The New Nature of Business

Chapter 2A Conservationist and His Fight for the World's Natural Capital

On April 29, 1961, a group of environmentalists convened on the shores of Lake Geneva, Switzerland, and conceived of an organization we all know today: the World Wide Fund for Nature, or World Wildlife Fund (WWF), as it is also known.¹ The organization wanted to help protect endangered species around the world, such as the rhino in Eastern Africa and the panda in China. Over the decades since its founding, the WWF panda logo became an icon for every generation that grew up since, my coauthor Peter and I included.

My father, Luc Hoffmann (1923–2016), was part of this group of founders. He dedicated his life to nature conservation, serving as vice president and honorary vice president of WWF for decades. He went on to found and fund several more nature conservation organizations, too, spending a great deal of his personal wealth on the endeavor. But neither he nor the WWF could bend the arc of human development. By the time we write this book in the 2020s, a mass extinction of species has taken place, and the pressure on animal habitats continues unabated. We are still gathering funds to save the rhino and the panda, ever since the first “shock issue” supplement the WWF published in the October 9, 1961, edition of the Daily Mirror newspaper (see Figure 2.1).² A 2013 WWF campaign embodies how endangered some of these same species still are, if they haven't disappeared altogether (see Figure 2.2).

Nor are ...