Press, research, and dispatches from the making of the film.
Each thread is a critical framing of the field, drawn from the press, research, and dispatches that document it. Together they show how the same evidence gets read in very different ways, and why the framing you start with shapes what you see. Read top to bottom, or begin with whichever one interests you.
The full argument around biofabrication: Pembient's substitution thesis, the NGO opposition, the economists who tried to formalize the market logic, and the August 2017 PembiCoin pivot. Read together, these pieces show not just a disagreement over rhino horn, but how competing institutions define risk, evidence and legitimacy.
Read the threadThe brief window before institutional frame consolidation, then the closing four pieces from April–May 2015 that show the press template hardening in real time.
Read the threadThis thread follows the money behind global biodiversity promises. It traces how much funding actually reaches conservation, how much public finance and private capital still flows to nature‑harming subsidies, and how that imbalance has barely shifted even after the Kunming‑Montreal targets. Across these articles, you will see how different actors count the flows, where the gaps and loopholes sit, and why the numbers now make it possible to say not just that we are off‑track, but by how much, for whom, and in which direction the system is really moving.
Read the threadThe Western press has covered Chinese rhino horn consumption as a medical demand story for 30 years. The Chinese-language press has covered it as an investment-market story. The two markets are different markets and the conservation movement has spent most of a decade arguing with the wrong one.
Read the threadWhat happens when researchers question the premise of a decade of NGO demand-reduction campaigning. The picture is not flattering: thin evidence, missing audience research, and campaigns aimed at the wrong market.
Read the threadFrom the killing field in KwaZulu-Natal to the WeChat group in Guangzhou, what is known of the route, what changes hands, what the price multiplies through, and where enforcement breaks down.
Read the threadJohn Hume's August 2017 auction. The ConCourt ruling, Molewa's permit conditions, IFAW's opposition, the academic literature, and the 48-hour pairing with PembiCoin made the three-way fight unmistakable.
Read the threadThe frame described one market. The record described another.
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