The Washington Post is publishing a series of exposes into the Nature Conservancy.
It's a bit troubling, especially if you're a fan of the organization. If you're unfamiliar with it, the Nature Conservancy straddles the line between for-profit and non-profit work by buying environmentally sensitive land and protecting it... creating, in effect, "privately owned" (or at least trust-owned) parkland.
Which, according to one of the stories, has hosted oil drilling to the detriment of very endangered birds.
To wit:
Eight years ago, Mobil Oil gave the Nature Conservancy what was one of the group's largest corporate donations, a patch of prairie that encompassed the last native breeding ground of a highly endangered bird.
Mobil officials said that the donation offered "the last best hope" of saving the Attwater's prairie chicken, a speckled grouse whose high-stepping mating dance attracts avid bird watchers to the Texas plains each spring.
Then an unusual role reversal took place.
The Conservancy, whose core mission is preserving land to protect species such as the prairie chicken, started acting like an oil company. The Conservancy sank a well under the bird's nesting ground.
So... what's up with this? Is this an isolated case? Is it better than it looks? Or are other environmental groups similarly compromised? |
