Franz Weber (activist)  Franz Weber (27 July 1927 – 2 April 2019) was a Swiss environmentalist and animal welfare activist. Franz Weber began his career as a journalist and reporter. After his studies of philosophy and linguistics at the Sorbonne University in Paris, he worked from his Paris office from 1951 until 1973. Weber became actively interested in ecology and conservation in 1965, when he learned about efforts to conserve the Swiss mountain region, the Engadine Valley of the Lakes. Weber decided to invest himself in the rescue and safeguarding of this region by beginning an international press campaign. At the end of a seven years battle by Weber the Swiss Federal Government declared the Engadine Valley of the Lakes a "National Conservation Region" and put it under the State's protection. In order to be able to launch further campaigns, he quit writing for money and devoted himself entirely to the conservation of natural sites of special beauty and value in France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Greece, Switzerland, Slovenia and Hungary, as well as endangered species in South America, Canada, Australia, Africa and Europe. He founded the Franz Weber Foundation in 1975. The board is composed of 5 international personalities with Weber as president. The Foundation has today over 230,000 supporter members. In 1997, in the presence of Émile Gardaz, Jean-Pierre Thiollet and some other personalities, the township of Delphi appointed him a Citoyen d'honneur. In 2014, Weber announced his retirement from the foundation, with his daughter Vera to succeed him in running it. Weber was married to Judith with one daughter, Vera, and lived in Montreux, Switzerland. He died on 2 April 2019 in Bern at the age of 91. In the 1970s and 2000s, Franz Weber launched three cantonal popular initiatives for the complete protection of the Lavaux region and two of them directly succeeded. In 2007 the vineyard landscape of Lavaux was registered as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. One of the Foundation's first international campaigns in defence of animals was the fight against the yearly slaughters of seals on the coast of Labrador in Canada, The campaign, which started in 1976, included a trip with French film actress Brigitte Bardot and 75 newspaper reporters to the Labrador seal hunting grounds. In 1983 the European Economic Community banned all importations of baby seal pelts into the EEC. In 1978, the Council of Europe in Strasbourg appealed to Franz Weber to save ancient Delphi in Greece from destruction by an American-Greek project of industrialization.