Insight

Environmental DisinfoIgnorance & Deception

Along with the increased media coverage of global warming and other environmental issues has come a dis/misinformation campaign that is both sophisticated and amorphous. Strangely enough, there are now many radical libertarian-leaning activists who align themselves with arch right-wing politicians and wealthy corporate interests in rejecting the urgency and/or extent of human environmental exploitation.

While corporate media coverage may bring to light some vital information on environmental degradation, these messages are crafted and received within a system and a culture that is staunchly and blindly opposed to fundamental change or paradigm shift. While it may seem otherwise, most mainstream coverage and institutional action on environmental issues is inevitably designed and/or functions to rationalize continued exploitation of the planet and avoid facing harsh realities and difficult changes.

Among “truth activists”—those who question the generally-accepted or promulgated version of political history and reality—there is a very evident split between those who give credence to environmental issues and those who argue against their validity or significance. Those who have aligned themselves with such right-wing libertarians as Alex Jones and Ron Paul have also usually assimilated a skepticism about global warming and environmentalism in general. These groups espouse a philosophy that has probably existed, in some form, since the beginning of history, but that is often connected with 20th Century writer/philosopher Ayn Rand. It is a worldview that idolizes individual rights, self-interest, and competitiveness. Much of this thinking is shared by the right-wing and it permeates most myths and institutions in the United States and throughout the global capitalist system. This way of thinking is responsible for the greatest unnecessary holocaust of life in history.

The “populist” libertarian movements decry government encroachment on personal rights and they often say that environmentalism is just an excuse for the elites to increase control over the population. There is no doubt that those in power will try to utilize any issue to stay in power or to gain even more power, but this does not mean that our environmental crises are not real. Many people influenced by the libertarian school of thought express a single-minded passion for pointing out evil within certain institutions but are unable to examine themselves rationally or admit their own complicity in certain wrongs. Their philosophy generally champions the individual over society and the human over nature. It is a philosophy of unconscious egotism, disconnection, and lack of self-reflection. Libertarians often have a visceral disgust for talk of the interconnectedness of nature and life. They do not seem to understand that the food they eat and the resources they burn came from somewhere and what they waste or hoard should be conserved or shared. They often espouse a “law of the jungle” outlook, explaining that if they didn’t take certain resources or powers for themselves, someone else would have done it.

Ayn Rand was a devout believer in reason and her own ability to reason. But her reasoning was wrong, just as the prevailing reasoning behind the conservatives, libertarians, and our society’s most basic assumptions are all wrong. Humanity is not separate from nature any more than any man or woman is separate from the human family. This school of thought could have been considered quaint, pathetic, even laughable had if it had not been central to the devastation of the planet over the last couple centuries.

“[O]bserve that in all the propaganda of the ecologists—amidst all their appeals to nature and pleas for “harmony with nature”—there is no discussion of man’s needs and the requirements of his survival. Man is treated as if he were an unnatural phenomenon. Man cannot survive in the kind of state of nature that the ecologists envision—i.e., on the level of sea urchins or polar bears… .

In order to survive, man has to discover and produce everything he needs, which means that he has to alter his background and adapt it to his needs. Nature has not equipped him for adapting himself to his background in the manner of animals. From the most primitive cultures to the most advanced civilizations, man has had to manufacture things; his well-being depends on his success at production. The lowest human tribe cannot survive without that alleged source of pollution: fire. It is not merely symbolic that fire was the property of the gods which Prometheus brought to man. The ecologists are the new vultures swarming to extinguish that fire.”

  • [Ayn Rand (1971), “The Anti-Industrial Revolution,” Return of the Primitive, 277.]

Anti-environmentalists who share Rand’s illogical views above are most likely to be guilty of misinformation rather than disinformation, through their deluded interpretation of reality and priorities. Most followers of Alex Jones don’t know it, but when they promote their individual rights and anti-environmentalist agenda, they are right in line with one of their supposed arch-enemies, former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, a 20-year associate of Ayn Rand. These “populist” libertarians act as unconscious foot soldiers fighting on the side of the establishment in the battle for the survival of the planet. With their selfishness and lack of self-awareness, they would most likely re-create the current order or something worse if they ever came to power.

Corporations and their agents are responsible for the most cynical anti-environmental disinformation campaigns. Many lobbyists, think tanks, PR firms, “astroturf” groups, etc. have been mobilized and setup to promulgate skepticism and confusion over the reality of the environmental crisis. These groups actively thwart the public’s understanding of urgent environmental facts in order to prevent progressive changes. Some of these forces may promote the reality of environmental problems and call for solutions but attempt to push action in a way that is beneficial to the existing order and certain special interests. At the heart of this movement is a complex of greed, fear, and ruthlessness shared by both corporations and individuals.

We easily find the hand of the corporate special interests behind much of the supposed “doubt” concerning global warming and environmental issues that is broadcast through the media. Additionally, governments themselves (which are often closely aligned or one in the same with corporate interests), have been major obstacles in stalling understanding and progress on the environmental crisis. Governments in the developed world, countries who are most responsible for ecological devastation, have usually been reluctant to institute restrictions that may “limit economic growth” or “prosperity.” Of course, this is a very shortsighted position, as the price of our collective denial and procrastination may likely be the collapse of entire economies and civilizations and the loss of most of the life on earth.

“Truth Activists” who parrot the propaganda and “skepticism” that is engineered by corporate and special interest PR specialists are part of the false truth movement. If in their delusions and blind following of certain leaders, they refuse to listen to reason and see the reality of the environmental crisis, they should be considered and treated as co-opted agents of the establishment.

Elements of the environmental movement that have been involved in dis/misinformation have clearly been influenced by outside forces with opposing interests. The conscious aims behind this campaign are to play down the urgency and reality of the environmental crisis and to split the movement into niche issues rather than allow a powerful, united and righteous movement to coalesce around the clearest and most alarming facts (which are all intertwined):

Overpopulation
Mass Extinction
Resource Depletion
Global Warming

Evidence