Response 3: Wildlife Conservation Society

While the Wildlife Conservation Society focuses on the preservation of endangered species, their website http://www.wcs.org is geared toward educating and fundraising. It allows its visitor to experience the wonders of the world through its pictures of some amazing wildlife and remote locations without the excitement of traveling to these regions, as well as make donations.  When I first looked at this site I was impressed by the information that spans the globe and numerous species, but quickly lost interest after looking further into the sites and finding a political agenda.

Education is probably the best means to promote conservation and on this website there are multiple articles on promoting education of conservation in multiple countries from Indonesia, Afghanistan, and the United States. By teaching future generations about the failures and the success of conservation we will be able to hopefully sustain the environments that we have grown to care about. As these educational programs continue to grow so will the chances of survival of many endangered and threatened species, unfortunately education is not the only thing that we must promote across the globe.

Funding for conservation can be very expensive and needs to be spread across the globe and its governments, however when you go “Take Action” it brings up three sub links that generates a letter to a congressional representative. This letter encourages the continual funding by our government to governments of other countries, in order to promote conservation in these countries. It even states during the cut backs our government is going through we need to continue to support these governments. This letter is putting the burden of conserving the world on the United States’ government and ultimately each and every U.S. citizen. Although conservation is important, it is not the responsibility of one country to fund. This letter should be removed from the site and the only fundraising that should be sought after is private funding.