I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas and has been enjoying the Holiday Season as we look forward to the New Year.
Throughout 2022, a number of people have asked me which wildlife conservation groups I recommend donating to. I always advise finding a small, on-the-ground group that speaks to you, rather than a Big Green organization. Here are a few that I can recommend:
The International Anti-Poaching Foundation (IAPF) – Founded by the Australian former special forces soldier, Damien Mander, IAPF sends rangers into the field to protect rhinos from poaching in southern Africa. I had the chance to meet Damien a couple of times. He and IAPF have been pioneering successful new models of community-led conservation.
Cheetah Conservation Fund (CCF) – CCF does cheetah conservation work in Namibia through a wide variety of projects. Founded by Dr. Laurie Marker, CCF has a long, successful history. I got to meet Dr. Marker a few years ago and have confidence that CCF is a very well-run organization.
Big Life Foundation – Big Life does great work in East Africa, for those who have an interest in elephant conservation. Protecting over 1.6 million acres of wilderness in the Amboseli-Tsavo-Kilimanjaro ecosystem of East Africa, Big Life partners with local communities to protect nature for the benefit of all.
There are many other small organizations worthy of support. By advising people to stick with them, I intentionally steer people away from large organizations with bloated budgets, as you never know what impact your donation is having. Also, the Big Green orgs have increasingly been going in a direction that makes me uneasy (more about that below).
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Thanks to everyone who helped make Under a Poacher’s Moon a success this year. The positive response to the story and the number of readers have exceeded my expectations. The ebook is on sale on Amazon for $1.99 through the end of December. I am still working on a sequel, an ongoing work in progress. I have also been taking my writing in new directions lately, publishing non-fiction articles throughout 2022 on the themes mentioned below, which I plan to expand upon in 2023.
To say more about why I steer people away from Big Green organizations: the environmental movement is now focused on a single issue, climate change, often to the exclusion of efforts to directly help and protect nature: wildlife, wilderness, rivers, grasslands, forests, and oceans. “Green” industrial projects that are sold to the public as a way to “save the planet” in many ways cause immediate harm to the natural world (see here, here, here, here for an explanation). Stating this truth is considered taboo in some circles.
Worse, a narrow focus on “fixing” climate change leads to the belief that environmental problems, and social problems more generally, can be solved with dubious high-tech solutions (like “dimming the sun”) and heavy-handed policies that are conducive to centralized profit and power. This is not Democracy but Technocracy: a system in which democratically unaccountable institutions and “experts” concentrate decision-making power in their hands.
“If you have ever wondered why climate change has so utterly dominated the green debate to the exclusion of so many other problems which stem from industrial society—mass extinction, soil erosion…ocean pollution,” writes the unorthodox environmentalist Paul Kingsnorth, “the answer [is that] climate change is a problem amenable to…technocratic answers.” Too many “green thought leaders,” he says, “bring with them a worldview which treats the mass of humanity like so many cattle to be herded into the sustainable, zero-carbon pen.”
Yet people who love the natural world have a long history of trying to stay out of pens, no matter how well-intentioned. The technocrats envision a world of passports—“carbon passports” and “vaccine passports”—but the Wild, wrote the late wilderness defender Edward Abbey, is a place where “no passports are needed.”
The word “Wild” comes from the Old English “Self Willed,” meaning beyond the control of the institutions and technologies of civilization. Complex ecological systems cannot be tightly managed or technologically controlled by officials and “experts.” Thriving human cultures, in my opinion, need to retain some of this “self willed” character. “The domination of nature made possible by misapplied science,” wrote Abbey, “leads to the domination of people, to a dreary and totalitarian uniformity.”
Without a robust sense of human Freedom, I do not see much of a chance that we can adapt and build resilience to future environmental challenges, as we must. “Wild and Free” are two sides of the same coin. The opposite—power, profit, and control concentrated in a few hands—will almost certainly make matters worse.
In any event, these are some the themes that inspire me now. The non-fiction articles I’ve published in 2022 on these topics have reached a pretty wide audience, and I intend to keep writing in this vein in 2023.
I feel that I am in good company with a number of other writers who have taken a difficult stand in defense of both Nature and Freedom, and against the excesses of centralized power, over the last few years: Kingsnorth, Jem Bendell, Charles Eisenstein, Vandana Shiva, and others. I have connected with writers and readers across the political spectrum, Left and Right, on these issues during the last twelve months. For that, and much else—especially family, good friends, and time in Nature—I am grateful.
Happy New Year and here’s to a Wild and Free 2023.