Ahead of COP27, the ecologist Dr. Susan Crockford has launched a hard-hitting attack on the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the World Economic Forum (WEF), King Charles and Sir David Attenborough. The two men are said to “parrot WWF activist nonsense” that they naïvely accept as science. Dr. Crockford is an acknowledged zoology expert on polar bears, whose work on their recently growing Arctic populations has effectively removed them as a green poster story. She says it is clear that many of the goals of the WWF are shared by the WEF, and these complement the vision the King and Attenborough share for the future. “They all want a return to a world with fewer people that live meagre, circumscribed lives, while the rich carry on their jet-setting ways.”
Dr. Crockford writes that when the WWF began promoting itself as a scientific authority a dozen or so years ago, these “naïve elite boosters” accepted it without question, parroting unsubstantiated WWF climate doomsday talking points at every opportunity. In her view, these men don’t speak with an authority of their own on this topic, “they use their exalted positions to assist the WWF and others achieve their utopian dream: destroy for others the capitalism that created their own wealth and power”.
Population growth has long been a concern of Attenborough’s. In 2011, he was reported to have said that “he couldn’t think of a single problem that wouldn’t be easier to solve if there were less people”. In 2013, he made the crass remark that it was “barmy” for the United Nations to send bags of flour to famine-stricken Ethiopia. At the time this invoked comparison with Sir Charles Trevelyan, the civil servant during the Irish famines of the 19th century, who saw the starvation as retribution on the local population for their moral failings and tendency to have numerous children. But to counter all these Malthusian notions, there is the considerable evidence that population numbers fall as societies become wealthier. Increased care of the environment is also a feature of wealthier societies, as individuals no longer need to scavenge the land and wildlife to survive.
King Charles, meanwhile, is not a fan of ‘consumerism’. In a speech in 2009 as the then Prince of Wales, he calculated that “we had just 96 months left to save the world”. Capitalism and consumerism had brought the world to the brink of economic and environmental collapse, he claimed, adding “we can no longer afford consumerism” and that the “age of convenience” was over. Of course this only applies to loyal British subjects. Since his recent accession to the British throne, His Majesty has added greatly to his personal portfolio of staffed mansions and palaces. In 2017 it was reported that he had complained that his seat on a first class flight was “incredibly uncomfortable”. This of course is not a recurring problem, since his preferred mode of transport is the private jet.
Read More: COP27 Is About a Jet-Setting Elite Trying to Make a World of Fewer
