Silencing the panda is a reference to the BRAND WWF's Panda Logo. Silencing the Panda = Stop hearing the liesWWF propagates manipulative deceptions better then many- given the money they take in!WWF promotes Earth Hour globally while asking for donations, of course. Giv'em your money and they'll save the planet! A couple of interesting reads excerpted:Guardian
WWF International, the world's largest conservation group, has been accused of "selling its soul" by forging alliances with powerful businesses which destroy nature and use the WWF brand to "greenwash" their operations.
The allegations are made in an explosive book previously barred from Britain. The Silence of the Pandas became a German bestseller in 2012 but, following a series of injunctions and court cases, it has not been published until now in English. Revised and renamed Pandaleaks, it will be out next week.
Its author, Wilfried Huismann, says the Geneva-based WWF International has received millions of dollars from its links with governments and business. Global corporations such as Coca-Cola, Shell, Monsanto, HSBC, Cargill, BP, Alcoa and Marine Harvest have all benefited from the group's green image only to carry on their businesses as usual.
Huismann argues that by setting up "round tables" of industrialists on strategic commodities such as palm oil, timber, sugar, soy, biofuels and cocoa, WWF International has become a political power that is too close to industry and in danger of becoming reliant on corporate money.
"WWF is a willing service provider to the giants of the food and energy sectors, supplying industry with a green, progressive image … On the one hand it protects the forest; on the other it helps corporations lay claim to land not previously in their grasp. WWF helps sell the idea of voluntary resettlement to indigenous peoples," says Huismann.
Queen Elizabeth & Prince Phillip- 50 years before the Cecil controversyPrince Phillip (WWF Founding member) & Queen Elizabeth WebCite
What a strange body the WWF (formerly the World Wildlife Fund, now the Worldwide Fund for Nature) has become these days. It is the largest, richest and most influential environmental lobbying organisation in the world. Originally set up in 1961 by Julian Huxley, Prince Philip, Prince Bernhard and others, for the admirable purpose of campaigning to save species endangered by human activity, it has morphed in the last 20 years into something very different, more akin to a multinational corporation.
The fact that Julian Huxley, Prince Phillip and Prince Bernhard set up WWF is enough to put me off of this No Good Organization.
The WWF empire now derives a very hefty chunk of its income from partnerships with governments, or the EU, or actual multinationals, such as Coca-Cola and Sky, which like to use its iconic panda logo (originally designed by the naturalist Peter Scott) to give an “eco-caring” gloss to their commercial activities. The chief reason why it has so greatly increased its wealth and influence is that it has joined other lobby groups, such as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, in pushing to the top of its agenda that most fashionable and lucrative of environmental causes, the “battle to halt climate change”.
But this has led WWF into some rather odd little tangles, such as those which have recently emerged over its activities in Tanzania. Much of its work there is carried out under a UN climate change policy known as REDD+ (“reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation”), which is part of the UN’s £17 billion Fast Start programme. Britain, giving £1.5 billion, is that programme’s second largest contributor after Japan.
Last November, Prince Charles, as president of WWF UK, flew to Tanzania to hand out “Living Planet” awards to five “community leaders” involved in WWF projects around the delta of the Rufiji River, which holds the world’s largest mangrove forest. Part of their intention has been to halt further damage to the forest by local farmers, who have been clearing it to grow rice and coconuts. This is because the mangroves store unusual amounts of “carbon” (CO2), viewed as the major contributor to global warming. (Another WWF project in the delta is to find a way of measuring just how great a threat release of that CO2 might be.)
Shortly before the Prince’s arrival, it was revealed that thousands of villagers had been evicted from the forest, their huts in the paddy fields torched and their coconut palms felled. This was carried out by the Tanzanian government’s Forestry and Beekeeping Division, with which WWF has been working. But Stephen Makiri, the head of WWF Tanzania, was quick to insist that WWF had never advocated expelling communities from the delta, and that “the evictions were carried out by government agencies”.
At this point, however, two American professors intervened. They had just published a study of the delta in an environmental journal, entitled “The REDD menace: resurgent protectionism in mangrove forests”. It was highly critical of the so-called “fortress conservation” policy advocated by WWF under REDD+, claiming that it was seriously damaging the traditional life of those local communities which had been sustainably farming and fishing in the area for centuries.
>>>> Read the omitted paragraphs at the links provided
When a series of scandals blew up two years ago over the more alarmist claims made by the IPCC in its 2007 assessment report, the two which attracted most headlines were shown to have been based, not on peer-reviewed science, but on campaigning material put out by WWF. One of these, a prediction that the Himalayan glaciers might all have melted within 30 years, was sourced from a WWF paper based only on a magazine interview with an obscure Indian scientist (who was subsequently employed by the research institute run by the IPCC’s chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri).
Pachauri the perv.. Recall this? Guilty in Sexual Harrasement Case
The other, a claim that drought caused by global warming could lead to the destruction of 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest, was revealed – by my colleague Dr Richard North and this column – to have originated in a WWF propaganda leaflet based on research that had not been concerned with climate change at all, but with the damage being done to the forest by logging and fires.
Exhaustive analysis, led by the Canadian author Donna Laframboise, then revealed that nearly a third of the 18,531 sources cited by the report had no more scientific provenance than press clippings, student theses and claims by activist groups – among which none was more prominent than WWF. But worse was to come. In her recent book on the IPCC, The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert, Laframboise shows how, from 2004 on, WWF deliberately set out to recruit contributors to the IPCC’s next report to its Climate Witness Scientific Advisory Panel. The result was that WWF “climate witnesses” contributed to two thirds of the 2007 report’s 44 chapters, including every one of the 20 chapters in the section on the impacts of climate change. A third of all the chapters in the report had WWF witnesses as co-ordinating lead authors, ultimately responsible for their contents. As Laframboise summed up, her analysis confirmed that, far from the report being the work of dispassionate scientists, “the IPCC has been infiltrated… wholly and entirely compromised”.
Many of these WWF panel members are now at work on the IPCC’s new report, due out next year. WWF has been so successful in getting its allies into key official positions that, in 2007, the chief executive of WWF UK, Robert Napier, was able to slip seamlessly into a new job as chairman of Britain’s Met Office. This is another body which, through its Hadley Centre on climate change, has been a central player in promoting alarm over global warming ever since 1990, when the centre was set up by Sir John Houghton, one of the IPCC’s founding fathers.
WWF has had only one real setback in its ascent to such influence. In March 2010, I reported here on its part in a hugely ambitious scheme, backed by $250 million from the World Bank under an earlier version of REDD, to turn the CO2 locked in the Amazon rainforest into “carbon credits” worth an estimated $60 billion. The idea was that these would be saleable on the world carbon market, to enable firms in the developed world to stay in business by buying the right to continue emitting CO2. WWF and others were granted selling rights by the Brazilian government over an area of forest twice the size of Switzerland. But, following the twin failures of the UN’s 2009 Copenhagen World Climate Conference, and the bid to give the US a compulsory “cap and trade” scheme, the project came to nothing.
WWF set itself up as a fully for profit business- to sell Carbon credits- Just an incredible hoaxAnd of course Canada is getting sucked right into this carbon hoax
Just how far WWF has travelled from the noble purposes for which it was set up was perfectly symbolised by the way it chose as its chief marketing tool the slogan “Adopt a polar bear”. If this organisation still had concern for endangered species closest to its heart, it would know that the idea that polar bears are dying out due to global warming is no more than sentimental propaganda. But then that is the main business that WWF now seems to be in – very much at the expense of the rest of us and, of course, those communities in the Rufiji delta.
And finally Prince Phillip on killing a beautiful tiger for sport:
It also documents how Prince Philip, the first president of WWF in Britain, shot a tiger in Ranthambhore tiger park in India shortly before the group was founded. In an interview with Huismann, Philip said: "I have never been big game hunting. No, never, except that one time in India. The only way you can be sure of getting a reasonable wildlife population is by making sure that they are balanced. You can't just leave it to nature."
Prince Phillip the arrogant arsehole- "You can't just leave it to nature!- Says the entitled SOBSay no to Earth Hour, Green/Brain Washing. Don't support the elitist WWF, Greenpeace or any other NGO's for that matter.