level performance, you may very well be disappointed.

Prediction:  If the future is like the past, some of the most important global warming reforms of the next few decades won't come primarily from environmental activists.

Grist could play a useful role by providing greater coverage of the environmental movement's inner workings.  However, it would need to be done carefully.  What I don't have in mind is the cynical, "holy crap" story that feeds people's sense of apathy.  

Rather, what is needed is coverage that points to what is wrong but in a way that also sheds light on more successful alternatives.  The overarching goal isn't to denounce but to help people learn more effective ways of organizing in an increasingly complex and fast-paced political environment.

Truth be told?  We're all bozos on this bus, because the challenges we face are unprecedented.  There is no road map to where we need to go.

Hardly anyone in the media wants to cast a cynical eye on environmental or animal welfare organisations. They're seen as being above reproach. Hardly anyone, that is, besides right-wing hatchet-jobbers.

Enviro stuff is very difficult to do. You've got to balance a zillion different things and there will be more screw-ups than successes. But there are some organisations like, dare I say it, IFAW, that really take the piss from their donors. If you look at the salaries some folks at the top end are getting paid, and the obsessive secrecy around them, you've got to get really suspicious.

There's a difference betwen raking in the dollars and getting something done, but it seems that loads of organisations rank their effectiveness on the money they bring in and not the minds they change. Nowadays we have professional environmentalists that have no particular knowledge or love for nature, and that really scares the hell out of me.

So, Mr Roberts, how about a no-holds-barred look at IFAW, one of the largest animal welfare/'conservation' organisations on the planet? Find out how much they spend annually on chartering private Gulfstream jet trips... What Fred O'Regan, the current head honcho, thought of his childhood pet dog... How much they paid their founder, Davies, so they could carry on using his name and image to raise money after he left... and what Davies is doing now, along with David Barrit, spindoctor to South Africa's biggest fraudster, Brett Kebble...

The answers are out there, and some are rather easy to find.

Whiskerfish

I noticed today that NYTimes.com has up an interview that Andrew Revkin did with Bill Clinton.  Bill seems to be involved with some new organization that is apparently ready to put some money where the environmentalist mouth is, and that was the occasion of the interview.  Revkin comes across as having a certain hat-in-hand approach, not to say reverential or genuflecting.  Nevertheless, he asked him why the two-term Clinton administration does not have a better environmental record.  Bill blamed that in part on a hostile Congress, including the Democrats; in part on the non-arrival of the historic moment, which he seems to feel has now arrived; and in part on certain mistaken emphases of his own -- but that part was rather over my head.

I am very glad that Revkin did NOT ask him something like, "Can we assume that a President Hillary Clinton would share your environmental agenda and make direct use of your current involvement in these matters?"

Chickens are our cousins! So are other sensitive animals! Enough is enough! No more factory farms!