Greenpeace tell us we should worry about global warming and GM food. But what are most people worried about when it comes to the environment?
There is currently a poll on ‘The Environment’ at the ‘What the People Want’ . If you fill it in and leave your email address Graham Young will send you a summary of his findings.
The poll is structured along the lines of work done by Riley Dunlap in the early 1990s. He asked people how the environment was locally, nationally and globally and found everyone thought the environment was worse ‘elsewhere’. Even in the one country most respondents believed the environment was worse ‘elsewhere’.
In his book ‘The Skeptical Environmentalist’ Bjorn Lomborg suggested this is because our fears for the environment are to a high degree communicated by scientists, conservationists and the media.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
From Harvard
“….Alarmism—the environmental movement’s basic strategy—has led to this dead end. Since Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” the movement has been dominated by doomsday scenarios. Even on the first Earth Day in 1970, biologist George Wald predicted that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken” while the New York Times warned that “man must stop pollution and conserve his resources…to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.” Fortunately, such apocalyptic forecasts have repeatedly proven to be wrong.
…Knowing the movement’s track record of false alarms, the American public dismiss dire environmental warnings out of hand. Moreover, these alarming reports attract a disproportionate amount of media attention, discrediting the environmentalist movement twice over: First when the sensational predictions drown out more plausible reports, then again when the highly-publicized disaster fails to occur.
….Although the impact of the movement’s past achievements is uncertain, its future success clearly depends on a fundamental reevaluation of long-unquestioned theories and policies. Doomsday warnings no longer shock the public into action; instead, environmentalists need to develop moderate arguments that don’t depend on the ‘stick’ of calamity. This means abandoning Soviet-style “command-and-control” regulation, epitomized by the Kyoto Treaty, and exploring ideas, like the use of DDT, that are currently considered heretical.
Thus, on the 37th anniversary of Earth Day, the environmental movement is looking increasingly long in the tooth. Alarmist environmentalists have overshadowed moderate, careful researchers, and undermined the credibility of the entire movement. Until environmentalists cease depending on nightmare scenarios, they will fail to influence the public at large. Let the next generation of environmentalists begin to reestablish the movement’s credibility by exploring currently heretical ideas and producing moderate, nuanced reports, even if they do not make for good press.”
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=512890
dire, disproportionate, drown, disaster, Soviet, heretical, nightmare
Nah ! spin it fast and spin it thick, create that imagery all so quick
This is the kind of problem that destroys credibility:
http://www.theagitator.com/archives/026634.php
May 30, 2006 You Sorta’ Suspected It, Didn’t You?
This is hysterical:
Before President Bush touched down in Pennsylvania Wednesday to promote his nuclear energy policy, the environmental group Greenpeace was mobilizing.
“This volatile and dangerous source of energy” is no answer to the country’s energy needs, shouted a Greenpeace fact sheet decrying the “threat” posed by the Limerick reactors Bush visited.
But a factoid or two later, the Greenpeace authors were stumped while searching for the ideal menacing metaphor.
We present it here exactly as it was written, capital letters and all: “In the twenty years since the Chernobyl tragedy, the world’s worst nuclear accident, there have been nearly [FILL IN ALARMIST AND ARMAGEDDONIST FACTOID HERE].”
Oops!
The boy who cried wolf.