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The National Wildlife Federation is a prominent conservation organization, with over 4 million members and supporters and 46 state affiliate organizations; its annual budget is over $80 million.
NWF was founded in 1936 by editorial cartoonist Jay Norwood Darling (a.k.a. "Ding" Darling) when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt convened the first North American Wildlife Conference.
In the 1980s, Jay Hair, formerly a special assistant to Secretary of Interior Cecil Andrus in the Carter Administration, transformed he organization, doubling its membership and tripling its budget. He did so by closely allying himself with big business, creating the Corporate Conservation Council with what critics call "some of the world's most toxic organizations": ARCO, Ciba-Geigy, Dow Chemical, DuPont, Exxon, General Electric, General Motors, IBM, Mobil Oil, Monsanto, Penzoil, USX, Waste Management and Weyerhauser. NWF grants them the prestige of being associated with the country's largest environmental group in exchange for millions in corporate grants.
In 1986, the Federation took 357-acre tract of forest donated by member Claude Moore to be managed as a wildlife sanctuary and sold it to a developer for $8.5 million. The resulting cash was used to pay for the construction of the Federation's new seven-story office building in DC. Moore sued the organization for breaching its contract to manage the land as a nature preserve but lost.
External links
This article uses content from the SourceWatch article on National Wildlife Federation (http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=National_Wildlife_Federation) under the terms of the GFDL.
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