Wildlife Betrayed is the forward-looking, reforming manifesto which 21st conservation and sustainable development has lacked. It is in the form of a short book-length document, ideal for online propagation. It has six Case Studies ranging from Elephants to COVID showing how populist “hands-off” conservation and animal welfare campaigns are pursuing a well-funded and relentless campaign to mislead the public and hijack multilateral institutions, especially CITES.
This is positive work. It shows, for instance, how CITES could easily and simply be reformed to make it a beacon of grounded wisdom and hope.
Written by the veteran campaigner for pragmatic conservation, Eugène Lapointe (CITES secretary-general 1982-90) and drawing widely on his experienced and expert IWMC network, the manifesto provides up-to-date evidence of how a multilateral effort could deploy practical and sustainable natural resource use to bring wildlife back into sync with humans.
Wildlife Betrayed shows the wide range of evidence which can energise the pushback against the doomy, prohibitionist, simplistic stereotypes about wildlife conservation which are so popular on TV, but which ignore the plight of the many poor countries and their rural populations who live closest to wildlife. The message is as simple as it is well-evidenced: “Use it or lose it”.