Righteous Liars

Back in the 1980s, when I was young, earnest, and easily outraged, I fell prey to the environmental industry's alarms and klaxon-calls regarding the savaging of Mother Earth. Among the high-dudgeon inducers was the deforestation of the Amazon rain forests by farmers, , ranchers, miners, and other evil sorts, and like a good little green, I sent donations to such as Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund, and other such do-gooders.

I recall being informed by one of the above that the rain forest was being denuded at the rate of 100,000 acres a day. Not being nearly the cynic I am today, I didn't think to question that figure (ditto for the 40 lost species a day assertion that I discussed here a few months ago). After all, these were the good guys - why would they lie?

I did eventually open my eyes. Concurrently with discovering that the source of the 40 lost species a day assertion shamelessly fessed up to simply making that number up, I did a wee bit of math. 100,000 acres a day is 156 square miles a day is 57,000 square miles a year is nearly 5% of the rain forest every year. That was in the late 1980s - call it 35 years ago - and deforestation had been going on for some time by the time my young brain was clued into it.

The Internet tells me that about 20-25% of the Amazon has been deforested, and Wikipedia tells me that a recent one-year span had a "decade-high" rate of deforestation at 3100 square miles. That's 5400 acres a day, not 100,000.

Yes, I was lied to.

Yes, it worked.

No, the liars haven't stopped lying.

The photo at the top of this article was released by the World Wildlife Fund - Pakistan on multiple social media platforms as part of a #10yearchallenge, with over a million eyeballs seeing it. It purports to show deforestation across a decade.

Here's the unaltered photo.

Yes, it shows deforestation activity, but not the way the divided and watermarked image implies.

Herein lies the problem. Deforestation may indeed be a concern, but lying in order to stoke emotional responses is not the way to win hearts and minds. This is true across all public issues and across history - lies may prompt a positive initial response, but when they are outed, they can create a backlash that undoes the initial gains, and then some. Good-minded citizens are turned off by lying. I still worry about deforestation and other environmental matters, but WWF will never get a penny of my money nor a syllable of my support because it has lied to me.

This is the same "people need to be managed" condescension that prompted so many lies during the COVID pandemic, that suffuses the global warming debate, and that was wrought large during the 2016 election.

If you have a case, make it. If your case is strong, I will probably come around to your point of view. But, if you lie to me in order to win me over, you risk hardening me against you, no matter the validity of your arguments or the righteousness of your cause. No one likes a manipulator.