EDITORIAL
Together we are BirdLife International
Partnership for nature and people
CONSERVATION
IN A POST-TRUTH
WORLD
Donate to BirdLife and we’ll bring extinct birds back. Support us, and Dodos will soon run freely in your backyard
and the skies will turn dark blue with endless flocks of Spix’s
Macaws. Not credible? It doesn’t matter – we now live in a
post-truth world.
“Post-truth” is the Oxford Dictionary’s “international word of
the year”. The prefix post doesn’t just mean “after”, as in after
you’ve known the truth (like in post-industrial). “Post-truth” has
a deeper meaning, like post-racial, and it refers to a context in
which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. The use of the
term spiked in the year of Brexit and Trump, and experts have
decided to include it, formally, in the dictionary. Now, the truth
is that… the “truth” is a rather hairy business, one we’ll gladly
stay away from. History’s (mass) graveyards are full of innocents slaughtered by “truth-heralders.” So, purged of its eschatological nuances, the question is rather: do facts still matter?
The link to the conservation community and its work is obvious, and far deeper than the bombastic propaganda against
climate change science that found hospitality with some
Trumpists and Brexiteers (pundits say not to worry about that,
it was just a campaigning ballon d’essai).
www.birdlife.org
The problem is that we believe, among other things, in science and the scientific method: that’s OUR truth. Somehow
we’re stuck in the Enlightenment and the French Revolution
(head-chopping of royals aside, that is) and we really struggle with the idea that publishing anything but the results
of a scientific paper is necessary. Our thought is: “print the
data: the rest will follow”. Colours, images, feelings, values, narratives…? The Sunday papers and clickbait sites
can deal with those.
Without realising that this is, in itself, an anti-scientific position. Neuroscience long ago revealed the workings of
our brains: we prefer narratives over facts. And we
tend to choose facts that confirm and strengthen
our narrative, and discard those that invalidate it. Narratives are
complex beasts and depend on a number of factors, typically
related to our culture, upbringing and family values. Values,
despite the French Revolution, still beat facts 10 to 1.
The acrimonious debate around the role of Facebook in US
politics was related to this issue. Facebook creates “bubbles”
of reality where users are provided only with the facts that
confirm their internal narrative. That’s what “digital profiling”
does for you. Great for sales; disastrous for democracy.
So where does conservation stand in a world of people that
pick and choose their facts instead of their opinions? There is
no easy answer, but these are our two cents for this debate.
This magazine’s main theme is “lists”: the Red List, the Illustrated Checklist. The “list” as a synonym, a metaphor even, of
scientists’ hard work in systematically and relentlessly adding
to human knowledge. You might, as some of us do, struggle
to understand why it was necessary to split one species into
twelve (see page 38), but it’s underpinned by solid science.
And it doesn’t matter if this does not make America (or the
UK) greater: we will keep providing facts (whilst also trying to
convey a more convincing narrative).
Reading through the many cases extracted from the new Red
List, you will find confirmation of what you already know:
human activity (logging, farming, fishing, trading) continues to
be the main killer of our beloved birds. The challenge to achieve
sustainable business practices is far from accomplished. Is the
post-truth world one where environmental negationism wins
over scientific evidence, predatory business over conservation
demands? Many elements would suggest so.
Whatever the future brings us, we will still be here,
providing facts, and analyses, and using those facts and
analyses to deliver solutions in the field. It might not be
the “truth”, but it’s our way of being true to ourselves.
Enjoy
Luca Bonaccorsi
Chief Editor
BirdLife International
BirdLife International is the world’s largest nature conservation partnership.
Through our unique local-to-global approach, we deliver high impact
and long-term conservation for the benefit of nature and people
DECEMBER 2016 • BIRDLIFE
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