Initially, it was years of frustration running into people who knew little about forestry and paper production but plenty about killing and saving trees and deforestation. But it’s much bigger than that.
There’s so much misinformation out there, especially in social media: about forestry and paper issues for sure, but also about recycling and recyclability, about recycled content, about the generation of waste. There’s a whole sea of little green lies out there, and I wanted to set the record straight.
These little green lies prosper and spread courtesy of a sloppy and pliant media. The media acts as megaphone for a lot of the misinformation cited in this book. Sometimes the media doesn’t do its homework (basic fact-checking) and it gets used, or allows itself to be used. We’re all busy people, but getting the facts straight is important.
And accepting somebody’s version of the truth without question is not journalism. It’s public relations, or worse, propaganda. I think it was Joseph Goebbels who said: “A lie told once remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.” And that applies to industry, governments, environmental groups, everyone.
I think you’ll enjoy this book. A bit of straight talk is long overdue on this subject.