A look behind the ethical veil of environmentalist NGOs
Until quite recently, politicians and bureaucrats were widely assumed to be working ethically and professionally for the public good. Businesspeople were seen as the villains. Today, nongovernmental organizations continue to enjoy a similar presumption of virtue, often without sufficient public accountability. Because they claim to work for society, their intentions are assumed to be pure. Traditional wisdom tells us so. Yet the same assumption was once made about government.
By the early 1990s, politicians and bureaucrats were increasingly recognized as deeply corrupt. Businesspeople began to receive greater respect as public awareness of their economic contribution grew, and laws governing commercial activity became more liberal. Governments and bureaucracies could no longer hide behind claims of serving the public good while doing whatever they pleased. Nor, of course, could corrupt businesses continue polluting the environment with impunity. The larger principle is that no activity in the public domain should be exempt from scrutiny.
Unfortunately, new institutions and fields of activity are continually granted the same excessive respect once accorded to government and bureaucracy. They cloak themselves in such virtuous language that criticizing them provokes an immediate social reaction. More troublingly, much of that reaction comes from genuinely decent people. Most thoughtful individuals feel deeply concerned about animals and the environment. As a result, anyone who questions an NGO or an excessively rigid environmental policy is quickly assumed to be selfish or uncaring.
Consider the statement that no one should cut down trees. Most people can agree with it as a general principle. But does it not become extremism when trees are left obstructing roads? Such obstructions hamper traffic, increase fuel consumption, and consequently create more pollution. Trees left dangerously close to roads can also cause the deaths of innocent drivers who crash into them at night.
A lazily constructed series of WWF “Save the Tiger” advertisements currently running on the Discovery Channel presents similarly dramatic claims. In one scenario, the extinction of tigers in India supposedly means the end of agriculture. In another, it means that electricity will disappear.
There is no doubt that the natural world is interconnected. With sufficiently detailed analysis, one might argue that even the flutter of a fly’s wings could contribute to the formation of a tornado. But conclusions based merely on emotion, without serious analysis, are manipulative and intellectually corrupt. I contacted WWF to ask how it had arrived at its doomsday scenarios—in which India’s future and almost everything it contains supposedly depended on the survival of the tiger. It could provide no analysis.
A prominent environmental scientist once described the temptation facing campaigners:
“To capture the public imagination, we have to offer up some scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements and little mention of any doubts one might have. Each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective and being honest.”
Such is the relative morality of self-appointed saviors of the world. Exaggeration creates a distorted understanding of reality. It leads to the misallocation of money and effort and can increase the overall cost to the environment, outweighing any superficial benefits. The resulting loss of public trust is immeasurable.
When a company exaggerates the quality of its products to increase its profits—often its principal objective—it is rightly regarded as unethical, manipulative, and corrupt. Why, then, should a scientist or environmentalist who exaggerates the importance of a subject to attract funding, publicity, or personal recognition not be judged by the same standard?
Exaggeration destroys trust and produces bad education. At best, NGOs that conduct such campaigns assume that the public is incapable of understanding a measured and honest argument.
All work is respectable—whether it involves running a business, governing, cleaning streets, or protecting the environment—but only insofar as it is conducted ethically. Otherwise, we risk creating a new caste system in which employment by an NGO, much like employment by the government or military in an earlier age, is treated as morally superior and therefore placed above accountability.
Jayant Bhandari
January 2003