ABSTRACT
In conjunction with its report on the human and environmental impacts of manmade chemicals (Greenpeace 2003), in 2003 British Greenpeace ran a campaign advertisement in national newspapers showing a figure closely resembling Michelangelo’s David, complete with its small genital endowment. The accompanying text suggested that people should begin to worry about threats to men’s reproductive capacity owing to the environmental release of hormone-mimicking substances. Chemicals used in plasticisers and other applications could be ‘feminising’ the environment and leading to declining male fertility, in humans and in wild animals too. This advertisement was indicative of Greenpeace’s strategy. It expressed in an arresting way the supposed facts of the case – here was a new form of harm arising from a novel and unanticipated form of environmental pollution – but it was also significantly misleading, as the chemicals were unlikely, on anyone’s view, to lead to a threat to the size of male members. This advertisement encapsulated a key challenge in the public communication strategy of environmental non-governmental organisations (NGOs): the need to balance powerful, evocative images with the perceived demands of accuracy. This chapter examines the increasing importance of environmental NGOs as
mediators of scientific information in policy and other public arenas, and the challenges they face in positioning themselves in relation to shifting scientific orthodoxies. Environmental campaign organisations have been important in supplying arguments about, and publicising problems in relation to, a very large number of environmental issues. Rather than trying to conduct a review of these issues, this chapter focuses first on one leading example, climate change; derives some points of principle from it, then assesses their generalisability by applying them to a contrasting case – genetically modified organisms. Opponents of Greenpeace and other environmental organisations have frequently
criticised them for favouring the slick image over the accurate message, but this
criticism – although interesting and important – implicitly acknowledges something even more interesting. The key point is that environmental pressure groups can be called to account on this issue precisely because the persuasive power of their message depends on the notion that their claims have a basis in factual accuracy, that they are not matters of opinion. Environmental organisations, more than any other type of campaigning group, need to persuade the public that things are in fact the way they say things are, even when some of the claims they are making seem – at first glance at least – to be counter-intuitive or implausible: that plastics can make you infertile, or that burning fossil fuels can unsettle the entire global climate. Thus, in what is clearly today’s pre-eminent environmental debate, environmentalists
are keen to assert that global warming is in fact taking place, and that humanly caused changes in the make-up of the atmosphere are responsible. Central to the campaign is the claim that, in fact, humans are causing global warming and that, in fact, warming will have specific adverse implications. Indirect testimony to this factual and scientific orientation is given in the follow-
ing observation about Friends of the Earth (FoE).1 To celebrate its 21st birthday, the environmental organisation published a celebratory booklet (FoE 1992). With a large supporter base, active local groups, regular coverage in influential media, strong campaign teams and widespread name recognition, the organisation had a lot to boast about. ‘Yet the item chosen to begin this celebratory publication, immediately after the contents page, was a quote from a leading environmental journalist praising the group as a ‘‘reliable and indispensable source of information’’; this was followed by a comment from the head of Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Pollution [the forerunner to Britain’s Environment Agency] lauding the quality of its ‘‘technical dialogue’’’ (Yearley 2005a: 113). Given all the things that could have been chosen to feature at the start of FoE’s anniversary document, this selection was surprising and telling. In short, I suggest that there is an elective affinity between environmental campaign
organisations and scientific claims that is, to a large degree, distinctive among pressure groups. This gives environmental campaign groups an urgent interest in science communication issues and makes them significant science communication actors.
