Not all false truths about design, green building, eco-towns (and almost anything else for that matter) come from intentional manipulation of what a person is allowed to see and not see, and is told or not told about a project. Yes, such blinding and framing of a journalist or other knowledge producer by sponsoring organizations and those who have money or prestige to lose if their golden vision is shown to be tarnished often happens when the journalist makes only a quick visit to a site, doesn’t interview all potential stakeholders--and particularly those that the sponsoring organization says that they can speak for--or relies purely on press releases. The pitfalls of primary knowledge production are many, but different than the type of knowledge making that the Internet has enabled.

With the ease of linking to articles on others’ websites, or simply summarizing another’s report on one’s own online journal or blog, an extended “telephone game” is rapidly affecting what we know, and how we come to judge truth versus falsity.

Let’s take one example: On February 3rd, Paul French wrote about “China’s Eco-towns”  for both Ethical Corporation and Climate Change Corporation (simultaneously published). After highlighting the failures of Dongtan and Huangbaiyu, he went on to hold up Rizhao as a successful model for future projects to green China:

        An impressive 99% of households in the city centre and 30% in the    

           suburbs have solar panels that power their lights and heat their water.

But this isn’t accurate, at least according to what seems to be the original source: either Worldwatch Institute or the World Clean Energy Awards.

It’s really that 99% of household in the city center and 30% in the suburbs have solar water heaters. While there are solar photovoltaics in use in Rizhao, 99% of household lighting in the city center are not being powered by the sun! According to the WCEA, as of 2007, Rizhao was hoping to convert 10% of its total energy supply to solar power and biogas.

Within two days, the error in the Ethical Corporation article, was replicated by CC Huang at Responsible China, who clearly did not do any independent fact-checking. Three days after French’s post and one day after Huang’s, China Digital Times, a highly regarded and widely used source for briefs on China, repeated the error again, linking to Responsible China’s note on Rizhao. Given many China watchers reliance on CDT for their news briefings, I expect that there will soon be ever more articles and blogs that (falsely) state that 99% of Rizhao’s city center households have their lighting coming from solar power.

With quick linking to and replication of data from one page to the other without returning to the a source, or going to the place, that can verify the data, repetition creates veracity. Already more pages on the Internet state the error, than hold to the statement of the original source. With no arbiter of the methodology or data presented in work posted on the Internet, the data that is listed the most is the data that is found the most often, and therefore continues to be replicated, and replicated. Every copy potentially getting further from the original.

It is also problematic that the original source for the data on Rizhao in French’s article is unclear. First, why isn’t Ethical Corporation requiring attribution for the sources of its data? And second, Worldwatch was one of 8 nominators and jury members for the WCEA, and it seems that the article on their site is taken verbatim from WCEA’s summary of the project. This raises another question: can there be such a thing as plagiarism on the Internet?

Is a link before quoting large sections of another’s work enough? Given that thousands of websites now do so, often giving attribution only in tiny text at the end of multiple paragraphs of an article, or copied in its entirety, it seems that existent behavior demonstrates that the Internet is at peace with such practices. But what does this mean for how we come to know what we know?

With no person or organization held responsible as the source of data presented in the article, and the author of the article often obscured in dozens of poorly attributed replications (this is particularly common on Chinese language news and aggregator sites), information presents itself as existing independent of human gathering, recording or interpretation. It cannot be challenged because its veracity is demonstrated by its objectivity.

And so very quickly the truths we know, and upon which we make decisions that will significantly alter the world we live in and the world’s of others, become a dangerous substitute for the experienced reality on the ground.

Not being able to fly to Rizhao myself before writing this post, I at least went to Rizhao’s official government website. Interestingly, there is no listing of the World Clean Energy Award, no touting of its solar heated water, or use of photovoltaics or biogas. Why aren’t they proud enough of their accomplishments to highlight that information on their own website?

Under the section entitled Environmental Protection, the only accomplishment listed is that there is 38.2% “green land” in the city center:

        By implementing the "Strategy of Ecology ", we will build Rizhao into an    

        Oriental Green City with livable environment and sustainable development.

Yet again, grass and flowers (that require watering!) in urban parks are taken as evidence of environmental protection and sustainable development. Just across the Bohai sea from Rizhao, Dalian has famously deployed this strategy of claiming green spaces in the city as signs of its environmental progressiveness, and harmonious existence between man and nature.

I think that there should be a specific sub-definition of greenwashing that captures this all-too-common bait-and-switch technique of municipal governments: the use of green urban landscaping (xeriscaping does not count) to create an aesthetic urban environment that overwhelms residents and sometimes journalists with a sense of peace, precluding any possibility of being concerned about how other policies or activities in the municipality contribute to harming human, animal, or planetary health.