Private Land Acquisition to Protect Wildlife

300 people and 7 charities have come together and saved 625 species since June 2021. 🌍

£100 buys an acre of land for animals & indigenous people. Protecting them both forever.
💚Please donate whatever you can afford & help share our mission! pic.twitter.com/R5CMwFNHab

— Rewritingextinction (@rwritextinction) February 3, 2022

This is a rather ridiculous pitch for private funds to fund private land protection.

They have  "saved 625 species since June 2021"?  

Right.  Please name them.

It's bunk, but it's predictable bunk.

As I noted to one critic:

It’s the same bullshit spewed by E.O. Wilson, the ant man. You get that, right?

If you can extrapolate 1000s of species lost from a 50-acre survey (Wilson), you can “survive them” by protecting 50-acres. Bullshit flows in both directions.

For more on E.O. Wilson's shaky lie about the rate of species extinction, see >> Mass Hysteria Over Mass Extinction, and as a backgrounder to that see >>  Condors and Species Loss.

Having criticized the pitch, let me salute the goal. 

Yes, private land acquisition to bolster and help protect public land initiatives is vital. This is the backbone of the good work done by The Nature Conservancy and the hundreds of other land trusts conservancies around the US and the world. 

Ironically private land acquisition to protect the environment is also the part of the backbone claim to the "shoots" in the UK and the private hunting ranches in the US and Africa, where huge tracts of land are protected (and often fenced) in order to hunt charismatic mega-fauna like elk, lions, and kudu. 

Sure the big fellows are shot and sold for trophies, but what about the clean water, butterflies, birds, bees, and bunnies that are not?

Or, to paraphrase an old Smith Barney ad: "We can protect land the old-fashioned way... By BUYING it."