Propaganda as an Environmental Justice Issue

Interdisciplinary Environmental Review, Vol. 15, Nos. 2/3, 2014

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Propaganda as an environmental justice issue M. Joseph Aloi Department of Philosophy and Religion Studies, University of North Texas, Environmental Science Building, Room 225, 1704 West Mulberry, Denton, TX 76201, USA E-mail: [email protected] Abstract: Propaganda has a long history in the industrialised North as a disreputable method of communication and persuasion. I adopt the definition of ‘propaganda’ elaborated by Ross (2002). The people of Kivalina are being forced to relocate their village due to the effects of climate change. This is an instance of environmental injustice. They maintain that certain actions of fossil fuel companies, amounting to civil conspiracy, are at least in part responsible for these effects. I argue that these actions of the fossil fuel companies are propaganda. Accordingly, understanding propaganda is crucial for the environmental justice movement Keywords: propaganda; environmental justice; climate change; Kivalina. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Aloi, M.J. (2014) ‘Propaganda as an environmental justice issue’, Interdisciplinary Environmental Review, Vol. 15, Nos. 2/3, pp.105–113. Biographical notes: M. Joseph Aloi is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the University of North Texas. He specialises in environmental philosophy. This paper is a revised and expanded version of a paper entitled ‘Propaganda as an environmental justice issue’ presented at ‘The Interdisciplinary Aspects of Public Health and Environmental Justice’ Workshop, University of North Texas, Denton, TX, 15 September 2012.

1

Introduction

Almost all contemporary environmental problems have a justice component. Environmental burdens and benefits do not automatically distribute themselves fairly, nor do environmental problems only arise after adequate discussion and participation amongst all interested parties. Nature is unconcerned with justice. For this reason, many environmental activists have become concerned with the pursuit of environmental justice. Academics aid this pursuit by engaging these problems in theoretical, systematic, and enlightening ways. In this paper, I make the case that propaganda plays an important role in creating, masking, and contributing to occasions and patterns of environmental injustice. Although propaganda is often discussed amongst environmental justice activists, it has yet to receive a thorough examination by academics. My paper is intended as beginning of what will need to be a long, complex discussion of the roles different types of propaganda play Copyright © 2014 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

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in environmental injustice. All I intend to do is establish the importance of reflection on, and confrontation with, propaganda for the environmental justice movement. I do this by looking at a particular environmental justice issue – the impacts of climate change on the village of Kivalina, Alaska – and revealing the role that propaganda plays in it. I begin by examining the nature of propaganda, attempting to understand what it is and how it works. I then describe the situation in Kivalina and the issues it raises. I then move on to describe, briefly, what the environmental justice movement is and the role that academics play in it. I then return to the situation in Kivalina, with an eye to: 1

how it is an environmental justice issue

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the role of propaganda plays in worsening the injustice.

After all this, I hope to have established the necessity for reflection on propaganda for environmental justice studies.

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Propaganda

The word ‘propaganda’ derives from the same Latin root as ‘propagation’; it was first used to refer to the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide or the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith. Created in 1622 by Pope Gregory XV, the Congregatio was a committee of cardinals in charge of supervising international missionary activity (‘Propaganda’, 2012). Although at this time, the word ‘propaganda’ was a long way from developing its pejorative connotation, we can see that at its origin propaganda was concerned with inciting belief based on faith alone. ‘Propaganda’ still refers to a message that we are encouraged to agree with for neither logical nor empirical reasons. ‘Propaganda’ developed its secular meaning sometime in the late 19th century as mass media – at first in the form of magazines – began to emerge (Ross, 2002). Propaganda was the title of a 1928 book by Edward Bernays – the figurative father of public relations and the literal nephew of Freud (New York Times, 1995). Bernays (1928, p.40) advocated that businesses and governments use psychological methods and knowledge when crafting their messages, writing that one of the goals of public relations is to discover how citizens ‘subconsciously criticize’ certain organisations’ plans, and to react accordingly. Furthermore, Bernays argues that this type of propaganda work is necessary to maintain order in technological democracies; he writes that “Whatever of social importance is done to-day, whether in politics, finance, manufacture, agriculture, charity, education, or other fields, must be done with the help of propaganda. Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government” (1928, pp.19–20). Although Bernays encouraged truthful and ethical uses of propaganda, it is easy to see how talk of “the invisible government” might lead a democratic public to think ill of propaganda. The word ‘propaganda’ developed a pejorative connotation in the first half of the twentieth century, largely due to the unsavoury uses of practices like those Bernays described by totalitarian regimes (Ross, 2002). Yet, for centuries before this redefinition, philosophers have been deeply concerned with nefarious uses of language and argument. Plato (1997, p.233b) wrote that “the expertise of the sophist” was “the hunting of rich, prominent young men” – not the pursuit of wisdom, as the name ‘sophist’ might suggest.1 Similarly, in his Rhetoric, Aristotle (1941, pp.1354a24–26) writes that “moving [the judge] to anger or envy or pity” is as unethical, violent, and distorting as bending a

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carpenter’s ruler. Nor are these objections peculiar to the ancients; Kant (1987, Ak. 327) argues that oratory is reprehensible even when it is “employed for aims that are legitimate and laudable intrinsically” because the orator tries to “win over people’s minds for his own advantage before they can judge for themselves, and so makes their judgment unfree”. It is, perhaps, no great surprise that philosophers – from whom the will to truth always shines forth – disapprove of what would now be called propaganda. But it is worth noticing that these are objections not merely to factual falsity but, more fundamentally, to the surreptitious character of the persuasion used. Ross (2002, p.23) calls this surreptitious character of propaganda the message’s “epistemic defectiveness”. Ross’s account of epistemic defectiveness seems precise enough for use in evaluating the role propaganda plays in environmental justice. A given message cannot be called ‘propaganda’ merely because it stirs our emotions because “often propaganda functions by using practical syllogisms … with wholly false premises” (ibid, p.21). To call propaganda a lie would also be incorrect because the propaganda is often wholeheartedly believed in by the propagandiser (ibid, p.22). The phrase “epistemic defectiveness” is more appropriate because “it also encompasses communications and ways of understanding the world that are not normally thought to admit of truth values such as commands and conceptual frameworks” (ibid, p.23). False statements and lies are also epistemically defective, but the latter phrase is broader and encompasses various nefarious communications the former two cannot. The message’s epistemic defectiveness is the fourth condition of a propaganda event on Ross’s account. In summary, her account gives us: “[F]our necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for something’s being propaganda. They are (1) an epistemically defective message (2) used with the intention to persuade (3) the beliefs, opinions, desires, and behaviors of a socially significant group of people (4) on behalf of a political organization, institution, or cause.” (ibid, p.25)

When all four of these conditions are met, Ross claims, we can say that a given message is propaganda. Although I’ll be adopting Ross’s definition of propaganda for the purposes of this paper, I do so mostly for the sake of clarity. I believe the above definition is easy to comprehend and handy to work with, and, for those reasons, I believe that it can be adopted by anyone interested in working on environmental justice. But I also believe that my overall argument – that propaganda is an issue with repercussions for the environmental justice movement – could be made just as well with almost any definition of propaganda.

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Kivalina’s example

Kivalina is an Inupiat community of less than four hundred people at the end of a peninsula in northwest Alaska. This barrier reef has been the home of this Inupiat community for millennia, although it only became their year-long home during the middle of the last century. In recent years the town has been subjected to increasingly intense waves as sea ice has shrunk and storms have become more frequent. The land underneath the village’s buildings is eroding away. The people of Kivalina, and their

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lawyers, argue that the environmental devastation threatening the existence of the village has been caused by anthropogenic climate change (Barringer, 2008). In 2008, the village filed suit against ExxonMobil, Peabody Energy, and 22 other fossil fuel companies. The suit made two claims against the fossil fuel companies: 1

they created a public nuisance by mining/drilling, distributing, burning, and marketing the greenhouse gas rich fossil fuels which cause global climate change

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they engaged in a civil conspiracy to convince the American public that current changes in climate were non-anthropogenic.2

The suit sought $400 million to relocate the village (Barringer, 2008). Unfortunately, the case has been dismissed; the trial court decided that the case lacked standing and that the issue was political, not legal. The Ninth Circuit upheld the trial court’s decision, concluding that the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) decision to regulate greenhouse gases ‘displaced’ any rights for litigation, including remuneration, that citizens formerly had (Taylor, 2012). Although as Figueroa (2008, p.345) rightly notes, “courts have played a major role in determining the course of environmental justice in the United States”, I will not directly engage with the legal aspects of the Kivalina case. I see the court case as representative of a larger environmental justice issue – climate change burdens being distributed to peoples who did not reap the benefits of fossil fuel burning – and of a particular environmental injustice that results from the larger issue – the destruction and undesired relocation of an entire town. I do not think that the dismissal of the case indicated that the situation is just; sometimes courts decide unjustly. Similarly, I do not argue that the injustice in this matter can simply be reduced to the legal claims of public nuisance and conspiracy. I do, however, argue that our initial understanding of the environmental justice issues raised by propaganda can be developed by looking at the arguments made by the people of Kivalina – via legal counsel – in their legal complaint. An exegesis of this complaint directs our attention to the environmental justice issues as experienced and understood by the people making the claim – the people of Kivalina – rather than to the extraneous academic concerns of political philosophers like myself. The acts which the complaint calls ‘conspiracy’ are acts of propaganda, as I shall shortly argue. More importantly, these propaganda acts worsened the underlying injustice – the disparate effects of climate change on Kivalina. The complaint alleges that “there has been a long campaign by power, coal, and oil companies to mislead the public about the science of global warming” [Cole et al., (2008), p.43]. This campaign has been executed by “trade associations, … front groups, fake citizens organizations, and bogus scientific bodies” including “the Cooler Heads Association … [t]he Advancement of Sound Science Coalition [which] was originally formed … for the tobacco company Philip Morris with the goal of discrediting the mainstream science establishing the health hazards of second-hand tobacco smoke” and the Orwellian-named “‘Information Council on the Environment’ (ICE), which was formed by Defendant Southern Company along with … the Western Fuels Association, and the National Coal Association” (ibid, pp.43–44). These unscrupulous, clandestine organisations engaged in scientifically unsound “radio advertising blitzes and mass mailings” and both they and the energy companies themselves promoted:

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“the funding and use of ‘global warming skeptics,’ i.e. professional scientific ‘experts’ (many of whom are not atmospheric scientists) who regularly publish their marginal views expressing doubts about numerous aspects of climate change science in places like the Wall Street Journal editorial page but rarely, if ever, in peer-reviewed scientific journals.” (ibid, p.43)

The complaint has many more examples of this kind of conduct, and presents a fairly convincing case that there was enough of this conduct going on to prove that it was part of a larger intention. For the purposes of this paper, however, the legal ramifications of the civil conspiracy charges are marginal. What is more important to notice is the complaint’s claim that the defendants were engaged not in just any conspiracy, but in a conspiracy “to participate in the intentional creation, contribution to and/or maintenance of a public nuisance, global warming” (ibid, p.65). In other words, the fossil fuel companies engaged in this propaganda because they wanted to continue to sell fossil fuels. These companies did so even though they “knew or should have known of the impacts of their emissions on global warming and on particularly vulnerable communities such as coastal Alaskan villages” (ibid, p.2). So, even though the fossil fuel companies knew that their products caused, or could cause, harm to places like Kivalina through the effects of climate change, they deliberately engaged in propaganda campaigns to convince the public otherwise.

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Environmental justice

The term ‘environmental justice’ refers both to a field of study and to a global movement that fuse “the concerns of social justice and environmentalism” [Figueroa, (2008), p.341]. The movement has arisen in response to various local and international injustices which either stemmed from or led to environmental atrocities, most of which have severe public health components. The environmental justice movement consists of numerous groups and individuals across the worlds who work, in various ways, to achieve environmental justice. These groups vary as widely as instances of injustice and environments do; “a grassroots organization fighting for traditional fishing rights … in Kerala, India” and the Love Canal Homeowner’s Association of New York are both examples of environmental justice groups (ibid, pp.341–42). Environmental justice studies are an interdisciplinary theoretical field which attempts to: 1

understand, analyse, and, if necessary, clarify the conceptions of justice in the broader movement

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through this richer understanding, help the movement bring about environmental justice.

As Figueroa points out, these “movements usually advance issues and principles of distributive fairness” (ibid, p.342). In other words, environmental justice movements are usually concerned with who gets stuck with environmental burdens like pollution and toxic waste, who gets environmental benefits like clean water and ‘access to non-industrial milieus’, and how these benefits and burdens get distributed (ibid, p.342). Most, if not all, cases of environmental injustice involve some level of unjust distribution,

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and theorists and activists usually call for some form of redistribution, such as compensation. But the claims of environmental justice are not exhausted by principles of distributive justice. Indeed, “the Principles of Environmental Justice, adopted by the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit … include only two references to distributive justice in the seventeen principles. The remaining principles emphasize participatory justice and recognition justice” [Figueroa, (2008), p.345]. While distributive environmental justice focuses on economic issues, recognitive environmental justice – environmental justice based on the politics of recognition – focuses on cultural issues. Rather than dealing with who gets what, recognitive environmental justice focuses on “principles of self-determination, identity recognition, and democratic participation” [Figueroa, (2003), p.29]. Justice involves upholding these principles and “requires us to recognize differences among social collectivities through the equal and fair participation in social and political processes” (ibid, p.29). The right of a cultural group to decide whether or not to allow timber harvesting in a sacred space is an example of a right demanded by recognitive environmental justice. Unfortunately, these two paradigms of justice – distributive and recognitive – “generate an inherent competition” (ibid, p.29). Each paradigm perceives injustice differently and, accordingly, attempts to remedy it differently. Accordingly, it is easy for those of us in environmental justice studies to lose the constructive force of one paradigm by clinging too closely to the other. In order to avoid this pitfall, Figueroa advocates a ‘bivalent’ approach which embraces a ‘perspectival dualism’ whereby we “treat every social practice as simultaneously economic and cultural” (ibid, p.35). This bivalent approach seems to be both correct in general and useful in the Kivalina case in particular. Although I hope that my approach is bivalent, I will consider my argument a success if I make a clear case for propaganda as environmental injustice according to either paradigm; if I show that propaganda either creates distributional inequities or does violence to cultural differences I will be satisfied.

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Why propaganda is an environmental justice issue

As should be clear, several of the acts which the complaint mentions are propaganda events on Ross’s definition. Let’s look at one. An ICE-created advertisement shows a small cartoon chicken running with a worried look on her face and flames on her tail. It is accompanied by the bold tagline “Who told you the earth was warming … Chicken Little?” Underneath, smaller text reads “Chicken Little’s hysteria about the sky falling was based on a fact that was blown out of proportion. It’s the same with global warming” (‘ICE Chicken little’, 2013). This ad is clearly a message with the intention to persuade. If we consider climate change legislation to be a political cause and readers of newspapers a “socially significant group of people” – two assumptions I cannot imagine being objected to – the ad meets three of Ross’s four requirements for propaganda [Ross, (2002), p.25]. To meet the fourth, the advertisement must be ‘epistemically defective’. Recall that propaganda does not necessarily need to be false, nor does it necessarily need to engage our emotions, to be considered epistemically defective. ‘[A] message’, Ross writes, “is epistemically defective if either it is false, inappropriate, or connected to other beliefs in ways that are inapt, misleading, or unwarranted” (ibid, p.23). Chicken Little believed the

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sky was falling because a leaf fell on her head [Duncan, (1865), p.2]. This is not a fact blown out of proportion; it is, under the most generous interpretation, a misperception of a fact. The ICE ad is not specific about the nature of the fact blown out of proportion regarding climate change, but the ad is epistemically defective regardless. Chicken Little never asks “expert reviewers … to comment on the accuracy and completeness of the scientific/technical/socio-economic content and the overall balance of the drafts” as does the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2012). The analogy is thoroughly rotten; it is an inappropriate message that connects with other beliefs – namely, about the nature of scientific peer review – in misleading ways. Therefore, this ad is propaganda. I believe the same case can be made for many of the documents used by fossil fuel companies to mislead the public about global climate change. I hope I need not establish any further that the impact of climate change on Kivalina is an example of environmental injustice. Kivalina has suffered the environmental burdens of erosion, undesired relocation, and the loss of a culturally important homeland. The propaganda events cited in Kivalina v. ExxonMobil are an environmental injustice from a distributivist standpoint because they contributed to a widespread public misunderstanding about the nature and seriousness of climate change. This public misunderstanding at least contributed to the lack of international action to curb greenhouse gas emissions. This lack worsened – if not created – the current global climate change which is forcing Kivalina to move and, accordingly, the monetary burden produced by this move. Furthermore, the propaganda allowed the fossil fuel companies to continue burning and distributing fossil fuels, increasing their wealth and, thereby, their potential for environmental benefits. That this increase in benefits for the fossil fuel companies was also an increase in burdens for Kivalina is no coincidence. These propaganda events are also environmental injustice from a recognitivist standpoint. The people in Kivalina had little or no way to counteract the propaganda of the fossil fuel companies. Kivalina has neither the funds nor the propagandisers – public relations experts, as Bernays calls them – to conduct an information campaign comparable to the disinformation campaign of the fossil fuel companies. The propaganda campaigns of the fossil fuel companies ensured that Inupiat “cultural perspectives are rendered socially and politically invisible” [Figueroa, (2003), p.30]. Furthermore, the overwhelming presence of this propaganda in the US public sphere virtually ensured that minority viewpoints – especially those of such geographically and culturally marginalised Americans as the citizens of Kivalina – would be underrepresented and almost unheard. Accordingly, the ability of Kivalina to engage in self-determination – and to participate in a larger American self-determination – was reduced to almost nothing.3 Finally, although perhaps most obviously, the unwanted relocation of the village of Kivalina which has been foisted upon its citizens as a result of climate change is a blatant example of a denial of a people’s right to cultural self-determination and preservation.

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Conclusions

I hope I have shown the need for critical reflection on, and confrontation with, propaganda in environmental justice studies. The impacts of climate change on Kivalina are a clear example of environmental injustice, and the people of Kivalina – through the content of their conspiracy charge – have implied that propaganda played a role in

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creating, or at least worsening, this injustice. I have turned this implication into a standard philosophical argument. The environmental justice movement has long been aware that propaganda plays a role in environmental injustice. I hope only that my paper has illuminated some of the theoretical issues involved.

References ‘ICE Chicken Little’ (1991) [online] http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/ 400760-1991-05-ice-chickenlittle.html via: http://quitcoal.org/full-coaladsarchive?__utma=1.552563368.1363396100.1363396100.1363396100.1&__utmb=1.3.10.1 363396100&__u tmc=1&__utmx=-&__utmz=1.1363396100.1.1.utmcsr =smartgreenhelp.com|utmccn=%28referral%29|utmcmd=referral|utmc ct=/home/ heres-to-four-decades-of-coal-industry-ads-insulting-our-intelligence.html&__utmv=&__utmk=25950909 (accessed 15 March 2013) ‘Propaganda’ (2012) Online Etymology Dictionary [online] http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=propaganda (accessed 2-13-14). Aristotle (1941) ‘Rhetoric’, translated by W.R. Roberts, The Basic Works of Aristotle, edited by R. McKeon, Random House, New York. Barringer, F. (2008) ‘Flooded Village files suit, citing corporate link to climate change’, New York Times, 27 February. Bernays, E. (1928) Propaganda, Horace Liveright Inc., New York [online] http://www.voltairenet.org/IMG/pdf/Bernays_Propaganda_in_english_pdf (accessed 2-13-14). Cole, L.W. et al. (2008) Native Village of Kivalina and City of Kivalina, Plaintiffs, v. ExxonMobil Corporation: Complaint for Damages, Demand for Jury Trial [online] http://www.climatelaw.org/cases/country/us/kivalina/Kivalina%20Complaint.pdf (accessed 2-13-14). Duncan, F.W. (1865/1871) Remarkable Story of Chicken Little, Degen, Estes, and Co., Boston [online] http://archive.org/stream/remarkablestoryo00bostiala#page/n15/mode/2up (accessed 2-13-14). Figueroa, R.M. (2003) ‘Bivalent environmental justice and the culture of poverty’, Rutgers University Journal of Law and Urban Policy, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp.27–42. Figueroa, R.M. (2008) ‘Environmental Justice’, in Callicott, J.B. and Frodeman, R. (Eds.): The Encyclopedia of Environmental Ethics and Philosophy, 1st ed., Vol. 1, pp.341–348, Macmillan Reference USA, New York. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2013) Principles and Procedures [online] http://www.ipcc.ch/organization/organization_procedures.shtml#.UUPXjTdvchw (accessed 15 March 2013). Kant, I. (1987) Critique of Judgment, trans. by W.S. Pluhar, Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis. New York Times (1995) ‘Edward Bernays, ‘father of public relations’ and leader in opinion making, dies at 103’, 10 March, Obituaries. Plato (1997) ‘Sophist’, trans. by N.P. White, Complete Works, edited by J.M. Cooper, Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis. Ross, S.T. (2002) ‘Understanding propaganda: the epistemic merit model and its application to art’, Journal of Aesthetic Education, Spring, Vol. 36, No. 1, pp.16–30. Taylor, R.T. (2012) ‘The death of environmental common law?: The ninth circuit’s decision in native village of Kivalina v. ExxonMobil Corp’, 8 October [online] http://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/x/200182/Environmental+Law/The+Death+Of+Environ mental+Com mon+Law+The+Ninth+Circuits+Decision+In+Native+Village+Of+Kivalina+ v+ExxonMobil+Corp (accessed 2-13-14).

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Notes 1 2 3

‘Sophia’ was the Greek goddess wisdom. Especially during the late 1980s and early ‘90s, these conspirators also alleged that the climate was not changing at all. The case could easily be made that, after the court refused to hear Kivalina’s case, this ability was reduced from almost nothing to absolutely nothing.