Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist
Page 1
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1 - First Principles
Chapter 2 - Our Present Predicament
Chapter 3 - Beginnings
Chapter 4 - No Nukes Now!
Chapter 5 - Saving the Whales
Chapter 6 - Baby Seals and Movie Stars
Chapter 7 - Taking the Reins
Chapter 8 - Growing Pains
Chapter 9 - Greenpeace Goes Global
Chapter 10 - Consensus and Sustainable Development Discovered
Chapter 11 - Jailed Whales, Curtains of Death, Raising Fish, and Sinking Rainbows
Chapter 12 - Greenpeace Sails Off the Deep End
Chapter 13 - Round Tables and Square Pegs
Chapter 14 - Trees Are The Answer
Chapter 15 - Energy to Power Our World
Chapter 16 - Food, Nutrition, and Genetic Science
Chapter 17 - Biodiversity, Endangered Species, and Extinction
Chapter 18 - Chemicals Are Us
Chapter 19 - Population Is Us
Chapter 20 - Climate of Fear
Chapter 21 - Charting a Sensible Course to a Sustainable Future
Copyright © 2010 Patrick Moore
All Rights reserved.
Published by Beatty Street Publishing Inc.
No part of this book, covered by copyright, may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means (graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopies, taping, or information storage and retrieval systems) without the prior written consent of the publisher.
CONFESSIONS OF A
GREENPEACE DROPOUT
The making of a
sensible environmentalist
Patrick Moore
Also by Patrick Moore:
Trees are the Answer
Pacific Spirit Park: The Forest Reborn
Beatty Street Publishing Inc.
This book is dedicated to the environment and its miracles of nature that provide food, shelter, clothing, transportation, communication, and the energy to power our world.
It is also a tribute to the people who work in fields and forests, on the sea and underground, in labs, factories and power plants, making civilization a continuing reality.
May we all follow a path toward a
sustainable future on our beautiful Earth.
You can’t expect anyone to believe everything you say,
and you can’t expect everyone to believe anything you say.
Here’s what I believe.
—Patrick Moore
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge the many teachers and mentors I have had the privilege to study under and to receive wisdom from over the years. These include Dr. Oscar Sziklai, Dr. Hamish Kimmins, Dr. Buzz (C.S.) Holling, Dr. Vladmir Krajina, Professor Alistair Lucas, Professor Michael Goldberg and Dr. David Suzuki, during my years at the University of British Columbia.
In more recent times I have enjoyed good counsel and knowledge from Bob Hunter, Jim Bohlen, Ben Metcalfe, Terry Simmons, Dr. James Lovelock, Stuart Lang, David Hatherton, and Stewart Brand.
I would also like to acknowledge the contribution of Tom Tevlin and Trevor Figueiredo, my partners in Greenspirit Strategies and Beatty Street Publishing, and of Dawn Sondergaard and Christine Tevlin, all of whom have spent many hours to help make this book a reality.
I want to thank Alex Avery for his assistance with the early stages of the project, and for suggesting the main title of the book.
Many thanks to Deborah Viets, who performed the final edit and taught me a thing or two about punctuation and style.
I am grateful for the unfailing support of Eileen Moore, my wife and partner for 37 years. She worked beside me in many early Greenpeace campaigns, raised our two fine boys, Jonathan and Nicholas, traveled with me to distant shores, and continues to work with me through thick and thin.
Introduction
The Third World War will be the war to save the environment.
— U Thant, director-general of the United Nations, 1969
You could call me a Greenpeace dropout, but that is not an entirely accurate description of how or why I left the organization 15 years after I helped create it. I’d like to think Greenpeace left me, rather than the other way around, but that too is not entirely correct.
The truth is Greenpeace and I underwent divergent evolutions.I became a sensible environmentalist; Greenpeace became increasingly senseless as it adopted an agenda that is antiscience, antibusiness, and downright antihuman.
This is the story of our transformations.
The last half of the 20th century was marked by a revulsion for war and a new awareness of the environment. Beatniks, hippies, eco-freaks, and greens in their turn fashioned a new philosophy that embraced peace and ecology as the overarching principles of a civilized world. Spurred by more than 30 years of ever-present fear that global nuclear holocaust would wipe out humanity and much of the living world, we led a new war—a war to save the earth. I’ve had the good fortune to be a general in that war.
My boot camp had no screaming sergeant or rifle drills. Still, the sense of duty and purpose of mission we had at the beginning was as acute as any assault on a common enemy. We campaigned against the bomb-makers, whale-killers, polluters, and anyone else who threatened civilization or the environment. In the process we won the hearts and minds of people around the world. We were Greenpeace.
I joined Greenpeace before it was even called by that name. The Don’t Make a Wave Committee was meeting weekly in the basement of the Unitarian church in Vancouver.
In April 1971 I saw a small article in the Vancouver Sun about a group planning to sail a boat from Vancouver across the North Pacific to protest U.S. hydrogen bomb testing in Alaska. I immediately realized this was something real I could do, way beyond taking ecology classes and studying at a desk. I wrote the organizers and was invited to join the weekly meetings of the small group that would soon become Greenpeace.
The early days of Greenpeace were heady indeed. It was 1971 and the height of the hippy era. I was in a bitter battle to obtain my PhD in ecology at the University of British Columbia over the objections of a few industry-backed professors who had forced their way onto my thesis committee. I became radicalized and joined the group of antinuclear activists.
We realized all-out nuclear war would be the end of both civilization and the environment–hence the name we soon adopted, Greenpeace, as in “let it be a green peace.” We chartered an old fishing boat to sail to ground zero to focus public attention on the nuclear tests. We believed the revolution should be a celebration. We sang protest songs, drank beer, smoked pot, and had a generally good time—even while being tossed about on the notoriously dangerous waters of the North Pacific.
We survived that first voyage, but we never made it to the test site. The U.S. Coast Guard cut us off at Akutan Harbor and made us turn back. However, our mission was a success because our protest was reported in the media across North America. As a result, thousands of people from Canada and the U.S. marched on border crossings across the continent on the day of the H-bomb test and shut the crossings down. Soon after, President Nixon cancelled the remaining tests in that series. We could hardly believe what our ragtag band of peaceniks had accomplished in just a few short months. We realized that a few people could change the world if they just got up and did something.
It was the beginning of a very wild ride.
High on the victory of vanquishing a world sup
erpower, in early 1972 we repeated our “take it to ground zero” protests with France, which was still conducting atmospheric tests of atomic and hydrogen bombs on Mururoa, a small atoll in the South Pacific. France had refused to sign the 1963 treaty banning atmospheric testing signed by the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and the United States.
We found David McTaggart, a Canadian living in New Zealand who was willing to sail his small boat across the South Pacific, and the next protest was on. The first year the French Navy rammed a hole in the boat and forced it ashore. The second year they beat up our captain, an event secretly photographed by one of the crew. The beating catapulted the story to the front pages of French newspapers. Within the year France announced it would no longer conduct nuclear tests in the atmosphere.
In three years our little band of protesters had forced two superpowers to alter substantially their nuclear weapons testing programs. We proved again that a small group of dedicated people could effect real change at a global level. Nothing could stop us now.In 1975 we took on the challenge of saving the whales from extinction at the hands of huge factory whaling fleets. This campaign really put Greenpeace on the map and made us a worldwide icon. By the early 1980s we were confronting the annual slaughter of baby seals, opposing driftnet fisheries, protesting toxic waste dumping, blocking supertankers, and parachuting into nuclear reactor construction sites. Our campaigns were highly successful at changing opinions and energizing the public. Through the power of the media and the people, we were steadily influencing government policies and forcing industries to clean up their acts. We had achieved the support of the majority of people in the industrialized democracies.
By 1982 Greenpeace had grown into a full-fledged international movement with offices and staff around the world. We were bringing in $100 million a year in donations and half a dozen campaigns were occurring simultaneously.
During the early 1980s two things happened that altered my perspective on the direction in which environmentalism, in general, and Greenpeace, in particular, were heading. The first was my introduction to the concept of sustainable development at a global meeting of environmentalists. The second was the adoption of policies by my fellow Greenpeacers that I considered extremist and irrational. These two developments would set the stage for my transformation from a radical activist into a sensible environmentalist.
In 1982, the United Nations held a conference in Nairobi to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the first UN Environment Conference in Stockholm, which I had also attended. I was one of 85 environmental leaders from around the world who were invited to craft a statement of our collective goals for environmental protection. It quickly became apparent there were two nearly opposite perspectives in the room—the antidevelopment perspective of environmentalists from wealthy industrialized countries and the prodevelopment perspective of environmentalists from the poor developing countries.
As one developing country activist put it, taking a stand against development in his woefully poor country would get him laughed out of the room. It was hard to argue with his position. A well-fed person has many problems, a hungry person has but one. The same is true for development, or lack of it. We could see the tragic reality of poverty on the outskirts of our Kenyan host city. Those of us from industrialized countries recognized we had to be in favor of some kind of development, preferably the kind that didn’t ruin the environment in the process. Thus the concept of sustainable development was born.
This was when I first fully realized there was another step beyond pure environmental activism. The real challenge was to figure out how to take the environmental values we had helped create and weave them into the social and economic fabric of our culture. This had to be done in ways that didn’t undermine the economy and were socially acceptable. It was clearly a question of careful balance, not dogmatic adherence to a single principle.
I knew immediately that putting sustainable development into practice would be much more difficult than the protest campaigns we’d mounted over the past decade. It would require consensus and cooperation rather than confrontation and demonization. Greenpeace had no trouble with confrontation—hell, we’d made it an art form—but we had difficulty cooperating and making compromises. We were great at telling people what they should stop doing, but almost useless at helping people figure out what they should be doing instead.
It also seemed like the right time for me to make a change. I felt our primary task, raising mass public awareness of the importance of the environment, had been largely accomplished. By the early 1980s a majority of the public, at least in the Western democracies, agreed with us that the environment should be taken into account in all our activities. When most people agree with you it is probably time to stop beating them over the head and sit down with them to seek solutions to our environmental problems.
At the same time I chose to become less militant and more diplomatic, my Greenpeace colleagues became more extreme and intolerant of dissenting opinions from within.
In the early days we debated complex issues openly and often. It was a wonderful group to engage with in wide-ranging environmental policy discussions. The intellectual energy in the organization was infectious. We frequently disagreed about specific issues, yet our ultimate vision was largely shared. Importantly, we strove to be scientifically accurate. For years this had been the topic of many of our internal debates. I was the only Greenpeace activist with a PhD in ecology, and because I wouldn’t allow exaggeration beyond reason I quickly earned the nickname “Dr. Truth.” It wasn’t always meant as a compliment. Despite my efforts, the movement abandoned science and logic somewhere in the mid-1980s, just as society was adopting the more reasonable items on our environmental agenda.
Ironically, this retreat from science and logic was partly a response to society’s growing acceptance of environmental values. Some activists simply couldn’t make the transition from confrontation to consensus; it was as if they needed a common enemy. When a majority of people decide they agree with all your reasonable ideas the only way you can remain confrontational and antiestablishment is to adopt ever more extreme positions, eventually abandoning science and logic altogether in favor of zero-tolerance policies.
The collapse of world communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall during the 1980s added to the trend toward extremism. The Cold War was over and the peace movement was largely disbanded. The peace movement had been mainly Western-based and anti-American in its leanings. Many of its members moved into the environmental movement, bringing with them their neo-Marxist, far-left agendas. To a considerable extent the environmental movement was hijacked by political and social activists who learned to use green language to cloak agendas that had more to do with anticapitalism and antiglobalization than with science or ecology. I remember visiting our Toronto office in 1985 and being surprised at how many of the new recruits were sporting army fatigues and red berets in support of the Sandinistas.
I don’t blame them for seizing the opportunity. There was a lot of power in our movement and they saw how it could be turned to serve their agendas of revolutionary change and class struggle. But I differed with them because they were extremists who confused the issues and the public about the nature of our environment and our place in it. To this day they use the word industry as if it were a swear word. The same goes for multinational, chemical, genetic, corporate, globalization, and a host of other perfectly useful terms. Their propaganda campaign is aimed at promoting an ideology that I believe would be extremely damaging to both civilization and the environment.
Greenpeace had grown so large by the early 1980s that there was nothing one person could do to turn this tide. I put up a spirited debate on many issues at our council meetings, but when you are outvoted, that’s democracy for you. There were a number of issues that gradually made it clear to me I was not in line with the politically correct thinking of the day.
One of the earliest manifestations of the extremism that developed in Greenpeace was its cam
paign to ban the element chlorine worldwide. It began innocently enough with campaigns against 2,4,5-T and dioxin, both rather objectionable substances that deserve to be restricted unless they are absolutely necessary. Both these chemicals happen to contain chlorine, and it wasn’t long until this very important member of the periodic table of elements was dubbed the “devil’s element” by the majority of representatives in our governing assembly. Even though I suggested banning entire elements was probably outside our jurisdiction, the hard-liners won the day.
It didn’t matter that about 85 percent of our medicines are manufactured with chlorine chemistry, or that the addition of chlorine to drinking water represented the biggest advance in the history of public health. By 1991, four years after I left, Greenpeace had adopted a resolution calling for an end to “the use, export, and import of all organochlorines, elemental chlorine, and chlorinated oxidizing agents,” stating, “There are no uses of chlorine which we regard as safe.”[1] They might as well have called for a ban on living because it is not safe either. I knew I had made the right decision in parting ways, but it saddened me deeply that my Greenpeace had come to this. The “devil’s element” is in fact the most important of all the elements for public health and medicine. This didn’t matter to my colleagues, and for me it was proof enough that their fundamentalist position was antihuman in nature.
My growing interest in sustainable development had attracted me to aquaculture, the practice of farming the oceans rather than just hunting wild fish. Many fish stocks were badly overfished, and it was clear to me the best way to take the pressure off the wild stocks was to learn to farm them. We made this transition on the land 10,000 years ago with agriculture, and again with farming trees (silviculture) 250 years ago in Europe. I believed Greenpeace should adopt a policy of supporting sustainable aquaculture as a positive contribution to protecting the marine environment. Not only did this fall on deaf ears, a lot of my colleagues were actually hostile to the idea. I thought, If these people are against farming fish, what on earth are they in favor of?