ORGANIZATIONS

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2000:

Lisa DiStefano, Sea Shepherd
Conservation Society international
director since 1991, has resigned. “I
signed a confidentiality agreement and
cannot discuss any details,” Distefano
told ANIMAL PEOPLE. “There is
much going on, and I am getting ready
to help some incredible people make a
difference.” Head of the OrcaForce
direct action team in the early 1990s,
DiStefano has recently focused on oil
spill disaster response.

Fearing political and economic
consequences, the W o r l d
W i l d l i f e F u n d in 1997 suppressed
release of a study of pirate logging by
Dominek Plouvier of W W F – B e l g i u m
and Nigel Sizer of the World Resources
I n s t i t u t e in Washington D.C., P a u l
B r o w n of the Manchester Guardian
revealed in the June 1-7 edition of
Guardian Weekly. Summarized G a r y
G a l l o n of the Montreal-based G a l l o n
Environment Letter, “The study found
that the biggest lawbreaking international
forestry companies were from Malaysia,
Indonesia, and China, not Canada, the
U.S., or Latin America. WWF worried
that the complicit governments supporting
the illegal logging operations of their
own national companies overseas would
shut down WWF regional offices.”
Brown said the suppressed report also
“blamed the International Monetary
Fund and the World Bank for inducing
forested countries to sell their forests for
a quick cash return to pay off debts,”
naming the Solomon Islands, Papua
New Guinea, Cameroon, and Belize as
most affected. The report also found that
“In the majority of countries studied, the
decision-making is controlled by a small
group of powerful people of clans within
the government who look at primary
forests as a short-term source of personal
revenue,” Brown wrote.
Robert Boyle, president of the
the environmental monitoring group
Riverkeeper, reportedly fired staff scientist
William Wegner recently, upon
learning that Wegner was alleged leader
of a 15-member ring who were convicted
in 1995 of smuggling wild cockatoos’
eggs into the U.S. from Australia, hatching
them, and selling the young birds to
the pet trade as captive-bred. Riverkeeper
chief attorney Robert F.
Kennedy Jr., who hired Wegner,
opposed the firing, leading to the resignation
of eight board members. Wegner
in Decemeber 1995 was sentenced to
serve five years in prison plus three years
of supervised release.
The International Society for
Animal Rights is reportedly soon to
relocate to Santa Fe, New Mexico,
home of board chair Henry Mark
Holtzer. Founded in Washington D.C.
in 1959 as the National Catholic
Society for Animal Welfare by the late
Helen Jones, the organization later
moved to New York City, and then to
Jones’ family home in Clark’s Summit,
Pennsylvania. Jones was ousted from
the ISAR presidency in December 1995,
due to alleged mismanagement exposed