Did you know that illegal wildlife trafficking is the fourth largest criminal enterprise in the world? Though it touches every corner of the globe–there is no international agency devoted to stopping it–so ex-intelligence operative Andrea Crosta stepped in. As head of Earth League International, Andrea has spent the past ten years investigating and exposing the people who get rich wiping out rare species and despoiling our planet.
And he’s got a lot of stories to tell. In this episode, Non-toxic goes undercover with Andrea to see how greedy traffickers take advantage of desperate poachers, how Latin American jaguar teeth are passed off as Asian tiger fangs, and how South African rhino horns are ground up for increasingly expensive virility cures.
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Links
Read Earth League International’s recent report on the Jaguar fang trade.
Read this recent profile of Andrea in the New Yorker.
Check out this overview on the economics of the illegal wildlife trade.
Check out this graphic novel about ELI’s efforts to save the vaquita.
Watch this Netflix documentary about the illegal ivory trade and this Nat Geo doc ‘Sea of Shadows’, about illegal fishing and the potential extinction of the Vaquita porpoise.
Guest bio
Andrea Crosta, Executive Director and Board Member
Andrea is the founder of Earth League International (ELI), among the founding members of the Wildlife Justice Commission, in The Netherlands, a Member of the Board of The Africa Conservancy Foundation, and the creator and project manager of WildLeaks, the world’s first wildlife crime whistleblower initiative.
He has been working for almost two decades as an international consultant to companies and governmental agencies on high-end security technologies & services, homeland security, anti-piracy, investigations and risk management. He now applies this unique knowledge to conservation, environmental crime, and wildlife protection.
