A brief history of sustainable use as political propaganda
Sustainable use comes from free market propaganda like climate change denial and tobacco disinformation.
The 1990 Perth General Assembly represented a shift in the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Steve Edwards, then head of the IUCN’s Species Conservation Program, questioned the traditional approach to conservation that involved iconizing wild species and raising money.
He thought that the IUCN’s focus should be on capacity building and incentivizing the people who live with wildlife. He, and others primarily linked to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, crafted a motion to endorse the idea that sustainable use could be synonymous with conservation.
The motion was adopted at the Perth General Assembly. Edwards, the staff person responsible for the motion, became the IUCN’s Sustainable Use Initiative leader in 1991.
He moved to an office in Washington, DC which he describes as “out of the grasp of the competing visions.” The initiative disbanded after integrating the principles of sustainable use into the IUCN’s program and policy framework in 2000.
Some influential conservationists now promote trophy hunting and commercial wildlife trade as legitimate conservation tools under sustainable use. These conservationists view sustainable use as an evidence-based approach to conserving wildlife by supporting the interests of the people who live alongside wild species.
This view of sustainable use is naïve and potentially harmful. Historical evidence suggests sustainable use comes from free market propaganda like climate change denial and tobacco disinformation.
Sustainable use was introduced to the IUCN in 1990 as ‘wise use.’ Edwards says that his team changed the term due to “misrepresentation of the words” in the United States.
The Wise Use Movement, unrelated to Gifford Pinchot’s wise use forestry philosophy, took off in the United States in the late 1980s. The movement was an anti-government astroturf campaign orchestrated by extractive industries. One political sociologist described it as the “vanguard of antienvironmental astroturf operations” that sought to delegitimize capitalism’s critics.
Dropping ‘wise use’ suggested that sustainable use activists did not want their efforts to be associated with a fake grassroots movement. But Edwards and many other sustainable use pioneers actively participated in the Wise Use Movement during the 1990s.
Edwards and Grahame Webb, a crocodile specialist that Edwards credits for expanding his understanding of sustainable use, were featured speakers at a 1998 roundtable called Conservation Through Commerce. Webb opined in the CPC’s roundtable that the IUCN “went off on a tangent, largely with people from a science background, not people from a business background” before endorsing sustainable use.
The Center for Private Conservation hosted the roundtable. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free market think tank funded by the fossil fuel and tobacco industries that supported the Wise Use Movement, created the CPC.
The 1995 book The True State of the Planet was another CEI project. The book’s back cover stated that “ten premier scholars 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.” Edwards authored a chapter on conserving biodiversity through sustainable use.
CEI Founder Fred L. Smith, Jr. said the book would “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” in a 1994 letter to the Tobacco Institute’s President Sam Chilcote.
IWMC World Conservation Trust, a sustainable use group founded by former CITES Secretary-General Eugene Lapointe, requested that Chilcote join it to prepare for a Congressional hearing on CITES in a 1997 letter. It stated that the biannual CITES conference would “be held to address critical issues which will surely have a dramatic and lasting impact on the U.S. agricultural industry.” A handwritten note attached to the letter indicated that Chilcote collaborated with IWMC on the issue of bear bile trade the prior year.
The tobacco industry feared that restrictions on wildlife trade would set the stage for restrictions on plant trade. A 1991 British American Tobacco memo warned that the “orchid industry in Thailand is the first industry to be affected as a result of an international agency’s ban on wildlife trade.”
BAT described the Institute of Economic Affairs, a free market think tank that spread climate change denial for decades, as a “good ally” for its risk assessment program in a 1995 note. BAT’s risk assessment program challenged tobacco smoking regulations by arguing that economic losses outweighed the benefits of public health and environmental protections. The IEA published the book What Risk? Science, Politics and Public Health in 1997 that “cast doubt on the relationship between non-smokers and environmental tobacco smoke (secondary smoking),” according to an IEA subscription form.
The IEA boasted its first two books, Global Warming: Apocalypse or Hot Air? and Elephants and Ivory: Lessons from the Trade Ban, were selling well in a fact sheet sent to BAT. IEA’s fourth book in its list was Rhinos: Conservation, Economics and Trade-offs.
Elephants argued that 1989 CITES ivory trade ban “may exterminate elephants” and that “[r]anching them for ivory may be better,” according to an IEA order sheet. Rhinos argued that rhinos “should be privately owned and ranched, in order to prevent their becoming extinct.”
The common thread connecting sustainable use, climate change denial, and tobacco disinformation was a love of free markets and a disdain for government regulations. Free market propagandists viewed government regulations as a slippery slope to socialism and the stripping away of freedoms.
Alliance for America was another think tank that feared government regulations. Greenpeace’s PolluterWatch described it as “one of the largest anti-environmental groups to come out of the wise-use movement.”
Its mission statement decried that “Human needs come first” and that “Economics must inform what is environmentally feasible.” It stated that it was “dedicated to finally bringing human concerns into environmental decision-making” and was “the new face of conservation, one that cares about the environment and people.”
Several sustainable use activists participated in its 1995 Annual Fly-In for Freedom in Washington, DC which centered around the Endangered Species Act and other environmental regulations. Participants included Webb, Lapointe, CEI Fellow and IUCN steering committee member Ike Sugg, and Liz Rihoy of Resource Africa, an “ally of the hunter/conservationist,” according to the Safari Club International African Chapter’s 1996 Strategic Plan for Africa.
Resource Africa’s website stated that it “played a key role in promoting the concept and application of sustainable use of natural resources – particularly wildlife – as a conservation and development strategy both within southern African and in relevant international policy bodies” throughout the 1990s and 2000s. In 2020, it “resumed substantial operations with generous financial support” from Jamma International, a charity and investment vehicle for the wealthy European Johannson family.
Jamma stated it was negotiating management contracts for two “very large conservation and wildlife utilisation areas” in Mozambique in a 2021 response to the Call for Evidence on hunting trophy imports in the UK’s Animals Abroad Bill. It intended to invest $10 million and use trophy hunting as the “only income source” to obtain a return on its investment.
Jamma donated more than $1.2 million “plus technical and governance support” to Resource Africa since 2021. Resource Africa claimed it “does not receive financial support from the hunting industry” on its website.
The CEI and IEA are no longer as active in the sustainable use community as organizations like Resource Africa. But sustainable use activism is a staple of the Property and Environment Research Center, a think tank that “advances free market environmentalism.” It is one of the “most egregious climate misinformation groups” that “consistently mislead the public about the climate crisis,” according to the Center for Media and Democracy.
Economist and PERC Research Fellow Michael ‘t Sas-Rolfes was an IEA Research Fellow in the 1990s and authored its Rhinos book. He is a member of the IUCN’s African Rhino and Sustainable Use and Livelihoods Specialists Groups. IUCN SULi member Adam Hart and Wildlife Conservation Research Unit Director Amy Dickman had the dubious honor of being listed as members of PERC’s People on its website.
PERC launched its Wild Africa Initiative in 2020. It “is working to increase understanding of the role that free enterprise, free trade, and property rights play in sustaining the ecosystems that African economic prosperity depends on” by “producing research and analysis capable of informing high level decision-making in markets and multilateral forums that influence the African conservation economy.”
PERC’s “scholars are currently producing a fine-scale assessment of the contributions African photo-tourism and hunting operators make to efforts to counter poaching and illicit wildlife trafficking” to “create a deeper understanding of the impact of commercial enterprise on wildlife conservation.” WildCRU research student and former PERC Research Fellow Catherine Semcer led PERC’s Wild Africa Initiative until earlier this year.
Semcer’s WildCRU webpage stated that her goal “is to assess the extent to which African anti-poaching programs supported by commercial interests and NGOs enhance the impact of national and sub-national law enforcement authorities.” She is “conducting a fine scale survey of anti-poaching programs across Africa” and “building an evidence base that businesses, non-governmental organizations, donors, and governments can use to better target resources while also increasing understanding of the contours and gradients of militarized conservation.”
Economist and African Wildlife Economy Institute Co-Founder Francis Vorhies also influenced WildCRU research. AWEI’s 2022 Activities Report stated that Vorhies’ Research Visitor position at WildCRU “has opened opportunities to integrate a wildlife economy perspective into their research.”
Vorhies said in an interview that studying Ludwig von Mises, a free market fundamentalist and fascist sympathizer, taught him that “the delivery of so-called public goods do not necessarily require government intervention and that they potentially be delivered by markets—hence, making capitalism work for conservation.” The Climate Social Science Network noted that the “ideology of this tradition of Austrian Economics based on Ludwig von Mises provides important conceptual tools that are highly relevant for climate denial and obstruction purposes” in a 2021 research report.
Vorhies argued that “Africa is starving because colonialism prevented capitalism from flourishing” in a 1989 article for the Foundation for Economic Education, a free market think tank built around Mises’ economic philosophy. He blamed Marxists and “African socialism” for starvation and argued for “a system of private property and free markets” to fix low productivity on black South African farms.
AWEI “secured funding from an important new partner, the Atlas Network, for research on non-tariff barriers in the intra-African wild meat trade,” according to its 2022 Activities Report. The Atlas Network includes hundreds of free market think tanks that denied climate change and obstructed government regulations. AWEI planned to scale up support from the Atlas Network in 2023.
The Wise Use Movement faded from the public eye shortly after it started. But sustainable use keeps free market propaganda alive and well in wildlife conservation.