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The Gap Between Activism and Science
I stumbled across a Greenpeace website last night called "Kleercut". Essentially, they are promoting action against Kimberly-Clark (makers of Kleenex) because of their forest use practices. Unfortunately, what could have been an informative and convincing website leaves me only with a renewed conviction that a little knowledge can be a ridiculous thing.
Groups like Greenpeace cannot hope to make any progress merely with transparent outrage and without a thorough understanding of the science involved. In short, their web site is amateurish. Some specific examples that betray ignorance:
- Extensive use of "boreal" as a noun, as in "The Boreal" (capital "T"; capital "B") to mean Canada's boreal forest. Boreal is an adjective.
- Inflation of FSC as the "final word" in sustainable forestry, which I do not believe it is. I am shocked to see a group like Greenpeace treat it as such.
- Oversimplification (i.e. "trees = good", "cutting trees = bad"). There is no mention or discussion of the actual logging practices that are employed by Kimberly-Clark's suppliers, there is only a theoretical bulleted list of everything that could conceivably go wrong in a cut. And then only if you were not only completely incompetent, you were actually attempting to drive yourself out of business.
It goes on. One of the biggest problems with science is that the general public is ill-equipped to understand it and completely unqualified to attempt to use it. There is a huge communication barrier between the people who are charged with furthering our understanding of the world, and the people who are supposed to use that information. It doesn't help that a large portion of the United States has given in to complete intellectual surrender (phrase borrowed from Steve Mirsky's "AntiGravity" column, Feb 2005 Scientific American) and can no longer be bothered to understand facts, much less integrate them.
Progressive environmentalists cannot stoop to the level of radicals like Greenpeace. We will never make any progress merely by being louder, angrier and more shrill.
