This piece originally appeared on the Toronto Star. 

“What does reconciliation mean to you?”

I asked that question of Miles Richardson, a Haida leader, former chief commissioner of the B.C. Treaty Commission and a close friend since we started serving together on the board of the David Suzuki Foundation in 2001. I had recently come from a workshop discussion where I had earned criticism from an Indigenous leader for conflating reconciliation with forgiveness.

So, I was looking for an understanding of reconciliation that was deeper and more nuanced than the dictionary definition: “the restoration of friendly relations.”

I can’t remember if Miles harrumphed but he didn’t answer. I wasn’t even sure if he had heard me, and we were soon discussing something else. But a couple of days later, we were talking again and he said, “Jim, I’ve been thinking about the question that you asked me.” And even as I was wondering, “What question?” Miles said, “ … about reconciliation.”

He went on: “If you can see me as I see myself, and I can see you as you see yourself, that is the beginning of a healthy relationship. And I’d like to see where a healthy relationship would take us.”

Two things struck me about this response. First, I was honoured — though, in hindsight, not surprised — that Miles had taken time to consider my question. It reminded me why we are friends; he is thoughtful, as well as wise. More important, though, was the answer itself. Miles wasn’t trying to persuade me to agree with him. He was calling for mutual respect and empathy. He was trying to open up space for a higher quality conversation.

This, in terms of the faltering processes of reconciliation unfolding in Canada today, gets to a critical point.

Reconciliation is not something you pick off the shelf. It’s not a gift that one powerful party can offer another. It is the product of a trusting relationship. It doesn’t require agreement — so much is yet to be negotiated — but it demands a degree of understanding. And that foundation of trust and acceptance — of mutual respect — is not, in itself, the happy end point; it is a first, essential step in creating the space in which reconciliation may emerge.

#Reconciliation Is Not a Gift. It’s a New Beginning https://t.co/PSHIgCTGh3 #cdnpoli #indigenousrights @james_hoggan

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) October 15, 2017

That gets to one of the biggest problems we now face. Too many people today are stressing and obsessing about all the ways the reconciliation project might ultimately go awry.

As Miles has said, reconciliation is not about coming to a final verdict: it’s about respect. It’s about having integrity as a Canadian and a human. It is, again, about seeing the other as they see themselves, and, critically, about being who you say you are.

The final accounting — the resolution of rights and title — will take years to unravel, even once the journey to reconciliation is well under way. But this first step demands an unprecedented degree of openness.

For example, Miles says, “I also have the view that my people are sovereign over Haida Gwaii. If you hope to understand me, you better understand that.” He’s not demanding that you accede — even if he’s quick to point out that his title is well defined in Canadian law. But, he says, “Reconciliation entails respect, whether you agree or not.”

So, the task now is to find the courage and integrity to take a first step — not to fear that, by reaching out, we might sacrifice a long-term negotiating position or “give away” something that was built on denial of the basic humanity of our Indigenous neighbours — only that we seek a foundation of understanding.

In Miles’s words: “We’re agreed that we’re all here to stay.” Wouldn’t it be better, for the social, economic and environmental security of all parties, to begin the next 150 years with the mutual respect that enables us to see where a healthy relationship takes us?

James Hoggan is the past Chair of the David Suzuki Foundation Board and author of the book, I’m Right and You’re an Idiot: The Toxic State of Public Discourse and How to Clean It Up.

Image: Healing Walk 2014. Photo: Zack Embree

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Political propaganda employs the ideals of liberal democracy to undermine those very ideals, the dangers of which, not even its architects fully understand.

In the early years of DeSmog’s research into anti science propaganda, I thought of energy industry PR campaigns such as “junk science,” “clean coal,” and “ethical oil” as misinformation strategies designed to dupe the public.

Although that’s obviously true, I now understand that propaganda is far more complex and problematic than merely lying about the evidence. Certainly propaganda is designed to deceive, but not in a way you might think. What’s more, the consequences are far worse than most people who produce and consume it realize.

My deeper understanding evolved after I interviewed Jason Stanley and read his important book How Propaganda Works. The American philosopher and Yale University professor will speak about the history and dangers of demagogic propaganda at UBC’s Point Grey Campus in Vancouver on April 27 (7 p.m. Buchanan A210, 1866 Main Mall).

According to Stanley, the danger for a democracy “raided by propaganda” is the possibility that the vocabulary of liberal democracy is being used to mask an undemocratic reality.

In a democracy where propaganda is common, citizens believe they live in a liberal democracy; they have free speech. But this belief masks an illiberal, undemocratic reality. In his rich and thoughtful book Stanley defines political propaganda as “the employment of a political ideal against itself.” DeSmog stories about groups concealing ideologies and financial interests behind cloaks of alternative science, and offering “facts” designed to undermine real science, are paradigm examples of this type of propaganda.

“Propaganda that is presented as embodying an ideal governing political speech, but in fact runs counter to it, is antidemocratic …  because it wears down the possibility of democratic deliberation,” Stanley writes.

He dismisses the idea that deception is what makes propaganda effective. Instead, Stanley argues what makes propaganda effective is the way it, “exploits and strengthens flawed ideology.”

This sometimes involves outright lies, but Stanley points to a bigger problem, “that sincere, well-meaning people under the grip of flawed ideology unknowingly produce and consume propaganda.”

In his introduction to a recent reprinted edition of Edward Bernays’ classic book, Propaganda, Crispin Miller agrees. The professor of media studies at New York University says behind-the-scenes wirepullers are often prone to losing touch with reality themselves because in their universe “the truth is ultimately what the client wants the world to think is true.”

It’s an occupational hazard facing all full-time propagandists, he warns, but the greater risk is to the public since a slick propaganda campaign can squelch any inconvenient investigation or journalistic enterprise, so that early warnings fail to resonate and escalating ills receive no mass attention.

With this in mind, my worry is that when we cannot spot propaganda or don’t understand how it works, democracy is damaged to a point where we cannot tell truth from fiction or make evidence-based collective decisions.

Jason Stanley. Photo: Carol Linnitt/DeSmog Canada

Authoritarian Propaganda Undermines Democracy

We saw the emergence of dangerous propaganda in the United States recently, during the presidential campaign when Trump branded Latino immigrants as criminals and rapists. His efforts to whip up fear and anger about race and religion were highly successful and he is now in the White House — despite the fact many people in his own party see him as unstable, untrustworthy and unpredictable.

Trump’s warlike attack on the EPA, the FBI, the CIA and even the Pope is classic authoritarian propaganda. It is an attempt to concoct an alternative reality through the creation of enemies. In Russia they call it theater craft and Putin has been fine-tuning this choreographic approach to authoritarian propaganda for decades.

Donald Trump’s dispute with science and facts is less about old-fashioned misinformation propaganda and more about authoritarian theater. Part of his strategy is to undermine confidence in the public square and in the institutions that democracies rely upon to mediate competing versions of the truth: courts, universities, science, news media, etc. The authoritarian must decide what is true; there can be no competition.

One of his prime tools is Twitter. With a deluge of lies, fake news accusations and outrageous claims his provocative tweets create a chaotic, alternative reality. He sabotages democracy by creating his own swamp where we can’t tell truth from fiction, where rational debate evaporates as he diverts, distracts and deflects accountability.

Trump repeatedly described climate change as a Chinese hoax intended to make U.S manufacturing less competitive, but now denies ever having said it. This is not the ranting of a madman but the voice of a demagogue turning science into a partisan sport.

Powered by propaganda, Trump is now rolling back President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which called for substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. The new president appointed a trio of infamous anti climate science propagandists to oversee the dismantling of the Environmental Protection Agency.

They include Myron Ebell, the non-scientist chair of the Cooler Heads Coalition formed in 1997 to dispel the “myths of global warming” and a director in the anti-regulation think tank, the Competitive Enterprise Institute; Steve J. Milloy, who runs the website JunkScience.com which aims to debunk climate change, and a man who has continually affirmed that smoking does not cause cancer; and Scott Pruitt, a self-described “leading advocate against the EPA’s activist agenda.”

According to NASA data, the Earth’s surface temperatures in 2016 were the hottest since records began in 1880 and that made last year the third in a row to set a new heat record. This data was corroborated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which confirmed 16 of the 17 warmest years on record have occurred since 2001.

Trump appointed Ebell to his EPA team despite the fact that Gavin Schmidt, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a top Earth scientist at NASA, has explained that Ebell’s technique is to point out some little fact and then use it to deduce a larger unconnected and scientifically incorrect point.

As many of you know, the gusher of oil money in recent years has led to PR campaigns and propaganda on a grand scale, similar to that fuelled by the tobacco industry years ago. While facing an environmental crisis, we are also facing a group of industries and a new president who don’t want us to know anything about it.

Today’s public discourse on the environment is overflowing with fabrications and distortions, and I doubt the general public has the faintest idea just how much energy, intelligence and money is poured into these deceptive techniques.

‘Toxic Rhetoric & Spin Silence Critics. Let’s Get Savvier About How #Propaganda Works’ https://t.co/Wq6wrinCX7 #cdnpoli #bcpoli #bcelxn17 pic.twitter.com/2cZtmYWScP

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) April 26, 2017

Liberal Democracy Requires Rational Debate

This style of rhetoric is not as much an attempt to persuade, as it is an act of cultural tribalism: the creation of a team divided against other teams in a manner that shuts down open-minded thinking.

Stanley writes that a democratic society is one that values liberty and political equality. It is a society suffused with a tolerance for difference. It rests on the view that collective reasoning is superior, “that genuine liberty is having one’s interests decided by the result of deliberation with peers about the common good.”

These examples of propaganda pose a challenge for liberal democracy because they sabotage joint deliberations. They are touted as free speech but in fact undermine public reason by excluding certain groups.

Trump’s ad hominem name-calling undermines our ability to question our own views, or respectfully consider the perspectives of others, Stanley says. It undermines the inclusive, rational debate at the core of liberal democracy.

“…flawed ideologies rob groups of knowledge of their own mental states by systematically concealing their interests from them,” he says.

Understanding what makes propaganda effective is at the heart of understanding political inaction on issues that scream out for action. Stanley is most worried about demagogic speech, saying it “both exploits and spreads flawed ideologies,” creating barriers to democratic deliberation. “It attempts to unify opinion without attempting to appeal to our rational will at all,” he says.

Stanley describes propaganda as a method of bypassing the rational will of others. The consequences are widespread and can be long-lasting. Accumulated over time, propaganda becomes a turn-off that discourages citizens from participating in democratic responsibilities, such as voting, the participation level of which is already embarrassingly low in free societies like Canada and the U.S.

Toxic Rhetoric and Spin Silences Critics

The impact of propaganda reaches far beyond immigration. When people deny climate change or label Canadian oil as “ethical” or coal from West Virginia as “clean,” to justify aggressive expansion and government subsidies, the entire planet is harmed.

According to Stanley, it’s difficult to have a real discussion about the pros and cons of an issue when they are shrouded by spin. He believes assertions like these, where words are misappropriated and meanings twisted, are often less about making substantive claims than about silencing critics.

In his words, they are “linguistic strategies for stealing the voices of others.” Groups are silenced by attempts to paint them as grossly insincere, which in turn undermine the public’s trust in them. Consider the former Harper government’s labelling of environmentalists who opposed their aggressive oilsands expansion policies as “foreign funded radicals” trying to block trade and undermine Canada’s economy.

When I first met Stanley in Harlem, he used the example of Fox News, which he says is silencing when it describes itself as ‘fair and balanced’ to an audience that is perfectly aware that it is neither. “The effect is to suggest there is no such thing as fair and balanced. There is no possibility of balanced news only propaganda,” Stanley says.

This style of propaganda pollutes the public square with a toxic form of rhetoric that insinuates there are no facts, there is no objectivity and everyone is trying to manipulate you for their own interests.

Let’s Get Savvier About How Propaganda Works

When facts are spun, people mislabelled and it appears that you can’t trust what anyone says, why bother paying attention at all?

American linguist Deborah Tannen puts the problem this way: “When you hear a ruckus outside your house you open the window to see what’s going on. But if you hear a ruckus every night you close the shutters and ignore it.”

Propaganda makes it difficult for citizens to weigh facts honestly and think things through collectively. What’s more, it’s convinced many of us to disengage.

That is the opposite of what we should be doing. We need to ensure that conditions exist for reasonable conversations about serious problems that impact society.

Stanley cites a tradition in political philosophy dating back to Aristotle, called “defending rhetoric.” He argues there is a kind of propaganda that is necessary to help overcome obstacles to realize democratic ideals. That speech involves empathy and appeals to emotion as it brings reasonableness back into public discourse. In other words, fighting propaganda with propaganda that elicits empathy can help to reinforce the liberal democratic ideals of autonomy, equality and reason.

“The demand of reasonableness requires those deliberating about policy to take into account the perspective of anyone who may be subjected to those laws,” Stanley writes.

The antidote to demagogic propaganda is what Stanley calls civic rhetoric. It’s an attempt to share the perspectives of a group whose members have been silenced, such as scientists or Latinos, or what he describes as “the tool required in the service of repairing the rupture.“

One of the most striking lessons in his book, How Propaganda Works, is a piece of advice on what we can do personally about the dark art of propaganda.

Stanley writes: “In the face of the complexities we’ve discussed, perhaps a reasonable way to adhere to ideal deliberative norms, for example, the norm of objectivity, may be to adopt systematic openness to the possibility that one has been unknowingly swayed by bias.”

To my mind, the best way to fight propaganda is to become savvier about how it works to undermine public trust. It strives to polarize and activate what social psychologists call “my side bias.” It’s not just that we don’t want to become victims of propaganda. We don’t want to inadvertently contribute to its darker purpose, which is to divide us into warring tribes. Authoritarian propaganda creates unyielding one-sidedness and it also creates enemies.

We can inadvertently reinforce this polarization by acting like the enemy the demagogue needs or defuse it with a more pluralistic reaction that shows concern for the problems Trump supporters struggle with.

As George Orwell wrote: “One defeats the fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself.”

Photo: Alisdare Hickson via Flickr

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This is an excerpt from DeSmog founder Jim Hoggan’s latest book, I’m Right and You’re an Idiot: The Toxic State of Public Discourse, published by New Society Publishers.

I first began reading the works of linguist and cognitive scientist George Lakoff about 15 years ago and I was struck by the Berkeley professor’s now famous ideas about what he calls frames. In public relations our stock in trade is messaging, because our role is to create understanding by combining maximum clarity with supreme brevity. We work in the world of sound bites and elevator pitches that are designed to be short and pithy, and we rarely have the time or budget to delve into frames or deeply moving narratives.

When I started writing I’m Right and You’re an Idiot I wanted to better understand the difference between messages and frames, so I would know how frames work and be able to explain how to manage them. I wanted to better understand how they relate to the mechanics of public debate, and especially how frames impact facts and scientific evidence in public discourse, or when shaping opinion.

When we met, Lakoff described frames as metaphors and conceptual frameworks that we use to interpret and understand the world. They give meaning to the words we hear more than the other way around, because words don’t have objective meanings independent of these metaphors. Frames are structures of thought that we all use every day to determine meaning in our lives; frames govern how we act. They are ultimately a blend of feelings, values and data related to how we see the world.

We can’t think without frames, Lakoff explained. “Every thought you have, every word is defined in terms of a frame. You can’t say any word that’s meaningful without it activating a frame.” Frames permeate everything we think and say, so the people who control language and set its frames have an inordinate amount of power.

Lakoff stressed that if you do a bad job of framing your story, someone else will likely do it for you and his comments reminded me of something my mentor in the PR business, Mike Sullivan, once said: “If you don’t tell them, someone else will—and it will be bad.” What Mike meant was if you are an unwilling or ineffective communicator, you leave yourself wide open to someone else doing serious damage.

A frame is a way of looking at the world that is value laden, and like a metaphor it conjures up all kinds of thoughts and emotions. Jackie Kennedy used a frame when she referred to her life as Camelot. “Ethical oil” and “tax relief ” are also frames. Such words evoke subconscious images and meanings, as opposed to factual statements such as “10 million scallops are dead,” a headline that appeared in February 2014 in a Vancouver Island newspaper.

What came to be called Climategate was an international campaign to discredit scientists on both sides of the Atlantic just before the 2009 Copenhagen summit on climate change. It took the momentum to set targets out of the conference. I was astonished to see how a group of legitimate climate scientists, with stacks of peer-reviewed evidence on their side, could lose debates to a group of people who had none — all because of a lens created by mischief-makers. Clearly, Climategate was a battle of frames versus facts, and the frames won.

The truth is, facts alone don’t change minds, said Lakoff, who wrote a book called Don’t Think of an Elephant, which explains how to frame political debates in terms of values not facts.

He believes that the progressive community contributes to confusion in the public square because of an outdated understanding of reason and consequent lack of persuasive communication. During our interview, he told me that progressives need a mental model that goes beyond cold, logical messaging that’s directly correlated to reality — a model which should embrace metaphors, a marriage of emotion and logic.

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Liberals have an unemotional view of reason that dates back to French philosopher Descartes. Lakoff explained that when conservatives want to go into politics they study business, marketing and what makes people tick, whereas progressives study political science, law and public policy. Progressives don’t study cognitive science, neurology or how the brain works. “They learn a false view of reason that goes back to the 1600s…that says reason is conscious, logical and unemotional.”

It wasn’t long ago that risk communications experts, who study the power of facts, also assumed that giving people more information and evidence would ensure they made better decisions. But research shows facts don’t change minds, at least not in the way we think they do.

Lakoff said cognitive and brain science research has shown that reason is not rational without emotion, without an over-lay of values to make sense of facts. Simply put: frames trump facts.

“We have thousands of metaphors structuring our brains,” he told me. “We think in terms of them all the time and they’re not random, they’re not mythical, they’re things that allow us to get around in the world. We have to use them. Words aren’t neutral.”

They are the structure we use to think.

We should all have a commitment to the truth, he continued, but not let an understanding of facts overwhelm our job, which is to change the brains of people out there. “Every time you argue, you change your brain. Every time you tell somebody something else, you’re changing brains, because everything you think is physical; it’s all in the circuitry of your brain.”

But just speaking the truth isn’t enough to convince people of new ideas. If facts are to make sense and be perceived as urgent, they must be framed in terms of deep, deep values.

George Lakoff ’s advice is short and sweet: To be an effective communicator get clear on your values and start using the language of values. Drop the language of policy. “People do not necessarily vote their self-interest. They vote their identity. They vote their values.” He believes so-called inaction and apathy should warn progressives that the conservatives are winning the communications battle between moral imperatives: “It’s time to decide, either we are all in this together or it’s every man for himself.”

Progressive morality says citizens act responsibly to provide infrastructure, education, health care, transportation and basic research for one another. Progressives constrain stock markets and protect bank accounts. They believe that private profit depends upon public provision. Conservatism is all about personal responsibility. The importance of public services is minimal when compared with the benefits of private enterprise. Conservatives promote stock markets and regulate banks. They believe that human effort creates wealth.

Of course some people are conservative about some things and progressive about others. Lakoff calls this bi-conceptualism. It means you can have both moral systems operating in your brain at the same time, each inhibiting the other from time to time. The more active one is, the stronger it gets, and that’s where language and communication come in. It’s also why media in influences matter so much, as do the ways we communicate.

In politics and social issues, frames are hierarchically structured and at the top of that hierarchy are the moral frames. So the question often is: Is this a frame where citizens care about each other, act responsibly and where there is a robust sense of what’s good for all? Or is the frame telling us that someone believes they have the freedom to access their own self-interest but need not care about the interests of others?

When it comes to environmental issues, Lakoff explained that these conflicting moralities are tied to two very different ideas of our relationship with nature. For progressives: We are a part of nature and dependent on the environment. Nature has inherent value. For conservatives: We are separate from and dominant over nature. Nature’s value is determined by its direct utility to people. Lakoff was quick to note that this is a simplification because most people aren’t ideologues, and bi-conceptuals are generally open to persuasion in either direction. The moderate has no ideology.

Every word is defined by an individual frame. A frame is a neural circuit. A neural circuit is made up of connections of neurons joined together by synapses. When a circuit is activated the synapses get stronger. If that circuit inhibits another circuit, then that other circuit’s synapses get weaker. When the synapses are stronger, it is easier to activate an idea in someone’s mind and therefore easier for it to spread to other issues. “So, repetition is what strengthens synapses. And it doesn’t matter if it is accurate.”

Suppose you’re a conservative, he said, and you want to create a frame that fits your moral system, but let’s suppose it has nothing to do with truth. You may be saying, for example, that cutting corporate taxes will create jobs. We know that’s false. Corporations are making more profits than ever before, are not hiring people because they’re outsourcing work, reaping the benefits of cheap labor in other countries or using more technology. They’re not “creating jobs.” So this is a false statement. But if conservatives call themselves job creators and repeat it over and over, people will think that cutting corporate taxes will create more jobs. The words are like a recurring jingle, stimulating a synapse and creating a thought pattern. That frame is activated over and over, and every time it is reactivated it grows stronger.

I asked Lakoff if it’s possible to set the record straight. Every time we say, “those are not job creators,” do we step into the job creator frame and imprint it again? By outlining facts, even in a logical statement of contradiction, do we always help reinforce the other side’s point of view?

Yes, he said. You lose the persuasion battle when you consistently step into your opponent’s frame; it reinforces their morality and their argument in the minds of your audience. The way to respond is to not mention the other frame. Only mention yours. Always start with your frame and stay in it. Always be on the offensive; never act defensively.

Framing is a system that has evolved because it works for every-day life, said Lakoff. “Free will is not totally free. It is radically constrained by the frames and metaphors shaping your brain and limiting how you see the world. Those frames and metaphors get there, to a remarkable extent, through repetition in the media.”

Everything you have learned is stored physically in your brain, he stressed. Every frame is in a brain circuit, every metaphor is in a brain circuit, every image is in a brain circuit. Your whole moral system is in your brain. If you hear something that doesn’t fit with what’s in your brain, it will go in one ear and out the other unless you are the type of person who remembers things that don’t quite fit and worries about them. But most people don’t.

Progressives must realize that their old-fashioned view of reason is false — that Descartes and the information injection theory of communication have not panned out.

More information about Jim Hoggan on I’m Right and You’re an Idiot.

Image: George Lakoff/George Lakoff

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I wrote my last book, Climate Cover-Up, because I wanted to take a deeper look at the science propaganda and media echo chambers that muddied the waters around climate change, fuelled denial of facts and stalled action. The book was a Canadian best seller, was reprinted in Spanish and Mandarin and became the basis of many lectures, panel discussions and presentations I have given around the world since it was published in 2009.

I continued to be perplexed and frustrated by the spin doctoring swirling around the global warming issue, making it easy for people to refute the reality of what’s going on and ignore this critical collective problem. But as time went by I became even more concerned and alarmed by the crazy state of debate today in general — the toxic rhetoric that seems to permeate virtually all of the important issues we face, whether it’s a discussion about vaccinations, refugee immigration, gun control or environmental degradation.

I decided to write another book that would take a deep look at our resistance to change, the human relations and ingrained psychology causing it and the gridlock, inaction and despair that result. 

My new book, I’m Right and You’re an Idiot, is a provocative examination of this growing trend: the sorry state of pollution, polarization and propaganda in the public square. Sometimes it’s intentional, sometimes it’s inadvertent, but the troublesome fact is this toxic mix is coming from all sides and stifling discussion and critical debate.

I wanted to find out how misinformation campaigns work, how we came to a time when facts don’t matter and how we can start having real public conversations again. So I began to explore how these tendencies arise, what spurs us to become close-minded, aggressively vitriolic and most importantly, what we can do about it. I also began to analyze how we can become highly effective communicators, deflect over-the-top advocacy and make our arguments more convincing.

Writing this book has been a fascinating journey, even though I have years of experience in tough issues and crisis management. What surprised and pleased me was the discovery that the intellectual environment is ripe for this discussion, which enabled me to present the collective wisdom of an outstanding set of thinkers who were all eager to share their knowledge.

I distilled more than 60 interviews conducted with everyone from a NASA scientist to a deep-sea oceanographer, from cognitive researchers to authorities on systems thinking. I sat down with an expert on public trust in the House of Lords lunchroom, spent a week with Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh and travelled to the Himalayas to speak with the Dalai Lama. Insights of political pundits, philosophers, moral psychologists, brain scientists, scholars, media gurus and corporate analysts are all included.

I’m Right and You’re an Idiot explains why facts alone don’t lead people to the right decisions; how language is manipulated; how people’s voices are “stolen” or silenced and what that means for democracy. It explains why modern messaging fails, why we are susceptible to misinformation and how trust networks are destroyed.

And it outlines real solutions, because we need to open up space for healthy conversations again, frame our arguments more convincingly and become better communicators by tapping into deeply held values.

Hear James Hoggan speak about his new book May 25th in Vancouver. Tickets here.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Political Propaganda employs the ideals of liberal democracy to undermine those very ideals, the dangers of which, not even its architects fully understand.

In the early years of DeSmog’s research into environmental propaganda, I thought of industry PR campaigns like “junk science,” “clean coal,” and “ethical oil” as misinformation strategies designed to dupe the public about the real issues.

Although there is obvious truth to that view, I now understand that propaganda is far more complex and problematic than lying about the facts. Certainly propaganda is designed to look like facts that are true and right, but not in a way we might think. What’s more, the consequences are far worse than most people consuming and even producing it realize.

Much of my new understanding comes from conversations with Jason Stanley, an American philosopher and professor at Yale University and author of an important new book How Propaganda Works. According to Jason Stanley, the danger for a democracy “raided by propaganda” is the possibility that the vocabulary of liberal democracy is being used to mask an undemocratic reality.

In a democracy where propaganda is common, you have a state that appears to be a liberal democracy, its citizens believe it is a liberal democracy (they have free speech) but the appearance of liberal democracy masks an illiberal, undemocratic reality.

In this rich and thoughtful book Stanley defines political propaganda as “the employment of a political ideal against itself.” DeSmog stories about groups presenting ideologies or financial interests as objective and scientific evidence are paradigm examples of this type of propaganda.

“Propaganda that is presented as embodying an ideal governing political speech, but in fact runs counter to it, is antidemocratic …  because it wears down the possibility of democratic deliberation,” Stanley writes.

He dismisses the idea that it’s deception that makes propaganda effective. Instead, Stanley argues what makes propaganda effective is that it “exploits and strengthens flawed ideology.”

It sometimes involves outright lies, but Stanley points to a bigger problem, which is that “sincere, well-meaning people under the grip of flawed ideology unknowingly produce and consume propaganda.”

My worry, alongside Stanley’s, is that when we can’t spot propaganda or don’t understand how it works, its detriment to democracy will grow to a point where it can’t be reversed.

Propaganda blazes a reckless path in politics 

The best example of this dangerous form of propaganda is currently playing out in the race for a leader of the Republican Party in the U.S., with its surprising frontrunner, real-estate tycoon and reality TV star Donald Trump.

In his campaign, Trump has described Latino immigrants as criminals and rapists and proposed to build a wall across the U.S. border to keep Mexicans out of the country. He’s also called for a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims entering the U.S. as an attempt to crack down on terrorism and believes those already in his country should be registered on a special government database and required to carry special identification cards.

While it may sound like bluster to some, Trump’s efforts to build support by whipping up fear and anger about race and religion is unfortunately working, at least where popularity contests are concerned.

That’s even though people in his own party see him as reckless and dangerous for the country. Trump is now being regularly characterized as a demagogue in mainstream media, with parallels to Joe McCarthy, the Republican senator who is known for stoking anti-communist fears in the 1950s.

Canada isn’t immune to this propaganda-guided campaign strategy. Consider the Conservative-driven debate during last fall’s federal election around whether Muslim women should be allowed to wear the niqab during the citizenship oath. The former Harper government’s “Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act” also pandered to fears of immigrants, while claiming to address issues such as forced marriages and honour killings, which many pundits were quick to point out are already illegal under existing laws.

Understanding propaganda is key to stopping its spread 

Obviously these examples of propaganda feed into negative stereotypes, but blatant bigotry is only part of the problem.

This style of rhetoric is not as much an attempt to persuade, as it is an act of cultural tribalism: the creation of a team divided against other teams in a manner that shuts down open-minded thinking.

Stanley writes that a democratic society is one that values liberty and political equality. It is a society suffused with a tolerance of difference. It rests on the view that collective reasoning is superior, “that genuine liberty is having one’s interests decided by the result of deliberation with peers about the common good.”

These examples of propaganda pose a challenge for liberal democracy because they sabotage joint deliberations of this sort. They are touted as free speech but in fact undermine public reason by excluding certain groups.

Such ad hominem name-calling undermines our ability to question our perspectives, or respectfully consider the perspectives of others, Stanley says. It undermines the inclusive, rational debate at the core of liberal democracy.

“…flawed ideologies rob groups of knowledge of their own mental states by systematically concealing their interests from them,” he says.

Understanding what makes propaganda effective is at the heart of understanding political inaction on issues that scream out for action. Stanley is most worried about demagogic speech, saying it “both exploits and spreads flawed ideologies,” creating barriers to democratic deliberation. “It attempts to unify opinion without attempting to appeal to our rational will at all,” he says.

Stanley describes propaganda as a method to bypass the rational will of others. The consequences are widespread and can be long-lasting. Accumulated over time, propaganda becomes a turn off that discourages citizens from participating in democratic responsibilities, such as voting, the participation level of which is already embarrassingly low in free societies like Canada and the U.S.

Propaganda’s attempt to silence critics 

The propaganda problem goes way beyond terrorism, impacting the entire world around us. Consider the harm being done to the planet by those who deny climate change is a reality or label Canadian oil as “ethical” and coal from West Virginia as “clean” to justify its aggressive expansion and government subsidies.

According to Stanley, it’s difficult to have a real discussion about the pros and cons of an issue when they’re slapped with these types of spin. He believes assertions like these, where words are misappropriated and meanings twisted, are often less about making substantive claims and more about silencing critics.

In his words, they are “linguistic strategies for stealing the voices of others.” Groups are silenced by attempts to paint them as grossly insincere, which in turn undermine the public’s trust in them. Consider the former Harper government’s labeling of environmentalists who opposed their aggressive oil sands expansion policies as “radical groups” funded by foreign interests trying to block trade and undermine Canada’s economy.

When I first met Stanley in Harlem, he used the example of Fox News, which he says is silencing when it describes itself as ‘fair and balanced’ to an audience that is perfectly aware that it is neither. “The effect is to suggest there is no such thing as fair and balanced. There is no possibility of balanced news only propaganda,” Stanley says.

This style of propaganda pollutes the public square with a toxic form of rhetoric that insinuates there are no facts, there is no objectivity and that everyone is trying to manipulate you for their own interests.

Can the battle against propaganda be won?

So when facts are being spun and people mislabeled and it appears that you can’t trust what anyone says, why bother paying attention at all? American linguist Deborah Tannen puts the problem this way, “when you hear a ruckus outside your house you open the window to see what’s going on. But if you hear a ruckus every night you close the shutters and ignore it.”

Propaganda makes it difficult for citizens to weigh facts honestly and think things through collectively. What’s more, it’s convinced many of us to disengage.

That, is the exact opposite reaction we should have at this time. Instead, we need to ensure the conditions for reasonable conversations about serious problems that impact society are made possible.

Stanley cites a tradition in political philosophy, dating back to Aristotle, called “defending rhetoric.” He argues there is a kind of propaganda that is necessary to help overcome obstacles to realize democratic ideals. That is speech that brings empathy and appeals to emotion, to bring reasonableness back into public discourse.  In other words, fighting propaganda with propaganda that elicits empathy can help to reinforce the liberal democratic ideals of autonomy, equality and reason.

“The demand of reasonableness requires those deliberating about policy to take into account the perspective of anyone who may be subjected to those laws,” Stanley writes.

The antidote to demagogic propaganda is what Stanley calls civic rhetoric. It’s an attempt to share the perspectives of a group who have been silenced, or what he describes as “the tool required in the service of repairing the rupture.“

One of the most striking lessons in his book, How Propaganda Works, is a piece of advice on what we can do personally, about the dark art of propaganda.

Stanley writes: “In the face of the complexities we’ve discussed, perhaps a reasonable way to adhere to ideal deliberative norms, for example, the norm of objectivity, may be to adopt systematic openness to the possibility that one has been unknowingly swayed by bias.”

To me, the best way to fight propaganda is to become savvier about how it manipulates, how it actually works, as Stanley does in his work. It’s not just because we don’t want to become a victim of propaganda, we also don’t want to inadvertently contribute to its dark purpose.

As George Orwell wrote: “One defeats the fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself.”

Blog image credit: Ads targeting clean coal propaganda, via Flickr CC. 

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

George Monbiot is a British writer known for his environmental and political activism. He is a columnist at The Guardian, and author of the bestselling books The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order and Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain, among others. His latest book is Feral: Searching for Enchantment on the ­Frontiers of Rewilding, which tells the story of his efforts to re-engage with nature and discover a new way of living.

I sat down with Monbiot to talk about why he keeps up his activism, where he differs from other environmentalists in areas such as nuclear power and why climate change deniers do what they do. Below is the second of our two-part conversation.* Read the first part here: George Monbiot: Climate, Junk Science and Zombie Myths.

***

James Hoggan: Are you discouraged by the kind of chaos that seems to come out of the climate change debate; the deniers and the arguments among environmentalists themselves? Why do you continue to do what you do?[view:in_this_series=block_1]

George Monbiot: It is a good question. There are several reasons why I carry on. One, I cannot abide bullshit.

There is something that just drives me mad about seeing other people getting away with talking rubbish and not being corrected on it. And that applies to a lot of fields. This is why I’ve got into so much trouble with other environmentalists over my position on nuclear power because I realized after a while, that the mainstream environmental story we’ve been told about nuclear power was complete nonsense. And that all this stuff about a million people being killed by Chernobyl, and the peculiar dangers of internal emitters and all the rest of it, had no scientific grounding whatsoever and it was as poorly based in science as anything we hear from the climate change deniers.

Now, I have absolutely no interest in alienating half of the environment movement, which is what I’ve succeeded in doing, but it was just seeing bullshit and bullshitters out in the open without any effective correctives that just made me see red. I felt I had to do something.

JH: We have all this evidence that says we should be doing something about reducing greenhouse gas emissions and we’re not. Do you think environmentalists are part of the problem?

GM: Well, I still regard myself very much as being part of the environment movement. I think it’s the only show in town. It’s the only thing that stands between us and some pretty nasty stuff. I think, in some respects, most environmentalists have got it wrong about certain issues for the same kind of reasons as other people get things wrong, that people believe what they want to believe, what’s convenient to believe, what doesn’t conflict with their other beliefs.

The world is a complex place and it’s very hard to have a set of consistent beliefs without any internal conflicts because actually, there’s lots of countervailing forces and lots of conflict out there. Nothing is very straight and cut-and-dry in this world. Sometimes, I think we can be an impediment, but by and large, environmentalism is the only thing that stands against the Exxons and the Koch Brothers and other such people.

JH: What can we do about climate change denial?

GM: The first thing we have to recognize is that denial is not confined to any particular issue. Denial is a fundamental part of the human condition. It’s a necessary survival strategy because we’re the only species that knows that our death is coming.

I believe that knowledge could destroy us if we weren’t adept to denial, to pushing things out of our minds so we can carry on with our day-to-day lives. Otherwise, we will just sit there like puddings waiting for a train to try to hit us. We would succumb to total despair, which would be crippling. This is a huge psychological burden to bear, the knowledge of our own death.

George Marshall, who is an effective climate change activist in the U.K., has made an interesting comparison between climate change and death. He believes that, for both, it’s seen as something that is a long way off. Even though climate change is happening now, the connection between our action and the reaction, the implication of that, is drawn-out over a long period. So, you can smoke like a chimney today and won’t die today as a result of that, but you might well die in 30 years time.

That distance allows you to forget the fact that that smoking is going to kill you.

Climate change is very much like death. That’s why we’re very adept at not seeing it and not dealing with it.

JH: What gives you hope that we might reach some kind of collective awakening to address this big environmental issue of climate change?

GM: I’ve seen three phases of environmental interest and activism.

The first one was in the late 1980s, between about 1987 and 1989-1990. The second one was immediately following Hurricane Katrina, which lasted for about nine months or so. The third one was between about 2007 and 2009. We weren’t able to sustain any of them.

There was a massive flush of enthusiasm worldwide for doing something about environmental issues and yet, it was gradually crushed and pushed down by the interests of the 1%, by the oil companies, by the Koch Brothers, by these people who really did not want to see any action taken to protect the environment because that would impede their profits. What we have not learned is how to sustain those actions, to keep them going and that’s what we desperately need to work on.

We need to find a way of turning that great wave of enthusiasm, and anger, and hope into something that carries on year after year after year, and trumps the short-term issues which blind us to the massive importance of the long-term issues.

The human failing is that we’re pretty short-term in our approach. If we’re well fed now, or if we see a particular issue coming at us right now, that’s the thing we concentrate on.

How do we change that?

I’m not sure that we’re going to be able to change human nature, not to the degree that we can actually turn ourselves into being creatures that prioritize the long-term over the short-term.

To me, hope lies in the political dimension, in our effectiveness as citizens and our rediscovery of the motives that drove our political ancestors – the people who created the mass movements which got us democracy in the first place, which ended slavery, which ended colonization and imperialism and all the other things which have been great advances for humankind. If we could do it in the past when life was much more oppressive, and we had far less leisure time, and we had far less money and all the rest of it, we should be able to do it today.

Read the first part of this interview, George Monbiot: Climate, Junk Science, and Zombie Myths.

* This is an abridged version of the interview

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

George Monbiot is a British writer known for his environmental and political activism. He is a columnist at The Guardian, and author of the bestselling books The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order and Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain, among others. His latest book is Feral: Searching for Enchantment on the ­Frontiers of Rewilding, which tells the story of his efforts to re-engage with nature and discover a new way of living.

I sat down with Monbiot to talk about why junk science is becoming an accepted part of the public discourse around climate change, creating what he calls “the phenomenon of zombie myths.” Monbiot also talks about why some media outlets continue to report on climate change without all of the facts. Below is the first of our two-part conversation.*

***

James Hoggan: What do you think about the state of public discourse around climate change?[view:in_this_series=block_1]

George Monbiot: Well, it seems to be the one area in which you can persistently get away with junk science. Now, in any other area in the mainstream media, if for example a newspaper says, “HIV is not connected with AIDS,” like The Sunday Times did for a while, the response by scientists is so strong and so effective that it has to roll back and retract that position, which is what it did, thankfully, because it was a grossly irresponsible position.

If you say, vitamin C cures cancer, for example, as certain newspapers have done at certain times, then, they too are effectively forced to roll back in the name of sound science, good science. But if you say climate change that we’re currently experiencing is caused by sun spots or cosmic rays or volcanoes or any of the other bullshit explanations, which are spread far and wide, you can, if you’re a newspaper like The Daily Mail in the UK or if you’re a television station like FOX News in the US, say it again and again and again and come up with a million different variants on it and never effectively be held to account for the nonsense that you’re promulgating.

JH: What is it about climate change that is so different to the other issues?

GM: The difference is that there is a huge amount of money at stake – money belonging to some very powerful corporations that continue to exert a great deal of influence within the media. They have a large array of public relations weaponry at their fingertips and they’re able to keep this junk science story bubbling for years and years and years. However many times it’s refuted, however effectively it is refuted, it doesn’t die. It’s what those of us interested in climate change call the phenomenon of zombie myths. The zombie climate change myths just keep coming up. No matter how many times they’re killed, they still keep standing up and walking.

JH: I’m the PR guy, so I’m used to spin. But I’ve never seen a situation where the people with essentially all the facts on their side lose to an opponent that virtually has no facts.

GM: It makes me feel impotent, to be honest. If we look clearly at the UK situation, just to give you an example, it’s almost as bad as the US, but not quite. You’re getting a newspaper like the Daily Mail, which will say, “There’s been no global warming for the past 15 years and we are, in fact, about to enter a new ice age.” Then you’ll get scientists saying, “This is the most demonstrable nonsense.” I’ll write in the Guardian, saying the Daily Mail should be ashamed of itself promulgating this junk science and it won’t make a damn bit of difference. It just bounces off like an arrow shot at a tank. Then they’ll keep repeating the same nonsense again a few weeks later. I have not seen that in any other field. I’ve not seen any other scientific issue where people can just keep banging it out, and banging it out, and banging out, utterly impervious to correction from the scientists who are the experts in the field.

JH: Can you discuss this more around the idea of confirmation bias – where people favour information that confirms their beliefs? Does that explain it?

GM: It’s one of the things that explain it. The Internet has contributed to this. Strangely, the Internet was supposed to expose us to a whole lot of different points of view. The problem is we have a tendency as people to form communities with those who have similar viewpoints. And the Internet allows us to form effectively closed communities in which we only hear the voices of those who agree with us. Some people might deliberately go into opposition blogs to troll or something, but they’re not going to listen to what the people are saying, they’re just going to try to shout them down.

But you have someone like Lord Monckton who will attract certain followers who will listen to what he’s saying and they will not listen to what the climate scientists are saying. And he will then go on to various nutty television stations, whether it’s FOX News, or Prison Planet, or any of the other slightly unhinged right-wing, pro-corporate stations and he will say something nonsensical and all his followers will hear that. And because they haven’t got any conflicting influence, they will believe that that is the truth. And then, when somebody says something that doesn’t fit that framing, which is out of that box, they’ll say, “That’s mad. That’s crazy. Because we aren’t familiar with it, and that is what must be wrong.”

This is a self-reinforcing process that takes place everywhere. Even we, environmentalists, are prone to it and we have to be very wary of it.

JH: I’d like your thoughts on what you might call agenda journalism and the problem of confirmation bias. Don’t columnists like George Will have higher level of responsibility for ensuring accuracy regardless of their bias?

GM: Well, I think in a way, it’s worse than that. I don’t think he’s making things up. I think he is just taking without any examination, without any skepticism, without any creativity at all. He’s just accepting what other people are telling him. And he’s got no skeptical distance that says, “Is this right or is this wrong, where is the science here, where is the evidence to support this position?” He’s just not doing it. Now, that is the most basic failing that a journalist could make.

Like all of us, he is entitled to his own opinions; he is not entitled to his own facts.

And I’m a columnist of a left-wing persuasion, and so, I will look at some facts and I will draw conclusions which fit into my own framing and that’s what we all do. Every person on earth does that, but what I’m trying to do is, first of all, to make sure I got my facts right. My position is that, if your opinions are not supported by the facts, you have to change your opinions. I mean apart from the ethical issues, why waste your life on promulgating bullshit? I mean, what a terrible waste.

JH: Have you always been as passionate about the environment as you are today?

GM: Yes, from when I was a very small child, I was intensely concerned about the planet. I don’t know where it came from. It didn’t really come from my upbringing. It was just something that was of enormous importance to me. I was fascinated by the natural wonders of the world, by wildlife, by everything to do with the natural world; geology, weather, whatever it might be. For me, it has always been something whose preciousness is apparent, whose wonders are apparent. And we’ve just got to get this right, and we’ve got to make some very hard and very difficult choices in order to get it right, but we cannot make those choices unless we get our facts right.

Read Part 2 of this interview here: George Monbiot on Environmentalist: “I Cannot Abide Bullshit”

* This is an abridged version of the interview.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

This post is an opinion editorial that originally appeared in the Hill Times.

VANCOUVER, B.C.—U.S. President Barack Obama’s recent climate speech at Georgetown University has shaken up the atmosphere of complacency around climate policy, and it’s time for Canada to stand up and take notice. The much-anticipated speech unveiled the Obama administration’s Climate Action Plan and put climate change back at the centre of the global economic agenda, a development that Canada cannot afford to ignore.

As other nations begin the slow transition to a low-carbon economy, Canada’s reputation as a bad actor on the international climate stage will hurt more than just the environment. If Obama’s plan to move to cleaner sources of energy is any indicator, Canada’s reputation as a climate laggard will also hurt our economy.

Although the Copenhagen Accord forged an international agreement to limit the average global temperature increase below two degrees to avoid catastrophic warming, it contained no legally binding plan on how to get there. Since 2009, climate politics have been stuck in a state of paralysis, with nations around the world waiting for others to act first.

Now the United States has made a move.

The U.S. is the world’s largest economy, and the second-largest emitter of CO2, behind China. The steps laid out in the Climate Action Plan are a clear signal to the rest of the world that not only is it time to begin reducing emissions in earnest, but also that the future belongs to those countries who embrace and invest in the low-carbon economy.

For Canada, the implications are clear. The United States is our largest trading partner, and Canada is perfectly positioned to become a leader in providing green technology, renewable energy and innovative solutions to meeting the challenges of climate change. But while we should be putting clear provisions in place to drastically reduce emissions and get a head start on building a low-carbon economy, we’re ignoring the international scientific community and recklessly committing Canada to decades of growing emissions.

And really, committing to a high-carbon economy has been a lot more trouble than it’s worth for Canada.

The Conservative government has worked overtime to suppress and attack scientists and environmentalists critical of rapid tar-sands expansion and a lack of adequate environmental protections.

In early 2012, the Harper government engaged in a campaign to undermine the credibility of citizen groups, philanthropists and scientific bodies that opposed the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline.

This effort was designed to demonize environmental and community groups as ideological ”extremists” bent on undermining the Canadian economy.

The rhetoric reached an all-time high last year when Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver accused environmental groups of being “foreign funded radicals” acting on behalf of American charitable foundations. Minister Oliver suggested that American foundations supporting conservation efforts in Canada were working to “undermine Canada’s national economic interests,” although no evidence exists to support this claim.

Accusing American philanthropic foundations of “interfering” in our politics is not likely to foster stronger relations with the US. Given their generosity, we should thank these good Samaritans rather than subject them to treatment they might better expect in Russia or Egypt.

Until now, the Conservatives have been milking the narrative around responsible economic management, intended to nudge public conversations away from the environment and climate change. But that narrative is now looking worse for wear.

Obama was right on the money when he said that arguments against action on climate suggest “a fundamental lack of faith in American business and American ingenuity.” The same holds true for Canada. Do the Conservatives really think that Canadians aren’t up to the challenge of implementing a low-carbon economy?

Sound economic management doesn’t mean holding on to outdated business models while the world changes rapidly. It means recognizing challenges and opportunities, and drawing on Canadian innovation and entrepreneurship to make clean energy the stable foundation of our economy – well into the future.

Building pipelines and expanding the tarsands may seem profitable in the short term, but in the long run it will cost Canadians billions in both missed opportunities to lead technologically as well as damages to public health and infrastructure. Scientists warn that climate-charged weather events will only become more frequent and severe as global temperatures warm.

At a time when we need to have honest, democratic debate about the future of the Canadian economy, the Conservative government is running public relations campaigns to discredit prominent environmental and scientific leaders while promoting pipelines and the expansion of the tar sands on the international stage.

These shortsighted tactics make Canada look out of touch. We look like a country trying to cash in on the last dirty energy boom before internationally binding restrictions on carbon emissions are put in place. 

Instead of trying to get as much of our high-carbon bitumen to market as possible—at whatever the cost to civil society—we should be spending our political capital to lead the fight against climate change.

To do that, we need leadership that convenes an honest, democratic discussion based on what our best scientists are telling us. We need to cut the funding of slick PR campaigns and prioritize the science-based decision-making that will carry us into the low-carbon future.

As President Obama said so powerfully in his speech, “I refuse to condemn your generation and future generations to a planet that’s beyond fixing.”

Canadians need to ask Stephen Harper if he’s on the same page, and if not, hold him accountable for the consequences of inaction.

Jim Hoggan is founder and president of DeSmog Canada. He is based in Vancouver.

Image Credit: PMO press gallery

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

This is the second of my two-part conversation with historian, novelist and essayist Ronald Wright, the award-winning author of nine books, including the influential, A Short History of Progress.

In Part 1 we talked about why Wright sees North Americans as the greatest “villains” when it comes to climate change and why society has fallen into what he calls, “The Progress Trap.”

In Part 2, we discuss why the solution to problems caused by technology isn’t more technology, and the false argument that the environment and the economy are in conflict. 

Jim Hoggan: You talk about society’s attempt to fix problems with more technology and why that’s not the answer to the big environmental challenges we face today. Can you explain your argument?

Ronald Wright: A lot of people want to believe that to solve the issue of climate change we just need to keep on inventing, to keep on letting progress rip, and that the solution will be found with perhaps a new source of power, such as fusion energy, or a new way of manufacturing or new ways to produce food, such as genetic modifications. A lot of people want to believe that the solution for the problems caused by technology is more technology.

While some technological advances offer partial solutions, such as greater efficiency, many of the new, untried technologies can be dangerous because we don’t understand the potential consequences. For example, we can’t foresee what might happen if genetically modified organisms get out and wipe out the natural diversity on which we truly depend for all of our food and medicine. Or, what if Nano technology was to get out of hand and we have self-replicating Nano machines?

It’s a sort of science fiction nightmare, but it’s not all that far-fetched if we don’t exercise a precautionary principal. Even though, in theory, we may be able to keep expanding our technologies, even if they are safe – which is a big if – we certainly cannot continue the way we have been. We are on one earth, which is only so big, and can only produce so much of the basic necessities of life. By this of course I don’t mean iPhones, but the necessities of life that we take for granted, namely clean air, land and water.

JW: Do you think it’s misinformation or a resistance to change that prevents society from not repeating its past mistakes?

RW: I think we are seeing both of those things at play in our own society. We are seeing great reluctance to face up to the fact that the party is over. Also, we are seeing cynical manipulation on the part of people who are absurdly wealthy to share any of their wealth. For example, just look at the changes in tax structure over the past 30 years, and the income spread in income between a CEO of a major American corporation and a shop floor worker.

If you look at any economic indicator you will see a vastly expanded gap between rich and poor both within countries and between countries. All of this has happened very recently. We see fabulous amounts of wealth in a few hands and almost a third of the human race living in dire poverty.

I think that is the greatest tragedy that the lesson of the 20th century. When I was a kid growing up in England you never saw beggars on the street. Of course, now you go to London you see beggars on the streets everywhere, and this is happening at a time when we have more wealth per head than ever in the history of the world. There really is no excuse for these huge disparities between obscene wealth and desperate poverty.

If we stopped the higher levels of consumption from getting out of control, there is enough for everybody to squeak through in a sort of modest prosperity, modest decency of life. The problems are political. They are problems of distribution.

JH: Do you have any particular thoughts on the way the environment is discussed today in Canada?

RW: I think the most troubling thing is the way in which our present Canadian government positions it: That we have to balance the environment with the economy. It’s as if the economy is a good thing on one side and the environment is something on the other that, if we deal with it, will drag down the economy. Of course that is absolute nonsense.

One of the absolutely clear lessons of history and archeology is that a healthy economy depends on a healthy environment. There is no economy without a sound environment beneath it, sustaining it.

The problem is that with our rapid technological advance, we have found ways to get more and more out of the environment and make it seem as though human prosperity is detached from natural systems. Of course, the reverse is true. What we’ve been doing by these very sophisticated means of extracting things is actually taking out stuff that can never be replaced.

Here’s one very simple example: a lot of the irrigation in North America, particularly in the United States, depends on the use of fossil water with these great underground aquifers. These aquifers are not water that is being replenished to any large extent. It’s called fossil water because it’s been there underground for a very long time. The levels of these aquifers are falling at an alarming rate. I think most predictions now suggest that there’s really only another 30 years of water left in much of the American west. Once it’s gone it’s gone. That’s the end of it.

That is an example of how technology appears to create prosperity because you pump up this water and suddenly you can produce more food or golf courses or whatever you happen to be using it for. But, in actual fact, all you are doing is plundering nature. I think that’s where we have to make the distinction: There is nothing wrong with exploiting nature through technology. That’s something human beings have always done.

My point is that it needs to be done in a way that doesn’t start eating into the capital of nature. We can live on the interest of nature, like we do from a bank.

JH: Do you have any thoughts on how we move from the thinking of the plunderer to a new thinking of where you draw the line?

RW: I think that it is very difficult and it’s part of our animal human nature to sort of gobble up everything in front of us, rather than leave it for a rainy day. The tar sands are a very valuable and useful resource, but it makes no sense to gobble them up quickly with all the consequences of pollution and the problems of supply and demand and the huge economic and political distortions they’ve introduced in this country. It should be done slowly and wisely.

What’s more, the corporations who are making all these vast amounts of money from the tar sands should be taxed should have to pay royalties. Right now, the royalty rates are laughably low. We are descending into the condition of a petro state – our political system is bought and paid for by big oil and the companies essentially have a license to plunder and only paying token amounts to the public purse that’s not acceptable.

One thing that can be done is introducing full-cost accounting in any measurement of economic progress. That means you have to include all benefits arising from natural systems.

JH: Are you at all hopeful that we can extract ourselves from these progress traps?

RW: The degree of hope I have goes up and down from day to day. I think our situation is very serious, but I don’t think it’s hopeless. Even if we do think it’s hopeless some of the time, we still have to act on the assumption that it isn’t too late. If we give up, we’ve lost the plot. If we stop trying to deal with our problems, the problems have won. When that happens, we’re done for.  

JH: What is your message about the environment?

RW: My message is: Look at the past, at these wrecked societies. The more we understand from archeological research, the clearer it becomes that almost all of these wrecked societies fell because of over expanding and over exploiting their environment. So, we’ve got this information about what human beings tend to do, they create messes that either get out of hand or because of belief systems they will not deal with.

Let’s look at that past and learn from it.

Read Part 1 of this interview, Locked in the Progress Trap: Interview with Ronald Wright.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Ronald Wright, the award-winning author of A Short History of Progress, says North Americans are the greatest “villains” when it comes to climate change. While Europe has put forward some serious money and strategies to try to combat it, Canada and the U.S. are dragging their heels.

Wright’s comments are particularly noteworthy after Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver’s recent visit to Europe, where he tried to sell Canada’s approach to oil sands to a skeptical audience. Europe is considering imposing a tax on Canadian bitumen because of its emissions.

I sat down with Wright on Salt Spring Island, B.C. to talk about why society can’t seem to change its way of thinking. He blames what he calls, “The Progress Trap.”

This is the first of two parts of my conversation with Wright. Read Part 2 here. 

Jim Hoggan: Why, despite mounting evidence and calls for urgent action from experts in the atmospheric, marine and life sciences, are we doing so little to address environmental problems like climate change, the declining health of our oceans and mass species extinctions?

Ronald Wright: I think we in North America are among the greatest villains in coming to grips with these issues. The Europeans have put forward some very serious money and serious proposals. They are working towards a 20 per cent reduction in carbon emissions by 2020 (from the original benchmark back in the 1990s) and propose spending $90 billion euros a year – the kind of money the Iraq war cost the USA each year.

They have also said that if other countries get on board they will go to a 30-per-cent cut and even more funding. This hasn’t happened because of a lack of will from other countries, including Canada and the U.S. There’s a denial amongst many of our leaders, an absolute inability to face up to the fact that there are limits to the human impact. It goes against the cultural grain of North Americans who are used to the idea that the future is always going to be bigger and better and wealthier, and that they are going to have more stuff than in the past. Those days are over.

JH: Why do we resist change like this?

RW: There are two things: First, there’s a cynical propaganda campaign extremely well funded by the people who have a vested interest in hydrocarbons. Second, there is a very willing audience among people who don’t care, don’t know the facts, or can’t be bothered to look at them. People want to believe that they can just go on expecting the high consumption North American lifestyle forever, because that’s kind of American – and Canadian – dream they were promised.

Of course there are those who realize there is a problem, but enough people have been stampeded by the propaganda that climate change is a “hoax,” or a socialist conspiracy to constrain the high consumption lifestyle of North Americans, or a problem that’s so far down the road we needn’t worry about it.

JH: Winston Churchill said, “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Is that what we’re facing here? Are we not paying attention to the lessons of history when it comes to the impact of overstressing the planet?

RW: In A Short History of Progress I looked at the pattern of civilizations’ rise and fall throughout history. Many civilizations who thrived and achieved brilliant things, such as the Sumerians or the Maya, eventually fell victim to their own success. This is what I call a “Progress Trap,” which happens when technological innovations create conditions or problems that society is unable to foresee – or unwilling to solve.

An example is irrigation systems. This was a terrific idea for the Sumerians, allowing them to grow food in the desert. However, as time went on, irrigation led to a build up of salt in the land. Eventually, over a few centuries, the Sumerian fields began to turn white from salt. After about a thousand years, their crop yields fell to only a quarter of what was possible in the fields they started with. Large parts of southern Iraq had to be abandoned, and still haven’t recovered.

That is one example, but I think we can be sympathetic in the Sumerians’ case because they couldn’t have foreseen the consequences before it was too late. But in our case, we do know what’s going to happen to the planet as the climate warms and destabilizes. We have an overwhelming consensus of scientific opinion and computer modeling that shows it. We don’t have the excuse of ignorance or lack of technology.

Where I see the similarity today with these ancient civilizations is in the behaviour and denial of the elites – the political leaders – people who should be the decision-makers just hoping the problem will go away.

The ancients tended to respond by saying “the gods are angry so we need to build bigger temples.” In other words, magical thinking. Our version of this is the widespread belief that the problems caused by rampant growth and technology will be solved by more of the same.

JH: How do people respond to A Short History of Progress – this idea of too much progress? Is it a difficult concept for people to accept?

RW: It is. The success of Western society has been based upon developing new inventions quickly, harnessing them and producing wealth. Yet, we ignore the fact that not all progress is good. In fact, some kinds of progress are very dangerous. Nuclear and germ weapons, for example. Or efforts to make patented GM crops with a “terminator” gene – an invention that could wreck the food chain.

Even if things merely keep going as they are a few more decades, there’s no way that nine billion people, which is the latest population projection by mid-century, are going to be able to live like Canadians or Europeans do now – simply because the by-products of our industrial activities are overwhelming natural systems. We are trashing the planet, stealing from our children’s future. The idea that growth is infinite is the Big Lie of our times. Yet we still believe it because we find it extremely hard to shed the idea that progress is an inherent good.

I saw my role, when I wrote A Short History of Progress, as being the person who says, “The building is on fire.” I don’t necessarily know how to put the fire out, I’m not a fireman, but I smell fire. That book was really a way of saying, “Look, this is the pattern of the rise and fall of civilizations through history; if they don’t deal with their problems, if they over expand, if they wear out their welcome from nature, they end badly.”

We’re now in this situation where we are running beyond the capacity of nature to sustain us, and, for the first time in history, we’re doing it everywhere at once. Not only are we drawing down resources, but we’re damaging natural systems and polluting every corner of the world. Too many of us are taking too much. But I don’t believe our problems are hopeless, yet. It’s very late but not too late. We still have one last chance to get the future right.

**In Part 2 of the conversation, Wright talks about the false argument that people can only support the environment or the economy, and not both. He also explains why he hasn’t given up hope that society can change to stop runaway climate change.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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