Wash and Spin Cycle Threats to Tropical Biodiversity Lian Pin Koh 1,10 , Jaboury Ghazoul 1 , Rhett A. Butler 2 , William F. Laurance 3,4 , Navjot S. Sodhi 5,6 , Javier Mateo-Vega 3,7 , and Corey J. A. Bradshaw 8,9 1 Institute of Terrestrial Ecosystems, ETH Zu ¨ rich, CHN G 74.2, Universit ¨ atstrasse 16, Zu ¨ rich 8092, Switzerland 2 Mongabay.com, P.O. Box 0291, Menlo Park, CA 94026, U.S.A. 3 Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Apartado 0843-03092, Balboa, Anc ´ on, Panama 4 School of Marine and Tropical Biology, James Cook University, Cairns, Queensland 4870, Australia 5 Department of Biological Sciences, National University of Singapore, 14 Science Drive 4, Singapore 117543, Singapore 6 Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A. 7 Environmental Leadership & Training Initiative, Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, 195 Prospect Street, New Haven, CT 06511, U.S.A. 8 The Environment Institute and School of Earth & Environmental Sciences, University of Adelaide, South Australia 5005, Australia 9 South Australian Research and Development Institute, P.O. Box 120, Henley Beach, South Australia 5022, Australia ‘The planting of oil palm trees has always been carried out legally and responsibly.’ —Yusof Basiron, Chief Executive Officer, Malaysian Palm Oil Council ‘Orangutans are predicted to become extinct by as early as 2011!’ —Rainforest Action Network TROPICAL DEFORESTATION IS RAMPANT (Bradshaw et al. 2009), and is increasingly being driven by industrial-scale logging, mining, and agricultural expansion, in addition to the subsistence activities of rural communities (Butler & Laurance 2008). As consumers, we ourselves shoulder some of the blame in that we are often the mar- ket that these industrial enterprises seek to satisfy. Recognizing this, we must balance our consumer demands with our environmental concerns. To do so, we need to be critical of information presented to us by either environmental or industrial interest groups before making our consumer, investment, or policy decisions. Both corporations and environmental organizations run so- phisticated public relations campaigns, the credibility and objectiv- ity of which are often difficult to verify. Corporations’ glossy brochures, slick websites, and cheerful videos serve to reassure con- sumers, undercut protests, and question the credibility of green activists (Munshi & Kurian 2005). When such promotional mate- rial has little basis in fact, or is at least disingenuous, companies are accused of ‘greenwashing’—a term coined by American environ- mentalist Jay Westerveld in 1986. We use the greenwashing term to define activities that misleadingly give the impression of environ- mentally sound management and which thereby deflect attention away from the continued pursuit of environmentally destructive activities. Yet environmental groups and activists sometimes make equally exaggerated claims in their campaigns—in effect engaging in environmental scaremongering and propaganda or what we term ‘blackwashing’—misleading and unverified accusations of avoid- able environmental degradation by corporations. In the short term, blackwashing can focus attention, make headlines, raise the profile of environmental debates, and might ultimately increase donations to charitable concerns. In the longer term, blackwashing exposed for what it really is could diminish the trust invested in environ- mental groups and more generally undermine public support for conservation. In light of the current global economic recession, which is likely to increase competition for dwindling conservation funds in the face of continued tropical deforestation and other forms of en- vironmental degradation, there is increasing need for the general public to hold both corporations and environmental groups to account in terms of delivering credible, well-substantiated, and documented evidence. Here we argue that greenwashing by some corporations and blackwashing by some environmental activists could hinder conservation outcomes through the erosion of positive public perception and the creation of consumer apathy. We as sci- entists have a particular responsibility to evaluate critically and ob- jectively the claims made by both parties, while being mindful of our own personal biases. GREENWASHING Among the drivers of tropical deforestation, oil palm agriculture demands special attention because of the scale and rapidity of its expansion (Koh & Wilcove 2007, 2008, 2009). Understandably, Received 8 June 2009; revision accepted 18 August 2009. 10 Corresponding author; e-mail: lian.koh@env.ethz.ch BIOTROPICA 42(1): 67–71 2010 10.1111/j.1744-7429.2009.00588.x r 2009 The Author(s) 67 Journal compilation r 2009 by The Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation