Michigan-native attorney and author Jeff Flocken will tell you firmly that he is not a lobbyist.
Instead, he uses the legal degree he received from Wayne State University Law School to manage a team of lobbyists, and to develop the kind of global policies others will take on in advocacy roles.
None of that should be taken as an indication, however, that he has no hands-on role. As the DC Office Director of the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), he often negotiates directly with the government of countries where people are acting contrary to the best interests of wildlife. The campaigns he develops often take him to exotic places —and now he has co-authored a book about heroic wildlife workers which required travel all over the globe.
Flocken wrote the book, Wildlife Heroes: 40 Leading Conservationists and the Animals They are Committed to Saving, with long-time friend Julie Scardina. In addition to profiles of these heroes and tales of their wildlife protection successes, the book includes gorgeous photography and essays by celebrities such as Ted Danson of Cheers, U.S. Representative Jay Inslee, and Jack Hanna of Jack Hanna's Animal Adventures and Into The Wild.
Flocken was a 1987 graduate of Portage Central High School who went on to graduate with honors from the University of Michigan before obtaining his law degree.
He says he has always known that he wanted to act on his passion for animal welfare and environmental protection, and he finally decided that becoming an attorney was the best way to do it.
Flocken says he is not sure why wildlife protection called to him, but he remembers that it always has. His parents raised him to love and respect animals, and his mother is a naturalist photographer, but Flocken, from a very young age, just had a heart for species that were endangered or compromised, or were suffering. Of course, he says, Jane
Goodall was an early inspiration for him, and continued to be throughout his youth.
After Wayne State, Flocken worked for a year at the Alliance for the Great Lakes, formerly the Lake Michigan Federation. Coincidentally, the executive director of the Alliance and Flocken’s close friend also wound up in Washington: Cameron Davis works in the Environmental Protection Agency as Senior Advisor to the Administrator, focusing on Great Lakes issues.
While Flocken enjoyed working on toxics policy at the Alliance, he continued to be driven to protect wildlife, and left after a year. He worked closely with the general counsel of Greenpeace USA, and after managing the National Wildlife
Federation’s endanger species campaign and as Education, Policy and Outreach Director for Conservation International, settled for five years at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
His time there as an International Affairs Specialist allowed him to dive deeply into the word of global wildlife conservation. He has expertise in the issues regarding familiar species, particularly in the cat family, as well as such lesser-known animals as tapirs, which are large endangered mammals that look something like pigs. Flocken is on the steering committee of the Tapir Specialist Group of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.
Flocken has held the position at IFAW since 2007.
Has his law degree helped him? “Oh, absolutely,” he says. “It’s been a huge advantage when I go into other countries to be able to understand their laws, and it allows me to find the right legal approach to the recommendations we make for changes in those countries.”
There have been major successes, though Flocken stresses that most of them have come in the wake of partnerships.
One example is in the work to eliminate the ivory trade. Though killing elephants for their tusks (a practice mandated by the great danger in removing tusks from elephants while they are still alive) was banned worldwide by CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) in 1990, poaching is still a nasty reality. IFAW and others have made some inroads in demanding that countries enforce their poaching laws, and have thus far prevented countries who want to see the ban overturned from prevailing on the international scene.
All of this amounts to an impressive career, but Flocken says he is continuously humbled by the unrewarding, often dangerous, work that he has observed over the years as people fight for the animals they love.
“There are amazing people doing incredible things, and I wanted people to know about it,” Flocken says of writing the book with Scardina.
Most, he says, have a focus on one species or group of creatures. They include everyone from Felicity Arengo, battling to save South American Flamingos and Diane McTurk the Giant River otter, to Leandro Silveira working on jaguars, Iain Douglas-Hamilton saving elephants, and May Berenbaum, an entomologist with vast expertise on bee populations.
“Of course,” Flocken says, grinning, “May had already been honored by having a character named after her on an X-Files episode.”
The authors tried to find a broad spectrum of activists to highlight, particularly wanting to include younger people. All of the people profiled are living, with one exception: the famous African environmental dynamo Wangari Maathai who died while the book was being published.
Flocken’s first hero, Jane Goodall, has endorsed the book, commenting, “These men and women are shining inspirations, and hopefully, after reading this book, you will be inspired to do something yourself to help animals in need.”
The book’s website, http://www.wildlifeheroes.org, does indeed give some ideas of what individuals can do to support the work of the wildlife activists in the book.
There is one thing Flocken cannot emphasize enough: climate change is by far the most pressing issue in wildlife protection.
He said he has observed frightening losses in habitat all over the globe, as well as the direct threat that unpredictable weather events pose. He would advise people who want to help animals worldwide to prioritize combatting climate change if they want to help animals everywhere.
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