21
That's it. Audubon sucks. I was immediately reminded of a recent Vox story on How the most powerful environmental groups help greenwash Big Meat’s climate impact
The National Audubon Society, the beloved bird conservancy organization, rewards regenerative ranchers with its seal of approval in the form of a label that reads “Grazed on bird friendly land” and “Audubon certified.” Such beef can be purchased at about 250 retail and online stores.
Then there's how Massachusetts Audubon pretended it was going to chop down its trees so it could continue NOT cutting them to get paid to preserve them for carbon-offsets. Propublica:
However improbable the idea might be of a conservation group actually permitting the removal of so much timber, Mass Audubon officials said they had simply followed the state’s rules in claiming that the society could heavily log its forest.
Then there's E & E News (politico) discussion of Audubon's internals:
The organization’s former president and CEO, David Yarnold, resigned under pressure in 2021, following POLITICO’s reports of widespread staff dissatisfaction at Audubon, especially among workers of color and the LGBTQ community (Greenwire, April 21, 2021).
An external audit later substantiated some of those claims, and pointed to widespread cultural problems. “Nearly all of the women we interviewed and many of the men commented that implicit bias toward women and people of color is prevalent at Audubon,” the audit found (Greenwire, May 6, 2021).
Refugio Mariscal, a former geographic information systems analyst in Audubon’s Great Lakes regional office, said that management at the national level had “almost gotten worse since Yarnold left.”
“I would say as a person of color, there’s still a lot of issues that Audubon needs to deal with,” he said.
Mariscal left Audubon in January for a job at another environmental nonprofit. He said workplace issues at Audubon, plus better pay at the new job, factored into his decision.
“The general culture within Audubon is not very welcoming to staff,” he said in January. “They seem to have a tough time letting go of their old ways of doing things.”