Peter Knights: Curbing the Demand for Wildlife

The fundamental difference with WildAid is 99.9 percent of conservation efforts are supply-side efforts. They’re either focused on scientists in the field, anti-poaching or laws. That’s most of the effort and nearly all the money.

What we’ve said is that you’ll never stop the trade if you do not address the demand. So we’ve been laser-focused on trying to address the demand — primarily in China, which is the biggest source of demand, given the economic boom that’s happened there for many of these species.

I started doing this in 1996 before WildAid even existed. For a long time it was a very lonely place to be. Now, “demand reduction” — I think we coined the phrase — is part of everybody’s plan. The Clintons’ plan has demand reduction as one of the three tiers. President Obama and Prince William and United for Wildlife have all mentioned demand reduction.

The analogy I always use is drug trafficking. We spent $25 trillion trying to stop the supply of drugs and drugs are cheaper and more available than ever before. Why do we think using probably 0.01 percent of those resources we’re going to stamp illegal wildlife trade with the same methodology. It’s just not going to happen, but we have a track record of stopping the demand for endangered species. Europe is no longer a major consumer of ivory, for example. Taiwan was the biggest consumer of rhino horn. It isn’t even on the map anymore, because of outreach, education and strict domestic laws.

When I left the London School of Economics I didn’t want to work in finance, which was what you normally do with an economics degree. I did some work for Greenpeace; they had me do an undercover job on ivory trade. This was 1989 — just when the last ivory crisis was coming to a head. I met these guys from the Environmental Investigation Agency who were doing all this undercover cloak and dagger work.

They clearly knew more about what was going on than anybody else. It shocked me that half the elephant population had disappeared in 15 years and people didn’t know about it. Ultimately, I thought people would care about it and maybe endangered species is kind of a soft route into broader public support for environmental issues.

It’s the decline that’s so shocking and also, how few [animals] are left in some cases.

There’s so little known about the shark fin trade that estimates are 28 to 73 million sharks are killed a year. It’s that broad a range! That means it’s very hard to measure any trends, because we don’t even know what’s going on.

Tigers have declined from 100,000 at the turn of the century to 3,200 left now — maybe even fewer. Elephant poaching has gone up to around 35,000 a year. And rhinos — we were just in South Africa to see some of the seven remaining Northern White Rhinos. The black rhino’s down to about four and a half thousand from 60 odd thousand 30 years ago. It’s generally pretty grim; although there’s always hope.

What’s clear is if you can stop the trade, then these populations can rebound.

I’ve been working on this for 25 years. It’s never had more attention than now. The bad news is it had to get so bloody terrible before the attention went on it. The United States government, the British government, Chinese government —  they’ve all got their eye on this now.

The sad thing is that despite all this lip service to demand reduction, as of yet there have still been almost no funds dedicated to it. The U.S. government probably spends $5 million a year on international enforcement while spending about $100,000 on demand reduction. The thing about demand reduction is, if you get it right for three or four years, you stop the problem. Enforcement goes on forever.

There is no silver bullet. You have to keep trying different approaches, different celebrities, different tacks to the issue, but the key thing is not to go away. Most campaigns run for three to six months, maybe a year, maybe three years at maximum. We’ve been running the same campaign effectively since 2006 in China. The characters change, the spokespeople change, the animals change, but the message stays the same. The message in China is basically, “No buying, no killing.”

As environmentalists we often have to convey bad news, and we have to try and keep it out there not for just one news cycle, but until we really get that change. And that means using your imagination and telling your story in a million different ways.

I’ve also learned you don’t change the individual. You change society around them and society changes them.

Yes, we’re seeing an impact: a 50 to 70 percent reduction in the shark fin trade, for example. And that’s been largely because of our campaign, but also because the Chinese government banned shark fin from state banquets. The Chinese government has backed this campaign with television advertising space and state media has reported about all the problems of shark fin.

That reduction is measured in statistics, but also in what the traders are saying. Rather than do all these surveys, we send people out undercover to talk to the traders. What’s going on in the business? How’s business?

They have no incentive to say, “Business sucks and it’s awful and nobody’s buying our stuff anymore,” but that’s what they’re saying.

We’ve seen some real results in ivory already. The three largest retailers in Hong Kong have pulled out [of the business of selling ivory]. You need momentum and you need the dominoes to fall one by one until, hopefully, it ultimately hits something like a sales ban in China, which would be huge. That’s certainly what we saw in 1989 when the ivory trade was banned internationally, the poaching went right down for a time. The price of ivory fell to a quarter overnight.

The scale and pace of change in Asia is absolutely mind numbing. The impact on the environment, be it deforestation or carbon that’s put into the air, is enormous. The numbers are so much higher than they were when we in the West went through our industrial revolution. We were talking about millions of people. Now we’re talking about billions of people.

Animals don’t have much hope. There’s nowhere we haven’t impacted. You go to the most remote islands and you see plastic garbage.

To me, there are only two environmental problems: population and consumption. Every other problem is a factor of one of those two or the two combined. I think that the most unsustainable consumption on the planet is surely to consume the last of an endangered species. By definition, you cannot be more unsustainable than that.

That’s why I also hope that it’s one of the things that makes us realize how crazy this is. Our constant drive for growth — we call it “sustainable growth.” It’s an oxymoron. Growth, by definition, involves the use of resources. Some of them are replaceable. A lot of them aren’t.

Yeah, the whole idea was to flip advertising on its head. In 2011 our donated media in China was over $200 million from a budget of less than $1.5 million. And we’re currently reaching up to one billion people every week. On our small budget we’re able to get the equivalent of a campaign that someone like Nike or Apple would run.

I’m very pessimistic on climate change, because we’re just not facing up to the challenge.

We need an attitude of we’re all in this together. We’re all going to work together. And we’re all going to make sacrifices.

It seems nobody’s prepared to make a sacrifice. The politicians obviously aren’t. It seems like a third rail to ask people to give up something.

The trouble with climate change is, 1) it’s complex and 2) it is the frog in the boiling water: It’s not going to hit with a sudden cataclysm. It’s going to be gradually worse and worse. Soon, we’ll be getting used to saying, “Oh, it’s always drought in California.”

Unfortunately, the mainstream media doesn’t help, because they don’t take, in my opinion, an objective view. They take their “fair and balanced” view.

I feel very ambivalent. China in particular is a place to make you both hope and despair. The scale of China is just awesome, but the capability of China is also awesome. My hope is that China can emerge to be an environmental leader, because I think here in the United States, unfortunately, we have a political paralysis.

When people say to me, “It must be so hard [working] in Asia given people’s attitudes to animals.” I say, “People’s attitudes in Asia are changing very, very quickly to animals.”

We did a poll in China and 95 percent of people said that they thought the ivory trade should be banned. Ninety-five percent in any poll is unbelievable — I mean, you always get five or ten percent who just don’t even know or understand the question. So, yes, there are some signs of hope.