The stickiness of our beliefs. The need for repetition. The power of propaganda. These 3 short sentences sum up a main reason we activists do what we do — and have our work cut out for us. Just about everything I’ve written in this essay I’ve written before. More like 50 times before. But if …
Even the most outrageous lies that defy your own common sense can infect your thinking, do an end run around your reasoning powers, and ultimately alter your beliefs, if you hear the lies often enough, from multiple sources, for years. This is how propaganda works, just ask any student of WW2 — or arguably any war, …
If you’ve read any of TreeSpirit’s posts in the last few years, you’ve likely noticed a broken record repetition of a few themes. One is that logging — which is deforestation by many of its trendy new (fool-the-public) names like “thinning,” “managing” and “restoring” — always degrades forests. Whenever bureaucracies “apply” their “treatments” to allegedly …
Demonizing the Ancient, Wild Feminine to Justify the Controlling, Destructive Masculinity of Industrial “Man-age-ment” The title above is a mouthful, yet a more accurate title for this essay. But I feared it too abstract and woo-woo for a general audience, despite it being more broadly accurate and pointing to deeper anxieties and psychological maladies of …
Wildfire fears, facts & falsehoods — of giant sequoias. Numerous government agencies today are exploiting the public’s fear of wildfire to win millions of dollars in funding for “vegetation management” and other “wildfire resilience” actions to, in effect, suppress wildfires. Even many environmental groups similarly exploit the public’s fear of wildfire to sell their own …
What’s worse than a 1,000-acre industrial deforestation project billed as a “forest health initiative?” Even as environmental activists and wild animal advocates are working to educate the public about an existing project consisting of hacking into and poisoning (with herbicides) 1,000 acres of Tomales Bay State Park in Marin County, CA, the agencies entrusted with …
Orwell’s forest PHOTO: The lush, dense, wild forest at Tomales Bay State Park, Marin County, CA. Word choice matters. Getting others to use words of your choosing is a powerful method of influencing not only their speech — but their thinking. George Orwell wrote: “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” With this …
Question: How do logging companies justify increasing logging operations in our climate crisis (which is created by logging)? Answer: Yell, “WILDFIRE DANGER!” and break out the chainsaws. Right now, when we need more trees more than ever, the timber industry is expanding its logging operations — by exploiting the public’s very real (and understandable) fear of wildfire. Lobbying …