IWMC Calls for a Look at Groups History |
| 16 December 1998 - Dunedin, Florida: An award
given to an environmental extremist has raised some eyebrows in the wildlife
management field. David Brower of the Earth Island Institute (EII) received
what is called the "1998 Blue Planet Award." The company giving the award
is based in Japan. After the award was announced, a number of wildlife
management professionals and supporters of sound, scientific based environmentalist
movement began to point out that Browers history makes it quite difficult
to understand how such a thing could happen.
Browers actual history is as a radical and extremist. Brower has a tendency to be irrational himself when he says, in E Magazine, "The Sierra Club made the Nature Conservancy look reasonable. I founded Friends of the Earth to make the Sierra Club look reasonable. Then I founded Earth Island Institute to make Friends of the Earth look reasonable." This was, of course, after having been acrimoniously ejected from the Sierra Club as well as Friends of the Earth, which he founded. His personal integrity and philosophical resolve are indicated by the fact that he said such things as (to a Christian Science Monitor reporter in 1991), "Id like to declare open season on developers and shoot them all" as well as, "childbearing should be a punishable crime unless the parents hold a government license," (after which he had three sons and a daughter.) Brower has been seen by many to have a definitely anti-Japanese approach. This disregard for Japanese preferences and culture history is also not something just from the past. EII has just refurbished and launched, with great fanfare, a sailing vessel named "Thursdays Child." This vessel has many missions but, according to the EII website, a primary goal is to "...build public opposition to recent moves by countries to open up commercial slaughter of whales by overturning the moratorium on whaling imposed by the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in 1986. Norway and Japan have been finding loopholes in the rules for years to kill whales, despite world opinion supporting protection for whales." EII goes on to say, "For too long Japanese officials have attempted to justify the annual slaughter of thousands of dolphins and whales as traditional, subsistence harvesting practiced by indigenous people." Eugene Lapointe, President of IWMC-World Conservation Trust says, "It is incomprehensible that a Japanese firm could want to reward such patently anti-Japanese behavior. Not only Japanese fishermen and whaling supporters but every citizens in the world who respect the tradition and culture of each country should all immediately protest such behavior and demand that more careful research be done before bestowing such honors on those who, in a historical perspective, may not deserve them!" For further information, please contact
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