Monsanto has given millions of dollars to The Nature Conservancy and has even sat on its Leadership Council.
The Green Groups Helping to Destroy the Planet
When Mark Lynas made his now infamous Oxford Farming Conference speech, it was quickly welcomed by Mark Tercek the CEO of the U.S. environmental group The Nature Conservancy. Tercek, a former investment banker, declared that he "largely" agreed with Lynas, whom he described as having been "a leading voice" against using GMOs in farming. According to Tercek, Lynas wasn't "picking fights or making attacks" but simply saying that the arguments over GM foods should be based on science not ideology.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-tercek/mark-lynas-gmo_b_2424493.html
Of course, almost everything Tercek told his Huffington Post readers was the exact opposite of the truth. Lynas had never been "a leading voice" against GMOs, and in recent years he has consistently attacked his former green allies, often in the most lurid terms. And even he has admitted that his views on issues like GM are more driven by his change in political outlook than by the science, i.e. the exact opposite of what he claimed in his Oxford speech.
http://www.spinwatch.org/index.php/issues/science/item/5490
Yesterday Tercek published another article cautiously favourable to GMOs. What Tercek never seems to feel it necessary to mention though is that Monsanto has given millions of dollars to The Nature Conservancy and has even sat on its Leadership Council. Of course, Monsanto are far from alone in this regard. Tercek is co-author of a book entitled "Nature's Fortune: How Business and Society Thrive by Investing in Nature", and his organisation has certainly thrived by collaborating with big business. Donors include Cargill, Shell, another oil and gas giant ConocoPhillips, Altria (the parent company of tobacco giant Philip Morris), and Nestle. Its Leadership Council has included Altria, BP, Cargill, Chevron, Dow Chemical, ExxonMobil, Nestle and, as mentioned, Monsanto.
http://thegoodhuman.com/2010/09/29/greenwash-of-the-week-the-nature-conservancy-and-corporate-donors/
If these seem pretty unsavoury leadership advisors for any green group, then even more disturbing is what the writer Naomi Klein has just exposed. Tercek's Nature Conservancy doesn't just collaborate with environmentally destructive multinationals, it heavily invests in them.
According to Klein's article, The Nature Conservancy has $1.4 billion - that's right BILLION - invested in publicly traded securities, much of it in fossil fuels, i.e. they are invested up to the hilt in climate destruction.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/03/giants-green-world-profit-planets-destruction
And Tercek's organisation is far from alone. It was already known that Bill Gates was a big investor in Monsanto, but it turns out that the Gates Foundation also has nearly a billion dollars invested in the oil giants ExxonMobil and BP. Klein comments that, "The hypocrisy is staggering: a top priority of the Gates Foundation has been supporting malaria research, a disease intimately linked to climate." She points out that mosquitoes and malaria parasites both thrive in warmer weather, and they are getting more and more of it thanks to climate change fueled by the very companies Gates is massively investing in.
It doesn't have to be like this. As Klein notes, "Greenpeace, 350.org, Friends of the Earth, Rainforest Action Network, and a host of smaller organizations like Oil Change International and the Climate Reality Project don't have endowments and don't invest in the stock market. They also either don't take corporate donations or place such onerous restrictions on them that extractive industries are easily ruled out."
By contrast, others with big fossil fuel investments include Conservation International, and U.S.-WWF while claiming it doesn't invest directly in such corporations refused to answer Klein's questions about whether it screens out environmentally damaging industries from its very sizable mixed-asset funds.
U.S.-WWF has had a former CEO of the gene giant DuPont on its board, while the current chair of the executive board at Conservation International is none other than Robert Walton, the chair of WalMart.
http://independentsciencenews.org/environment/way-beyond-greenwashing-have-multinationals-captured-big-conservation/
Is it a coincidence that WWF, Conservation International, and The Nature Conservancy are all to the fore in the the hugely controversial Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) and Roundtable on Responsible Soy (RTRS)? And in case, by the way, anyone was in any doubt that these were greenwashing exercises the 8th RTRS conference later this month is sponsored by... yes, you guessed it: Monsanto.
http://www.annualconference.responsiblesoy.org/
Like Mark Lynas, the Big Green ultra-business-friendly environmentalists often try to brand themselves as part of a more pragmatic "new environmentalism for the 21st century" but beneath the branding should be the logos of some of the most environmentally destructive corporations on the planet..