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CounterPunch
December
5, 2002
Panda Porn:
The Marriage
of WWF and Weyerhaeuser
by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
Back in the good old days, a corporation with
an unappetizing relationship to the natural world would often
try to burnish their image by luring an executive or top staffer
from an environmental group onto their board or into their public
relations department, where they could offer testimonials to
the toxic firm's newfound reverence for Mother Earth.
But times have changed.
Now it's the environmental groups who
seem to be on a shopping spree for corporate executives. For
the latest example of this repellent trend let us turn to the
World Wildlife Fund. Last week, WWF announced that Linda Coady,
now a senior executive at Weyerhaeuser Co, will become vice-president
of the World Wildlife Fund's newly created Pacific regional office
in January.
Weyerhaeuser is the great behemoth of
the timber industry, which has rampaged through the rainforests
of the Pacific Northwest leaving ruin and extinction in its
wake. Weyerhaeuser has operated in Canada for many years, but
in the last decade it has dramatically picked up the pace of
its clearcutting in British Columbia-- partly because it has
largely liquidated its vast holdings in Washington and partly
to flee the constraints of US environmental laws and lawsuits.
Before advancing to Weyerhaeuser, Coady
sharpened her teeth at Macmillan-Bloedel, aka Mac-Blo. Macmillan
Bloedel made billions by clearcutting all but the tiniest sliver
of Vancouver Island before being bought out by Weyerhaeuser.
(That sliver was spared only after 900 people got arrested for
blocking logging roads in 1993. Needlesstosay, no World Wildlife
Fund execs soiled their Gore-Tex rain jackets in those stormy
protests.)
Neither company has ever shown the least
regard for the rights of the First Nations of Canada, who lay
claim to much of the remaining coastal forests of British Columbia.
And the Canadian government has chosen to allow the timber companies
to clearcut those lands before the claims have been settled.
Indeed, Weyerhaeuser is now being sued by the Haida Nation for
illegally clearcutting their land in the Queen Charlotte Islands,
which they call Haida Gwaii.
"They've come and wiped out one
resource after another," says Guujaaw, chief of the Haida
in British Columbia. He notes that Weyerhaeuser logs the old
growth and ships it straight to its mills in Washington State.
The Haida get no money and no jobs. "We've been watching
the logging barges leaving for years and years," says Guujaaw.
"And we have seen practically nothing for Haida."
The moss-draped forests of British Columbia
are even more vulnerable than those of Washington, Oregon and
Alaska. There are few environmental laws to restrain the appetite
of the timber companies and the environmental movement itself
is understaffed and overwhelmed. Now, defenders of Canadian ancient
forests must contend with a conservation group run by a timber
executive.
The result of this mismatch shows up
starkly on the ground, where the clearcuts ramble farther than
the eye can see and the salmon, bears and birds of the deep forest
are vanishing at a heartbreaking rate. At the top of the list
is the northern spotted owl, the very symbol of the ancient forests
of the Pacific Northwest. In the US, the owl is afforded a minimum
level of protection under the Endangered Species Act-though George
W. Bush recently pronounced his desire to jettison the guidelines
and resume logging its nesting grounds once again.
But in Canada the reclusive raptor enjoys
not even the pretense of such a safe harbor; its nesting and
foraging habitat-200 to 800 year-old stands of Douglas-fir and
Sitka spruce-are leveled without quarter or regret. As a result,
scientists expect that the bird will soon go extinct, perhaps
within the next decade.
"It feels like we are taking care
of the dodo," said Ken Macquisten, a veterinarian and managing
director of the Grouse Mountain Refuge for Endangered Wildlife.
"We have gone from managing owl populations to managing
individual birds."
With a Weyerhaeuser honcho now running
the biggest conservation group in the region, the prospects for
the owl-and nearly every other creature that calls the deep forest
home-seems bleak indeed.
Of course, it's hard to work up too much
of a froth about this latest merger of clearcutters and self-advertised
nature defenders. After all, the World Wildlife Fund functions
more like a corporate enterprise than a public interest group.
It practices retail environmentalism and has made millions upon
millions hawking its panda logo, a brand as zealously marketed
as Nike's "swoosh". But, of course, it's done almost
nothing to save the panda, penned in by rampant deforestation
and poaching, except peddle pictures to trophy wives and innocent
third graders. Call it panda porn.
But the panda cash machine isn't the
group's only source of money. The World Wildlife Fund also rakes
in millions from corporations, including Alcoa, Citigroup, the
Bank of America, Kodak, J.P. Morgan, the Bank of Tokyo, Philip
Morris, Waste Management and DuPont. They even offer an annual
conservation award funded by and named after the late oil baron
J. Paul Getty. It hawks its own credit card and showcases its
own online boutique. As a result, WWF's budget has swelled to
over $100 million a year and its not looking back.
Where does all the money go? Most of
it goes to pay for plush offices, robust salaries, and a tireless
direct mail operation to raise even more money. WWF's CEO, the
icy Kathryn S. Fuller, pulls in a cool $250,000 a year, including
benefits. This is the remorseless logic of modern environmentalism,
in which non-profits are more obsessed with fundraising than
the corporations that they are supposed to be battling. Indeed,
the relentless cash hunt leads them serenely right into corporate
boardrooms, hands out, mouth gagged.
Remember it was only a couple of years
ago that WWF outraged many environmentalists and human rights
activists by giving an award to Shell Oil, the company that stood
mute as its partners in the murderous junta of generals that
ran Nigerian lynched Ken Saro-Wiwa and 8 other environmentalists
fighting Shell's foul operations on Ogoni land in the Niger River
delta.
This self-induced moral blindness is
par for the course. The World Wildlife Fund is one of those outfits
that believes capitalism is good for the environment. It has
backed nearly every trade bill to come down the pike, from NAFTA
to GATT. WWF has also sidled up to some very unsavory government
agencies advancing the same neo-liberal agenda across the Third
World, including US AID.
The World Wildlife Fund is so paranoid
about its image that it recently sued-and won-to force the World
Wrestling Federation to change its name, lest it sully its "WWF"
trademark. Of course, if you really care about the environment
your money would probably be better spent by watching some World
Wrestling extravaganza on pay-per-view rather than in a membership
to WWF. At least, the wrestling provides some laughs. Your contribution
to WWF will fatten the salary of a timber executive such as Linda
Coady parading around in the guise of an environmentalist. It
gives cross-dressing a bad name.
When the Haida launched their battle
against Weyerhaeuser and its rich army of lobbyists and lawyers
earlier this year, Guujaaw observed: "You cannot buy the
lifestyle we have with money."
It's a lesson that the environmental
groups like World Wildlife Fund should take to heart before they
discover that they've become little more than the well-paid zombies
of the corporations they have gotten into bed with. I'm not holding
my breath.
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