Read on Twitter
Good article @GeorgeMonbiot on the corporate capture of conservation groups. Many reasons for how this happens, I think. Here are a few (thread):
1/ The people who end up in charge are often the wrong people. Conservation is hard, it's complicated, it's depressing, it can feel pointless or impossible, it's underfunded and underpaid, so many brilliant people leave the sector from burnout or simply to have better prospects
2/ And as organisations and their budgets grow they often become more managerial, more professionalised, and the kind of people who want the top jobs (and the kind of people the board members want to have the top job) are not the kind of people who want transformational change
3/ The kind if people who want transformational change generally neither want to do these sorts of jobs in the way the board wants them to, nor do the boards generally want them in those positions.
4/ More broadly, almostbthe entire conservation sector has ended up focusing on the small edge tinkering stuff because it is hard to think big, the money isn't there, and it sucks to "fail" over and over and over.
5/ So conservation orgs end up doing work that a) is easy to get funding for b) is easy to conceptualise and compartmentalise and c) can result is a "victory"
6) So we get conservation orgs greenwashing "Nature's Arc" because they will be able to fund, deliver, and celebrate the creation of a handful of new reserves as a huge conservation success story, when in reality it is nothing of the sort.
It is the equivalent of a librarian letting an arsonist burn down a library if the arsonist will donate a rare collection of Dickens novels to a museum.
The librarian should be calling 999 and doing whatever they can to save the library, not negotiating and claiming a victory!
The librarian should be calling 999 and doing whatever they can to save the library, not negotiating and claiming a victory!
