Criticism
EDF has drawn criticism for its ties to large corporations including McDonald’s, FedEx, and the Texas energy company TXU, with which the organization has negotiated to reduce emissions and develop more environmentally friendly business practices. EDF’s philosophy is that it is willing to talk with big business and try new approaches in order to get environmental results.
John Berlau, author of the book Eco-Freaks: Environmentalism Is Hazardous to Your Health! argues that EDF and later the Clinton administration interfered with operations of the US Army Corps of Engineers via judicial activism with the aid of Judge Charles Schwartz, forestalling levee reinforcement before Hurricane Katrina.
However, Berlau’s claim that, if built, the levee reinforcement system would have protected New Orleans from Katrina, is inaccurate. After Katrina, several studies were undertaken to determine what went wrong. None concluded that the failure to build the system was a factor in the flooding of New Orleans. In fact, a 2005 GAO report found that, if the barriers had built, the flooding would have been worse.
According to one of the post-Katrina studies, “The USACE was aware of GNO HPS vulnerabilities, but appeared to accept the inadequacy of the system with a complacency that undercut efforts to sound alarms and begin pressing for improvement.”
A 2009 op-ed piece by the Pacific Coast Federation of Fisherman’s Association in the trade journal Fishermen's News argues that EDF's approach to fisheries policy in the Pacific Northwest is likely to damage smaller, local operators who have an interest in protecting fisheries and limiting by-catch. Many fisherman fear that the approach gives a competitive advantage to larger, non-local operations, jeopardizing independent operators, including boats, fisheries, and ports.
But with many reports suggesting that most of the world's commercial fisheries could collapse within decades, EDF argues that the way we manage our fisheries needs to change if we want to protect fishermen, fish, and coastal communities. EDF advocates a promising approach : catch shares, which set a scientifically based limit on the total amount of fish that can be caught; that amount is then divided among individual fishermen or groups of fishermen, who can sell or lease their shares to other fishermen. EDF’s research suggests that concern about consolidation of corporate ownership of fisheries is unwarranted in a well-designed catch share.
Read more about this topic: Environmental Defense Fund
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige through being mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)