Talk:Friends of the Earth

grammar

I noticed this small error in the first paragraph. "from the bottom up as a as a confederation of groups" I am hoping this is an acceptable place to note this.Sativarg (talk) 00:02, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

Suggested change: rather than "separate different organizations" "separate and dramatically different organizations"Sativarg (talk) 00:06, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

Funding

Shouldn't there be anything about FOE's funding? The Telegraph had an article about how FOE europe was largely funded through the European Commission recently. I think that is relevant information, no?

The Telegraph link given is dead but here is a (probably verbatim) copy. This material certainly looks legitimate and could be added, particularly if the original story can be traced. I tried a dedicated google search and could not find it, but here is something similar. Someone might like to finish this research and add the information to the article. Best wishes. RobbieIanMorrison (talk) 08:20, 28 October 2016 (UTC)

References

Supporters

For organizations such as this, their notable supporters, here probably mislabeled "Famous People..." is an intrinsic part of their Brand.

Examples:

• Bono and African causes
• Past Presidents of the USA and numerous causes
• Lance Armstrong and cancer research
• and so on.

In many cases these brand-drivers are directly responsible for significant levels of public awareness, and significant levels of overall funding for the organization as a result.

I argue that one should not simply delete a list of famous people supporting causes on the grounds that "it doesn't feel encyclopedic". These associations are vital, and it's a two-way street. Both sides gain from the partnership. Deleting that breaks the deal, which is the co-branding of the collaboration which, I remind you, can be significant even vital for the organization under discourse.

Please don't unilaterally delete sections without showing respect and balance for the topic at hand, especially after being politely asked to bring it to the discussion page first.

StevenBlack 06:12, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

I dunno. Lance Armstrong is notable for supporting cancer research. Everybody's got those yellow wristbands. Bono has been babbling about Africa for decades now. You can hear the groan at U2 shows when he starts in. And Richard Gere with Tibet. He has the Gere Foundation for that. I think those are special cases. If on the other hand the organization is barely notable in itself, such that the famous person's connection with it is essentially unknown and unremarkable, I don't think it bears mentioning. IMHO. -- But|seriously|folks  07:07, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

So, Butseriouslyfolks, to summarize therefore, in your view Thom Yorke representing Friends Of The Earth in the court of Tony Blair and, moreover, acting as a driver of fundraising for Friends Of The Earth is not notable in the article on Friends Of The Earth? I'm just trying to understand what you are really saying. StevenBlack 09:10, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Steve, this article doesn't assert that: it just says he's a member and supporter. I had to go to the Yorke article to find out he was actually a spokesman for the organization. That's notable, IMHO.--SarekOfVulcan 11:40, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Objectivity

The introductory paragraph (and so possibly the rest of the article) appears rather subjective, or biased: it reads like a promotional leaflet. Needs revision.

Friends of the Earth International are the world's largest grassroots environmental network and they campaign on today's most urgent environmental and social issues. They challenge the current model of economic and corporate globalization, and promote solutions that will help to create environmentally sustainable and socially just societies.

--·Arianwen· (talk) 19:09, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

That's because the the only sources referenced are Friends of the Earth websites. Nothing like a good old self-licking ice cream cone...--Lacarids (talk) 16:43, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

This article is so outrageously biased as to be worthless to an uncommitted reader looking for information about FOE. I know little about the organisation but I can detect an article which shows no objectivity at all. I'm surprised it even gets a consideration for being included in Wikipedia projects. "...self-licking ice cream cone..." - that about sums it up. I'd suggest it was deleted and a new article started Cannonmc (talk) 16:06, 27 February 2013 (UTC)

This article is very biased and as such i have nominated it to be checked for neutrality 7/11/2013- 18:47

grassroots

I think the term should be removed as unsourced, but if it is to be linked, it certainly needs a source. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 06:18, 12 April 2012 (UTC)

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Breadth

When looking under the campaign section, my attention was drawn to the Climate and Energy campaign, a highlight of which was the release of a song. When I clicked on the link to the song, it took me to an artists webpage, rather than linking to something related to FOTE's work on climate campaigns or involvement with the song.

Macknarg (talk) 20:52, 12 February 2018 (UTC)

Unverifiable lede

This is a poor article. Maybe a history of FoE has not yet been written, but this article still contains obvious errors of fact. Depressingly I couldn't find a clean version of the second paragraph in the last two years of article history and it probably goes back to 2013. This is how it read:

Friends of the Earth (UK) was founded in 1969 in London as an anti-nuclear group by the Texas based American oil tycoon[5] Robert O Anderson[6] who contributed $200,000 in personal funds to launch FOTE with David Brower, Donald Aitken and Jerry Mander after Brower's split with the Sierra Club. FOTE main mission was to lock up and prevent further development of nuclear energy.[7][8] Their first employee was Amory Lovins, who kicked off FOE in the UK. It became an international network of organisations in 1971 with a meeting of representatives from four countries, namely U.S., Sweden, the UK and France.[9].

'FOTE' is neither a conventional nor defined abbreviation. If Anderson donated to FoE that does not mean he founded it. It's hard to know if "Jerry Mander" is a joke, a founder, or a real individual who probably shouldn't be listed as a founder (it seems the last). References 7 and 8 are to something called The Big Bad Bank, apparently a self-published conspiracy compendium. As a primary source, [1] states "The first Friends of the Earth group was founded in San Francisco in the US in 1969. Friends of the Earth England, Wales and Northern Ireland was established in September 1971." I wish injection of stuff like this could be detected more promptly. --Cedders^tk 10:25, 18 December 2018 (UTC)

Clicked on the foei.org link and got a virus

The correct link should be foe.org, but I'm too busy to correct it atm. Donkey Hot-day (talk) 17:04, 17 October 2020 (UTC)

Unverified claims regarding founding donation by Shellenberger

The article currently claims that

The founding donation of $500,000 (in 2019 USD) was provided by Robert Orville Anderson, the owner of Atlantic Richfield oil company.

The source given is an article by Michael Shellenberger where he claims that Anderson "gave FOE the equivalent of $500,000 in 2019 dollars." He does not give a direct source for this claim, instead he mentions the author of Brower's biography wondering "What was [he] doing accepting money from an oilman?". The problem with this is that the biography mentions no donations - let alone "founding donations" - made by Anderson to Friends of the Earth. The only mention of Anderson in this context concerns a donation of $80,000 made to the John Muire Institute to hire Brower to organize a conference in Aspen in 1969:

A year before his resignation as executive director of the Sierra Club, Brower had joined up with Edgar Wayburn and Max Linn, a public-relations specialist with Sandia Laboratories in Albuquerque, to launch the John Muir Institute (JMI) as a tax-deductible, nonlobbying organization. Linn was president, Brower vice president, Wayburn treasurer. The secretary was David Sive, and the chairman was Robert O. Anderson of the oil company Atlantic Richfield.

The idea was that conservationists, now slowly morphing into environmentalists, needed better information in order to win their arguments. JMI would, according to plan, eventually become a provider of sound, solid studies and other material to bolster efforts to force environmental sanity into the public debate. Such an organization might also serve as a lifeboat if Brower were ever forced to jump off the good ship Sierra Club. In fact, Brower would often characterize his last act as a Sierra Club employee as walking the plank.

Immediately after his forced resignation, Brower got together with Linn to chart a course for the immediate future. Linn prevailed upon Anderson to make a grant of $80,000 to the new institute to hire Brower to organize a conference he called “Forum for a Future,” in Aspen, Colorado, in the autumn of 1969. It brought together politicians, scientists, and conservation activists to discuss a broad range of issues. Brower was expected to devote 60 percent of his time to the John Muir Institute for pay and the remainder to organizing his new non-tax-deductible organization as a volunteer.

The grant from Anderson was not widely publicized at the time but began to raise eyebrows later: What was David Brower doing accepting money from an oilman? There’s no evidence that Anderson ever tried to pressure Brower to moderate any of his stances, and Brower allayed anysuspicion when he filed suit to block construction of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline a year and a half later.

Turner, T. (2015). David Brower: The making of the environmental movement. Univ of California Press.

This claim is repeated in Anti-nuclear movement where it is given as evidence (together with another unverfiable claim by Rod Adams citing something that his source does not state) for donations toward Friends of the Earth by Atlantic Richfield. As far as I can tell these claims are simply made up by Shellenberger who either didn't read his sources or did not actually understand what he was reading. 84.186.212.97 (talk) 12:19, 5 October 2024 (UTC)