Was Peak Conservation Caring in 1978?
Image Google Books Ngram Viewer Was Peak Conservation Caring in 1978? It would seem so. Lynn Johnson 29 October, 2020 Did we really reach peak interest in conservation in 1978? If we go by the published written word, it appears so. Firstly, the graph – what are you looking at? Google Ngram Viewer uses data from its ambitious book-digitizing project which started in 2002; to-date the project has digitized at least 30 million books from major university libraries. This means the frequency of keywords as displayed in the graph is slanted towards scientific and non-fiction books. In the case of wildlife and conservation this slant towards more [...]
Introducing The Fly
Image Backiris Introducing The Fly It's Time To See Clearly. Lynn Johnson 28 October, 2020 As the Northern hemisphere braces itself for a second wave of COVID-19, has anything been learned about the trade in endangered wildlife which has brought the world to its knees? On the 4th February 2020, Nature Needs More sent the first of many emails to global mainstream media publications and journalists covering the emerging pandemic. The correspondence linked the zoonotic origin of the pandemic to the lack of regulation of the legal trade in exotic and endangered species. Eight months on, the legal trade in exotic and endangered wildlife as the root [...]
Investigate The Cause Not Just The Symptoms
Helen Clark, who has been appointed to lead the investigation into the World Health Organization response to the coronavirus pandemic, said in a recent interview: “The brief we’ve been given is, what do we need to stop the world being blindsided again by a crisis like this?” While I for one am delighted with the choice of Helen Clark, given her reputation as a “fighter” and someone who will push the boundaries of the scope of the review if needed. But even she will only be able to push these boundaries so far. We must see clearly that the scope of this review is far too narrow because it is only investigating the role of the [...]
Nearly 50 Years Of Perception Management
Perception management involves 3 techniques: deletions, distortions and generalisations. These techniques have been used consistently to divert attention away from the legal trade in endangered species and the failure of the system set up to regulate it. The aim has been to keep the public focused squarely on the problem of illegal trade and, in the main, this has worked. When the failures suddenly enter public awareness, as in the case of the zoonotic and legal trade origin of Covid-19, the stakeholders usually scramble to acknowledge an ‘isolated incident’ or ‘single point of failure’ but refuse to talk about the long-standing systemic issues. We can no longer tolerate the perception management that the legal trade in [...]
HowToSpendItEthically.Org
I would like to introduce a new pillar to the Nature Needs More strategy – a new online magazine titled HowToSpendItEthically.Org: https://howtospenditethically.org/ We have created this online magazine, with articles primarily targeting the consumers of wildlife products, because there is nothing like it currently and there is an urgent need to educate consumers. For more than a year we have tried and struggled to get the mainstream media interested in investigating the legal trade in species, with very limited success. This seems incredible given the massive scale of this utterly destructive trade. We particularly tried to get coverage of the glaring mismatch between the vast profits made by business compared to the near-total lack [...]
What Does A One-Trick-Pony And Australian Crocodile Farming Have In Common? Sustainable-Use Ideology
Why one trick pony? Because crocodile farming, in Australia, is the go-to example pro sustainable-use organisations spout to ‘validate’ the sustainable-use model. In articles, at conferences (including CITES CoP18) and in workshops it is the only example regurgitated as the justification of the ideology. And why do I use the word ideology? Because, as I wrote in a September 2019, after attending CITES CoP18, there is no proof the sustainable-use theory works in practice as there is no useful or reliable trade analytics from 44 years of CITES operation. Sustainable-use is an ideology, not a proven strategy. In late 2019, work undertaken by world-leading experts in trade analytics confirmed that the CITES trade database is badly designed and [...]