When it’s too wet or windy to garden on weekends, I catch up on reading. I found a letter to the editor in one publication in the “to read pile” rather thought provoking. The writer was commenting about the state of public discourse today, using the example of  a friend who works as a psychologist in a PR office, writing copy to help sell idea or products. “Truth, inconvenient or otherwise, is whatever our psychologist friends in all those PR agencies can get us to believe with all our hearts, our souls and our guts … hundreds and thousands of people who have bought the corporate PR shtick carry the ball by parroting it on talk radio, in letters to newspapers, and over coffee in the clubhouse. If you read it in the papers enough times and hear it on the radio enough times and if all our friends at work believe it, it becomes true.”

If you think of some of the anti-ethanol folks, you can spot some of that manipulation.  They look for the mantra that resonates, such as food vs fuel, or it takes more energy to make ethanol than you get out of it.  I get asked all the time about those two points. To many, they are the absolute facts, and even though I can cite USDA numbers on ethanol’s energy balance and point out the false notions in the food vs fuel discussion, I sense that they aren’t convinced.

People ask if corn ethanol is bad. And I talk about the huge corn surpluses of the 70s that depressed grain prices worldwide. Many American farmers got tired of government subsidies and decided to build a new market for their corn. Some 40 years later, it’s working. Grain prices are up. Ethanol has created a solid new market for corn, and there’s just as much corn available to feed livestock as ever, and just as much corn sweetener and starch (the only really food items extracted from field corn) as ever. The mountainous surpluses of corn are gone. With grain prices up globally, perhaps the decades-old trend of farmers leaving the land because they can’t make a living from farming will reverse. Not many countries like the U.S. and those in Europe subsidized their agricultural sectors to keep them productive. But the argument is complex and I see the eyes of my listeners glaze over.

So, how do we get the message out to those who’ve bought the dominant anti-ethanol spinsters’ line? People are duly skeptical of what they perceive as spinning – but as we know, as the half truths get widely repeated, they begin to carry the weight of absolute truth. And facts that contradict are simply not believed.

Does truth really belong to those with biggest advertising budgets? I don’t like the idea that there are people out there trying to manipulate the truth. I find it disturbing that the PR technique described above could be characterized as spreading  lies – cleverly packaged, but downright lies.

 I’d like to believe that truth ultimately wins out. That if we hang in there, and keep putting our message out there, it will be heard. It is important to have integrity and not fall into the temptation to develop our own spin, over exaggerate or spread our own distortions of the truth. We also can’t neglect the legitimate concerns being raised about the broader implications of the industry’s rapid growth. In the cacophony of the moment, it may seem impossibly naïve, but over time, it will be heard. Am I hopelessly naïve? Or do I have a fundamental faith in the reasonableness of fellow citizens?