We’ve all seen those touchy-feely TV ads with baby deer, butterflies, and sylvan streams — claiming that some big corporate polluter is nature’s best friend.
There’s a word for such hokum: greenwashing.
Leave it to the Koch brothers, however, to invent a whole new category of greenwashing. Doling out millions of their oil-smeared greenbacks, David and Charles Koch have been buying their way onto the boards and into the exhibits of elite museums of science.
The fossil-fueled billionaires are using the academic and cultural prestige of these establishments to wash their filthy reputations and to spew the self-serving balderdash that climate change is a natural phenomenon, not one caused by polluting profiteers like them.
Astonishingly, David Koch was able to purchase a seat on the decision-making boards of the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington.
DonkeyHotey/Flickr
I know museums are scrambling for money, but come on — an infamous science-denier directing a science museum?
Maybe not for long.
An upstart group is highlighting economic and political forces that shape (or misshape) nature. Called The Natural History Museum, this outfit is outing the Kochs and the other greenwashers invading the public’s science spaces…and invading science itself.
More than merely exposing the invaders, however, this mobile “museum” is recruiting prominent scientists, activating museum staffers, and rallying you and me into a spirited cultural campaign that can oust these hucksters, reject their tainted money, and throw junk science out of our centers of real science.
You can find out more by visiting www.TheNaturalHistoryMuseum.org.
