By: giles

giles — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 22:40:22 +0000

As they say Larry you are “preaching to the choir”. I applaud your achievements and devotion to environmental conservation education and being the NWF leader. However, I hope you are fully aware that only a very small percentage of humans care about your and my ecological concerns. Do not be like most preachers and surround yourself with only believers or people of the same faith. You have already made the sale to the nature lovers. You and your team need to save the sinners. Given the rapid demise of the environment you are loosing far more battles than winning.
You and I are about the same age. Your rewarding career has been dealing with the environment. My career has been with various types of manufacturing, production schedules and profit making. People in my profession have little concern or thought towards protecting the environment and not much time for passionate environmentalist. In fact you are their enemy because you restrict, complicate and add cost to their businesses.
I guess the survival instinct in humans is what makes most people greedy and self centered. As they say “We live for the now not for the future”. Sure people want a clean looking environment teeming with wildlife as long as it does not cause them any inconvenience or expense. Your speeches definitely will not change the vast majority of the people’s views who profit from using up the natural resources, creating pollution and accelerating development as compared to your desire of conserve, preserve and improve the environment unless these people can financially benefit. How do you do this? The world leaders need to offer people financial incentives for conservation of natural resources, preserving and increasing wild places, selecting smart car and green equipment, reducing household and industrial garbage, pollution, power usage, and so on. Award people and industries to “clean up”. Use the peoples inherent greedy money motivated survival instincts to your advantage by paying people to take care of the environment.
Put these money motivated conservational measures in place and it will, without a doubt, help turn the environmental downward spiral back up in your direction. However, this will only help solve part of the problem. The world has to also reduce its population growth. Again how do you do this? Offer readily available free birth controls and well thought out financial incentives to people for not having children or paying people to choose to under go medical procedures to limit their childbearing capabilities. People should also not be rewarded with tax reductions for each child they have. It should be just the opposite.
These solutions might be politically incorrect but clearly the band aid approach environmentalist are currently using is not going to work. I have been a NWF member for 35 years. Today there are fewer frogs, fewer birds, fewer butterflies, fewer fish, and fewer wild animals less clean water, less clean air and fewer wild places than there was yesterday. Today there are more people, more pollution, more hazardous substances, more industrial sites and more environmental groups asking for donations than there was yesterday.
Larry it is time to change yours and the NWF’s strategy, take some new bold steps and guide this world in the new direction.
Thank you
Ed Giles

Comments on: Copenhagen Event: Last Chance for Wildlife

By: giles