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‘Nature-rinsing’: How polluters use the beauty of nature to clean up their image

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Tuesday, September 27, 2022

You’ve been seeing commercials like this all your life: An SUV steers off-road into a lush forest. An airplane soars over a pristine coastline. In fast-forward, a tiny green plant sprouts from the soil — something that appears to have nothing to do with the oil company behind the advertisement. There’s a new word for this old marketing practice: “nature-rinsing.” It’s when polluting companies use images of charismatic animals, green plants, and wild landscapes to suggest that they’re more environmentally friendly than they actually are. Geoffrey Supran, a Harvard researcher who studies fossil fuel propaganda, coined the phrase in a recent working study that analyzed nearly 34,000 social media posts from polluting companies in Europe. Nature-rinsing is nearly as ubiquitous as nature itself: According to the new report, written in collaboration with researchers at the nonprofit Algorithmic Transparency Institute at the National Conference on Citizenship, environment-related visuals made an appearance in 97 percent of posts from airlines this summer, and well over half of posts from automakers (64 percent) and oil companies (56 percent). “I was shocked by the scale of it when we actually started to quantify it,” Supran said. The report highlights some striking examples. An Instagram post from the German airline Lufthansa shows an airplane with the bottom half replaced with a shark tail. The Irish Wizz Air put videos on Twitter that poked fun at airlines for using so many beautiful landscapes in their ads. “Look, a magnificent shoreline and soothing piano music,” the voiceover says as the camera slowly zooms in on green, coastal bluffs. “Showing you this doesn’t prove that we care about the planet.” (It’s the lack of business-class seating that shows they care, according to the ad.) Instagram / Lufthansa In recent years, activists have been calling more attention to this kind of deceptive marketing, known broadly as “greenwashing.” Research has found a large disconnect between the fossil fuel industry’s climate-conscious words and real-world actions. States, tribes, and advocacy groups have launched a wave of lawsuits against companies over greenwashing, alleging that it violates consumer protection rules by deceiving the public. A congressional committee has also been investigating oil companies’ misleading advertising. In contrast, nature-rinsing is subtle enough, and so widespread, that it often goes unchallenged. Supran says that the practice has been overlooked by scholars, advocates, and policymakers. “Maybe this has been hiding in plain sight so effectively that we just take for granted the potential subconscious influences,” he said. Marketing research has demonstrated the success of these tactics, finding that seeing nature-filled ads elicits pleasant feelings similar to seeing “real” nature. Several studies indicate that this emotional response misleads people and prompts them to view the advertiser’s brand more positively. Supran calls the practice of combining green-sounding marketing language with nature pictures “a powerful one-two punch.” Researchers have found that this double whammy of green messaging can even trick those knowledgeable about environmental problems into thinking companies are greener than they are. In the marketing field, nature-rinsing is known by the inscrutable term “executional greenwashing.” Twitter / Wizz Air Nature-rinsing has been around for decades, starting in an era when explicit, heavy-handed pitches were the norm. In the 1980s, Chevron made a series of commercials that looked like low-budget nature documentaries, eventually winning an Effie advertising award for the effort. In one, a grizzly bear awakens from hibernation to play in a grassy meadow where companies were supposedly drilling and exploring for oil mere months earlier. “Do people sometimes work all through the winter so nature can have spring all to herself?” a deep voice narrates. “People do.” In another, a fox pursued by a prowling coyote leaps to safety by clambering into an oil pipe — “a cozy den that keeps her snug and safe.” The modern version is slightly more subtle as people have become savvier at spotting greenwashing. Take the “Nature or Nothing” campaign from Mercedes-Benz earlier this year, which promoted electric vehicles using close-up shots of a rose, a leaf, and honeycomb. A white circle was overlaid on areas where three lines converged to imitate the German carmaker’s logo. Some observers called it greenwashing, noting that Mercedes-Benz recently faced a lawsuit over its role in contributing to climate change. The advertisements inspired a parody campaign that superimposed the company’s logo over photos of spilled oil, wildfires, and cracking ice. The recent report suggests that companies know what they’re doing. Posts that use green-sounding claims are statistically more likely to contain nature imagery, according to Supran’s report, which appears to be the first to demonstrate this correlation. “Fossil fuel interests are strategically appropriating the beauty of nature to strengthen their green language,” Supran said. Companies that can’t convincingly spin their business as “green” may turn to nature imagery more often, Supran suggests. Oil companies can market their (usually tiny) investments in renewables and carmakers can showcase their new electric vehicles. By contrast, airlines’ talking points aren’t as solid: They’re still burning buttloads of jet fuel, with sustainable alternatives facing big hurdles. That might explain why nearly every aviation ad features the beauty of nature: They’re falling back on a safer greenwashing strategy that can easily fly under the radar. Some countries have already taken steps to regulate the use of nature in advertisements. In France, courts have found that car companies have violated the country’s ethics code by advertising cars off-road in natural settings, a move that one judge declared “environmentally unfriendly behaviour.” Last month, France banned fossil-fuel ads altogether, and next year, it will force carmakers to promote biking, walking, public transport, or carpooling in all advertisements. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has recommended against using images of forests, the earth, or endangered animals if they might mislead people. But most critiques of greenwashing have focused on language, which is both easier to quantify and easier to discredit. Nature-rinsing doesn’t make a specific statement — the images evoke a feel-good response, burnishing a brand’s reputation. And as research indicates, that emotional resonance is why it’s so persuasive. This story was originally published by Grist with the headline ‘Nature-rinsing’: How polluters use the beauty of nature to clean up their image on Sep 27, 2022.

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How to tackle the global deforestation crisis

Vital forest is cleared every day, with major climate effects. Satellites have revolutionized measurement of the problem, but what can we do about it?

Imagine if France, Germany, and Spain were completely blanketed in forests — and then all those trees were quickly chopped down. That’s nearly the amount of deforestation that occurred globally between 2001 and 2020, with profound consequences. Deforestation is a major contributor to climate change, producing between 6 and 17 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to a 2009 study. Meanwhile, because trees also absorb carbon dioxide, removing it from the atmosphere, they help keep the Earth cooler. And climate change aside, forests protect biodiversity. “Climate change and biodiversity make this a global problem, not a local problem,” says MIT economist Ben Olken. “Deciding to cut down trees or not has huge implications for the world.” But deforestation is often financially profitable, so it continues at a rapid rate. Researchers can now measure this trend closely: In the last quarter-century, satellite-based technology has led to a paradigm change in charting deforestation. New deforestation datasets, based on the Landsat satellites, for instance, track forest change since 2000 with resolution at 30 meters, while many other products now offer frequent imaging at close resolution. “Part of this revolution in measurement is accuracy, and the other part is coverage,” says Clare Balboni, an assistant professor of economics at the London School of Economics (LSE). “On-site observation is very expensive and logistically challenging, and you’re talking about case studies. These satellite-based data sets just open up opportunities to see deforestation at scale, systematically, across the globe.” Balboni and Olken have now helped write a new paper providing a road map for thinking about this crisis. The open-access article, “The Economics of Tropical Deforestation,” appears this month in the Annual Review of Economics. The co-authors are Balboni, a former MIT faculty member; Aaron Berman, a PhD candidate in MIT’s Department of Economics; Robin Burgess, an LSE professor; and Olken, MIT’s Jane Berkowitz Carlton and Dennis William Carlton Professor of Microeconomics. Balboni and Olken have also conducted primary research in this area, along with Burgess. So, how can the world tackle deforestation? It starts with understanding the problem. Replacing forests with farms Several decades ago, some thinkers, including the famous MIT economist Paul Samuelson in the 1970s, built models to study forests as a renewable resource; Samuelson calculated the “maximum sustained yield” at which a forest could be cleared while being regrown. These frameworks were designed to think about tree farms or the U.S. national forest system, where a fraction of trees would be cut each year, and then new trees would be grown over time to take their place. But deforestation today, particularly in tropical areas, often looks very different, and forest regeneration is not common. Indeed, as Balboni and Olken emphasize, deforestation is now rampant partly because the profits from chopping down trees come not just from timber, but from replacing forests with agriculture. In Brazil, deforestation has increased along with agricultural prices; in Indonesia, clearing trees accelerated as the global price of palm oil went up, leading companies to replace forests with palm tree orchards. All this tree-clearing creates a familiar situation: The globally shared costs of climate change from deforestation are “externalities,” as economists say, imposed on everyone else by the people removing forest land. It is akin to a company that pollutes into a river, affecting the water quality of residents. “Economics has changed the way it thinks about this over the last 50 years, and two things are central,” Olken says. “The relevance of global externalities is very important, and the conceptualization of alternate land uses is very important.” This also means traditional forest-management guidance about regrowth is not enough. With the economic dynamics in mind, which policies might work, and why? The search for solutions As Balboni and Olken note, economists often recommend “Pigouvian” taxes (named after the British economist Arthur Pigou) in these cases, levied against people imposing externalities on others. And yet, it can be hard to identify who is doing the deforesting. Instead of taxing people for clearing forests, governments can pay people to keep forests intact. The UN uses Payments for Environmental Services (PES) as part of its REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) program. However, it is similarly tough to identify the optimal landowners to subsidize, and these payments may not match the quick cash-in of deforestation. A 2017 study in Uganda showed PES reduced deforestation somewhat; a 2022 study in Indonesia found no reduction; another 2022 study, in Brazil, showed again that some forest protection resulted. “There’s mixed evidence from many of these [studies],” Balboni says. These policies, she notes, must reach people who would otherwise clear forests, and a key question is, “How can we assess their success compared to what would have happened anyway?” Some places have tried cash transfer programs for larger populations. In Indonesia, a 2020 study found such subsidies reduced deforestation near villages by 30 percent. But in Mexico, a similar program meant more people could afford milk and meat, again creating demand for more agriculture and thus leading to more forest-clearing. At this point, it might seem that laws simply banning deforestation in key areas would work best — indeed, about 16 percent of the world’s land overall is protected in some way. Yet the dynamics of protection are tricky. Even with protected areas in place, there is still “leakage” of deforestation into other regions. Still more approaches exist, including “nonstate agreements,” such as the Amazon Soy Moratorium in Brazil, in which grain traders pledged not to buy soy from deforested lands, and reduced deforestation without “leakage.” Also, intriguingly, a 2008 policy change in the Brazilian Amazon made agricultural credit harder to obtain by requiring recipients to comply with environmental and land registration rules. The result? Deforestation dropped by up to 60 percent over nearly a decade. Politics and pulp Overall, Balboni and Olken observe, beyond “externalities,” two major challenges exist. One, it is often unclear who holds property rights in forests. In these circumstances, deforestation seems to increase. Two, deforestation is subject to political battles. For instance, as economist Bard Harstad of Stanford University has observed, environmental lobbying is asymmetric. Balboni and Olken write: “The conservationist lobby must pay the government in perpetuity … while the deforestation-oriented lobby need pay only once to deforest in the present.” And political instability leads to more deforestation because “the current administration places lower value on future conservation payments.” Even so, national political measures can work. In the Amazon from 2001 to 2005, Brazilian deforestation rates were three to four times higher than on similar land across the border, but that imbalance vanished once the country passed conservation measures in 2006. However, deforestation ramped up again after a 2014 change in government. Looking at particular monitoring approaches, a study of Brazil’s satellite-based Real-Time System for Detection of Deforestation (DETER), launched in 2004, suggests that a 50 percent annual increase in its use in municipalities created a 25 percent reduction in deforestation from 2006 to 2016. How precisely politics matters may depend on the context. In a 2021 paper, Balboni and Olken (with three colleagues) found that deforestation actually decreased around elections in Indonesia. Conversely, in Brazil, one study found that deforestation rates were 8 to 10 percent higher where mayors were running for re-election between 2002 and 2012, suggesting incumbents had deforestation industry support. “The research there is aiming to understand what the political economy drivers are,” Olken says, “with the idea that if you understand those things, reform in those countries is more likely.” Looking ahead, Balboni and Olken also suggest that new research estimating the value of intact forest land intact could influence public debates. And while many scholars have studied deforestation in Brazil and Indonesia, fewer have examined the Democratic Republic of Congo, another deforestation leader, and sub-Saharan Africa. Deforestation is an ongoing crisis. But thanks to satellites and many recent studies, experts know vastly more about the problem than they did a decade or two ago, and with an economics toolkit, can evaluate the incentives and dynamics at play. “To the extent that there’s ambuiguity across different contexts with different findings, part of the point of our review piece is to draw out common themes — the important considerations in determining which policy levers can [work] in different circumstances,” Balboni says. “That’s a fast-evolving area. We don’t have all the answers, but part of the process is bringing together growing evidence about [everything] that affects how successful those choices can be.”

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What’s in a name? The renaming of the pink cockatoo is no small thing in Australia’s violent history | Andrew Stafford

This beautiful bird’s former name represented colonial dominance – and told us nothing about the speciesThis year’s Guardian/BirdLife Australia bird of the year poll runs from 25 September to 6 October. Nominate your favourite for the shortlistGet our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcastThe pink cockatoo has had a few names over the years. The father of Australian ornithology John Gould knew it as Leadbeater’s cockatoo, similar to the scientific name given to it in 1831, Cacatua leadbeateri. This was named after Benjamin Leadbeater, the London naturalist and taxidermist whose name also commemorates Victoria’s faunal emblem, Leadbeater’s possum.Sir Thomas Mitchell, the surveyor general of New South Wales from 1828 to 1855, called it the red-top cockatoo. He was awestruck by its beauty. “Few birds more enliven the monotonous hues of the Australian forest than this beautiful species whose pink-coloured wings and flowing crest might have embellished the air of a more voluptuous region,” he gushed.Sign up for a weekly email featuring our best reads Continue reading...

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Amazon deforestation continues to plummet

“This shows how an election can change the fate of the Amazon.”

August was another month of relatively good news for the Amazon rainforest: The rate of deforestation has continued to decline significantly. Earlier this week, Marina Silva, Brazil’s environment minister, announced a 66.1 percent decrease in Amazon deforestation compared to last August. That amounted to a loss of about 217 square miles, according to Reuters. These figures come during a time of year when destruction of the rainforest is usually quite high, and follows a similar trend seen in July. So far this year, the rate of deforestation is 48 percent lower than in 2022 and is at levels not seen since 2018. The numbers are another victory for President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who has made protecting the Amazon a policy priority. “These results show the determination of the Lula administration to break the cycle of abandonment and regression seen under the previous government,” Marina Silva said, according to the BBC. The Amazon, the world’s largest tropical rainforest, covers some 2.5 million square miles — an area roughly twice the size of India. It’s a critical carbon sink for greenhouse gas emissions and home to 20 percent of the world’s fresh water. But deforestation and climate change are degrading the Amazon and its ability to sop up carbon from the atmosphere. Some scientists fear that if deforestation continues, the rainforest could reach a point beyond which it cannot recover and would become a grassy savannah. The tenure of Lula’s predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, saw a roll back of environmental regulations and enforcement, and a spike in deforestation. Since taking office in January, Lula has, among other steps, renewed efforts to combat illegal clearing and reactivated the $630 million Amazon Fund, which is aimed at supporting the government’s push to protect the rainforest. “This shows the importance of governments acting on climate change,” Erika Berenguer, a senior research associate focused on the Amazon at Oxford University, said of the figures released this week. She is currently doing field work in the rainforest, and says the decreasing rate of deforestation is an important signal for voters. “Often people vote and feel disempowered,” she said. “This shows how an election can change the fate of the Amazon.” Some scientists, however, prefer to follow the annual rather than monthly deforestation data. . “It’s a hopeful story,” said Alexandra Tyukavina, a geographer at the University of Maryland who focuses on tropical forest loss. But she adds that there could be a lag in capturing deforestation via satellite imagery and “there is quite a bit of deforestation happening in the second half of the year.” While the progress so far has been critical, Berenguer calls it “low-hanging fruit” that largely revolved around getting back to where the country was before Bolsarano. “Then you have to pick the fruit at the top of the trees and it’s much more difficult,” she said. “The question becomes what we do to reduce rates even more from what they were pre-Bolsonaro.” The Lula administration has set a goal of zero deforestation by 2030. But whether he meets that goal, or how close he comes, remains an open question and there is at least some cause for skepticism. A meeting of Amazon nations early this year, for example, failed to reach an agreement on important barriers to progress, such as deforestation targets and the future of oil and gas development in the rainforest. “We cannot just give ourselves a pat on the shoulder and be happy about it,” said Berenguer. “We cannot get too comfy.” This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Amazon deforestation continues to plummet on Sep 7, 2023.

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‘Nature-rinsing’: How polluters use the beauty of nature to clean up their image

Related News

How to tackle the global deforestation crisis

What’s in a name? The renaming of the pink cockatoo is no small thing in Australia’s violent history | Andrew Stafford

Rainforest carbon credit schemes misleading and ineffective, finds report

She kills to be kind: the mastermind ecologist eliminating invasive predators

Amazon deforestation continues to plummet

Suggested Viewing

Dipsas Speaks

The Big Green

Among Giants

LEAVES

Juskatla

Join us to forge
a sustainable future

sign up for our mailing list to stay informed on the latest films and environmental headlines.

Cookies help us run our site more efficiently.

‘Nature-rinsing’: How polluters use the beauty of nature to clean up their image

Related News

How to tackle the global deforestation crisis

What’s in a name? The renaming of the pink cockatoo is no small thing in Australia’s violent history | Andrew Stafford

Rainforest carbon credit schemes misleading and ineffective, finds report

She kills to be kind: the mastermind ecologist eliminating invasive predators

Amazon deforestation continues to plummet

Suggested Viewing

Dipsas Speaks

The Big Green

Among Giants

LEAVES

Juskatla

Join us to forgea sustainable future

sign up for our mailing list to stay informed on the latest films and environmental headlines.

Join us to forge
a sustainable future