The End does NOT justify the Means

As an environmentalist, I get so tired of the subtle dishonesty and even worse the blatant disingenuous and dishonest nature of the movement.  More and more its become acceptable, expected and even worse applauded, for environmental groups to justify this behavior with eye roll inducing the "end justifies the means" mentality.   

The crux of my frustration is because the movement will stand on its own-and have far more support-if the organizations driving the movement would be a lot less extreme and just let the facts and data dictate the public land policies.  The movement doesn't need to twist, manipulate, exaggerate and make-up data to support their agenda (and all of those happen...often).  The facts, of their own accord and with no massaging, will stand on their own.  We don't need to stoop to ridiculous lows and push ethics and honesty aside to progress a very realistic, very responsible, very environmentally sound, and widely supported (even outside of environmentalist circles) environmental agenda in this country, for the benefit of us all, including our future generations.

The ONLY reason such dishonest, manipulative, and disingenuous tactics are even necessary is because of the ridiculous and unnecessarily extreme position today's environmental groups have taken.  And the problem these groups have is that the true facts and data don't support such an extreme agenda (they support a much more moderate agenda); so, they have to twist and manipulate and exaggerate the data to support their extremism.  And that is where I take issue with the environmental groups, because I maintain that they have a major problem when rather than molding their position around the available data, they are molding the available data around their position.  And time and time again, I see environmentalist groups doing just that!  And even worse, is that the loyal members of their organizations don't even bat an eye at it any more, and applaud it. 

Lets stop making "environmentalist" a dirty word.  And if we'd maintain a much more moderate position, using honest and ethical arguments supported by pure unaltered facts, it wouldn't be.  We'd be able to work with oil and gas companies, and OHV groups, and rural communities for the betterment of all, especially the environment, if the extremism and this "the end justifies the means" attitude were checked at the door. 

Extremism breeds extremism...and in this case the environmentalist groups are the offensive, and should take the high road and scale back their extremism.

If you are looking for examples, I will do posts specific to some more prevalent examples of this mentality as time presents itself and as I see them.  Stay tuned.