We live in strange times. Official government statistics shows that across Australia water quality in our rivers and streams are generally improving and that forest cover is actually increasing.
Yet most people believe water quality is deteriorating and forest covering reducing.
Furthermore official statistics show the material condition of life globally continues to improve, yet most people believe it is getting worse.
A major reason for the discrepancy between the evidence and the perception is that those setting the environmental agenda have their eyes wide closed to the evidence.
Let us consider the specific issue of water quality and the Murray River.
A policy document recently endorsed and launched by the Wilderness Society, Greenpeace and the Australian Conservation Foundation -- a document regarded by many environmentalists as the ultimate test of the environmental credentials of political parties in the context of this federal election -- states: "The once mighty Murray River is dying. On current trends, Adelaide's drinking water from the Murray River will be too salty to drink two days out of five by 2020".
Yet the official statistics from the Murray Darling Basin Commission for the key site of Morgan -- a site just upstream from the offshoots for Adelaide's water supply -- show salt levels have in fact more than halved over the last 20 years. The situation is clearly one of improvement, not deterioration.
Yearly averages for salinity (EC micro Siemens per cm) at Morgan. Data provided by the Murray Darling Basin Commission on 21st September 2004
The three large Environmental Organisations who set the environment agenda nationally have clearly used the term "current trends" deceptively -- in fact they have told a big lie.
The prediction that Murray River water would be too salty to drink in 2020 was a forecast from a computer model made in 1988 that has since proven wrong. This prediction does not, and never did, represent any "current trend".
The Howard government's approach to reporting weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq, and the contention that children were thrown overboard by refugees on the eve of the last federal election, has outraged many environmentalists.
They claim to be driven by a concern not just about the environment but for honesty, justice and truth generally.
Yet, paradoxically, the policy platform of key environmentalists is fundamentally dishonest -- at least when it comes to issues like the health of the Murray River.
A dilemma for environmental fundamentalists is that, for example, if the truth were honestly told about the state of the Murray River environment it would be difficult to justify taking any more water from irrigators.
Yet their end game, their ultimate objective, is taking water off irrigators. For the environmental fundamentalists taking water from irrigators is a just cause.
I once thought that the answer lay in getting a crowbar under the eyelids of key environmentalists and pushing them open -- so they could see the evidence.
But for the hard core environmental fundamentalists it seems their beliefs will never be troubled by the facts, because they have nothing whatsoever to do with facts.
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