Between e-mail, text messages, Web pages, online news outlets, Facebook, and blogs, advocates for social change have the most powerful loudspeaker ever imagined. And so do their adversaries.

As observed very early on, the ubiquity of these tools puts information and misinformation on an equal footing, and no one in the public sphere can any longer afford to ignore what's being said about them around the World Wide Watercooler. Adopting a model popularized by Snopes.com and the Discovery Channel's hit show MythBusters, Barack Obama is doing it over at FightTheSmears.com, and the Sierra Club of Canada launched a Web resource to debunk persistent misunderstandings about global climate change.

 

Wyoming's conservation groups, overworked and understaffed, have a hard enough time analyzing and addressing all the threats development and resource extraction pose to the state's landscapes, air and water, without having to troll the Web seeking electronic slanders that once would have passed unrecorded between customers at a coffee counter. But the sheer persistence of several such narratives points to a growing need to do just that.

Steve Thomas certainly knows the power of hearsay and urban legend, having served in small-town public office for eight years before taking on a leadership role in the Sierra Club – perhaps the biggest target of hostile mythology.

"I think the biggest hurdle the Sierra Club has to struggle with is the myth that we are 'radical outsiders,' " Thomas laments. "Our adversaries have painted us into this corner over the past several years here in Wyoming."

"The Sierra Club is a volunteer- based organization," Thomas patiently explains - again. "These volunteers are all local folks who care about various conservation issues in Wyoming. Any work we do in Wyoming is approved by the local volunteers, so we are really a home-based group." Meanwhile, he can only look on with incredulous envy at the reputation enjoyed locally by the mineral industry, "mostly made up of multi-national firms exploiting Wyoming resources, and no-one ever refers to ... [them]as 'outsiders.' "

Not being "from here" has always been a useful charge to make against your opponents in Wyoming and indeed, almost anywhere at anytime. Xeno lives. But if you are in fact from here, they can still always say you're "not one of us."

 

Ideology appears to be the favored marker for conservationists' supposed distance from local norms. "The biggest myth about conservation work is that it represents a left-wing fringe element, when in fact the primary push for conservation comes not from political parties but from local residents across the political spectrum who have an interest in hunting, fishing, wildlife watching, and a general feeling of respect for the land," says Erik Molvar of Laramie-based Biodiversity Conservation Alliance. Culturally conservative, gun-savvy, multi-generational Wyoming outfitting and ranching families, increasingly sounding alarm over losses of wildlife habitat and public access caused by oil and gas drilling in the Wyoming Range, neatly underscore Molvar's point.

Erik Molvar

 

And at the Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance, with its well-established local bona-fides, advocates instead find their motives under attack.

 

Franz Camenzind, 'not against everything'. Photo by Beverly Lane.

'You guys are against everything! You are all alarmists that only survive as organizations by creating conflict where none exists!' repeats a rueful executive director Franz Camenzind. He finds himself regularly obliged to remind critics that the group is, in fact, not "against everything," but rather in favor of maintaining northwest Wyoming's environmental integrity. Especially galling is the implication that the group takes stands solely to raise money.

 

"In my 25-plus years of involvement with the Conservation Alliance, I am not aware of a single decision that was made based upon its economic impact to the organization."

 

Indeed, if opposing drilling in crucial winter range were a hot ticket to donor largesse, then at this point most of the state's conservation groups would have treasure chests spilling over with gold coins. Which they don't.

But if attacks on pedigree and motivations are taken off the table, critics will happily turn to an assault on tactics. Advocates are frequently attacked for their supposed eagerness to sue. Despite countless hours spent reading studies of proposed developments, attending meetings, proposing options and hashing out the issues with land managers, Lloyd Dorsey of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition too often sees good-faith investment of time and effort overshadowed by the occasional headline-grabbing legal ruling.

 

"Conservationists have years of experience in the political, social, economic, ecological and legal aspects of any given issue," he notes. "We help research and craft reasonable alternatives, ever mindful of protecting the heritage that makes Wyoming special." Yet somehow, being pushed to the wall by politically pressured agencies and having your input ignored and land management laws violated still makes you the bad guy in the court of public opinion when you have to go before a judge to protect something worth fighting for.

Lloyd Dorsey

Of course, for all the myths perpetuated about what sort of people conservationists are and what motivates them, there are many more which spring from the news of the day. Currently bedeviling Laurie Milford of the Wyoming Outdoor Council is the charge that by demanding lawful and balanced energy development, conservationists are impeding the nation's energy independence. While senators McCain and Obama trade shots over this very issue in the context of offshore drilling restrictions, the same baseless argument plays out here in Wyoming.

 

Laurie Milford

Milford can only scratch her head at this idea, given the numbers. Since 1994 new wells on federal land have more than tripled, and drilling permit issuances on federal land have nearly quadrupled. All of which failed to stop massive run-ups in gasoline prices. "The most secure path forward is to leave some resources in the ground," she maintains. "Reducing our demand and strengthening the dollar will help reduce the spike in energy prices much more than leasing our wildlife refuges and national parks, which would be to the detriment of future generations. We've had eight years of a boom in domestic drilling, and prices are higher than ever."

 

Milford also puzzles over claims that new drilling must urgently be approved, when 33 million domestic acres are leased out, but not being developed. "There are a lot of opportunities to drill domestically," she notes. "And yet it's important to realize that the U.S. has a small percentage of total global petroleum reserves and we can't affect global prices for oil. Economists from around the country have said as much, including our own professor of petroleum and natural gas economics at the University of Wyoming, Charles Mason. 'It's a myth,' Mason says."

Figuring out how many of their limited resources Wyoming's conservationists want to devote to myth-busting in the years to come will depend on the value of the work and the value of other work that would have to be left undone. The clear trend in this age of ultra-rapid response suggests groups will be forced to increase their efforts to counter spin and suspicion, or be presumed guilty in the court of public opinion.

 

But cognitive scientists advise caution about how myth busting efforts are presented. It seems that our brains generally aren't wired to learn the truth through careful examination of a falsehood. When a typical person hears a statement, he or she files it away in memory. Later hearing the statement was false impels the brain to affix a kind of "negation tag" to what we've already "learned." These tags turn out to be about as sticky as second-hand painter's tape. And that's just in the first 30 minutes.

 

Ultimately, and especially in Wyoming, we tend to believe the best about people we know and like, and believe the worst about those we don't. The most effective debunking will take place in the same kind of kitchen-table conversations that spawn the worst of the innuendo.

 

As usual, the wry and insightful new director of the Wyoming Wildlife Federation, Walt Gasson, sums up the challenge in a pointed quip. "The biggest myth in this business is that if you beat someone with enough science, they'll see it your way," the Green River native says. "This business is about relationships."

Walt Gasson