Sustainable use activist and climate deniers teamed up to defend anti-environmental industries
Competitive Enterprise Institute, with the help of sustainable use activist Steve Edwards, published a book that denied the seriousness of environmental issues.
Sustainable use activists claim that trophy hunting and wildlife trade protect wildlife and marginalized people. This claim is unsubstantiated.
There is evidence that the unpalatable practices protect anti-environmental industries and the capitalist elites that benefit from them, however. Take the book titled The True State of the Planet as an example.
The book was a project of Competitive Enterprise Institute that aimed to “shatter the myths of overpopulation, food, global warming, and pesticides, while redirecting environmentalists' concerns to the far more urgent problems of fisheries, fresh water, and third-world pollution -- and the political causes behind them.”
Researchers studying climate denial determined that the book “espoused environmental skepticism.” According to the researchers, “environmental skepticism denies the seriousness of environmental problems” and “encompasses several themes, but denial of the authenticity of environmental problems, particularly problems such as biodiversity loss or climate change that threaten ecological sustainability, is its defining feature.”
Along with shattering the ‘myths’ of such issues as global warming, the book promoted sustainable use as a legitimate conservation ideology. Steve Edwards, a leader of the sustainable use movement within the IUCN, authored a chapter on the benefits of sustainable use for Competitive Enterprise Institute.
The book’s other authors included people like Kent Jeffreys, a man who teamed up with famed climate denier Fred Singer to attack the Environmental Protection Agency for its position on secondhand smoking. The editor of the book, Ronald Bailey, also edited a climate denial book for Competitive Enterprise Institute titled Global Warming and Other Eco-Myths: How the Environmental Movement Uses False Science to Scare Us to Death.
Competitive Enterprise Institute is a right wing think tank funded by the world’s wealthiest elites and is notorious for its climate denial campaigns. The True State of the Planet was simply part of the think tank’s agenda for denying science in the defense of capitalism.
In a letter to Tobacco Institute president Sam Chilcote, Competitive Enterprise Institute president Fred Smith stated that the book “will show that capitalism and technology, far from destroying Planet Earth, have produced unprecedented advances in the quality of life. It will also make clear that economic and technological progress is vital to the solution of non-imaginary environmental problems.”
The issue of man-made climate change of course being an ‘imaginary’ environmental problem according to think tanks like Competitive Enterprise Institute.
[Sam Chilcote also worked with sustainable use group IWMC on issues related to wildlife trade and CITES.]
Smith detailed the think tank’s “aggressive” policy work which listed The True State of the Planet as part of its agenda to Thomas Borelli of Philip Morris in a letter.
Despite the obvious misrepresentation and denial of science in the book, it started to be “adopted in college courses around the country” according to Smith in another letter to Borelli.
[Sadly, getting this sort of propaganda into universities and influencing the debate around environmental issues is a common practice within the sustainable use community. IUCN SULi Vice Chair and Conservation Visions CEO Shane Mahoney even uses funding from the hunting industry to buy the next generation of conservationists by paying for their education.]
Next time a sustainable use activist pens an op-ed comparing people who disagree with the claim that trophy hunting and wildlife trade are conservation tools to climate deniers, remember that climate deniers and sustainable use activists have been working together for decades. Don’t be fooled by the narrative just because its espoused by someone with a PhD attached to their name.