Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist

by Patrick Moore

  But the challenge is growing. The world’s population is predicted to grow from 6.8 billion people in 2010 to 9.5 billion people sometime around the year 2050. Thankfully, population growth is already slowing, adding fewer people each year since 1997. Demographers expect the population will begin to decline slowly after we reach a peak of 9.5 billion. In addition to the sheer growth in numbers, in 2050 a larger percentage of the population (most, I hope) will be able to afford to be well fed, have access to medical care, own refrigerators, air conditioners, televisions, and will be able to afford to care about the environment more than they do today. This means instead of two billion people living modern lifestyles, there will be four to six billion, or two to three times more than today.

  In a nutshell, this will double or perhaps triple the world’s demand for food, minerals, forest products, and energy. That is the crux of the environmental challenge we face today: how do we double or triple food and energy production without fouling our garden and without converting the entire planet into food and fuel factories? How can wild nature survive in such a future?

  There is no shortage of answers to this challenge. Sticking to the topic of energy and climate change, we’re told to conserve energy, use more hydroelectric power, use more geothermal, use more wind, use more biofuels, use more solar, use tidal, use more nuclear, or simply increase fossil fuel consumption because man-made global warming is just a hoax anyway. All of these points of view may have a kernel of truth, but all are oversimplified prescriptions to very complex issues.

  Today we face a wide divergence of opinions about whether or not the climate is warming, whether or not we are the primary culprit if it is warming, whether or not this will be good or bad, and what to do about it.

  I do not deny that the climate has warmed; it has been doing so for more than 18,000 years—since the end of the last major glaciation, well before humans increased the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. And I do not deny that we are part of the cause of the recent rise in carbon dioxide levels in the global atmosphere, primarily because we burn huge quantities of fossil fuels. I don’t even deny we may be responsible for some of the present warming, but I do not believe we can be certain of this.

  I know I’ve begun with some very large topics that require much more discussion. That will come later in the book. But for now my purpose is to demonstrate, by way of the climate change/energy issue, the divergence of opinion that forced me to make my own way in the environmental debate. I couldn’t belong to an organization, or a movement, that demanded strict adherence to policies I thought deserved more debate, especially when there were logically inconsistent and contradictory positions taken on related issues. When environmentalism becomes an ideology or a religion, I’m out the door because I believe in continued open discussion of complex scientific issues about the future of civilization and the global environment. Simplistic, zero-tolerance, black-and-white positions are the enemy of sensible environmentalism. I believe in a more reasonable approach that provides practical solutions to real problems.

  No doubt some of you are already groaning, while I hope others are cheering. My primary purpose is to stimulate thought and debate about some of the more interesting and important issues of our time. Of course for now my mind is made up about some of them, but I’d like to think I am open to new information and fresh arguments. That’s all I ask of the reader, to bear with me through the story of my 40 years as an ecologist and environmental activist. During those years I’ve developed a vision for environmentalism in the 21st century. Allow me to share that vision with you.

  [1]. Robert Kennedy Jr., Facebook, April 27, 2005, http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2204512237

  [2]. Editorial, “Kennedy Picks the Wrong Side,” New Bedford Standard-Times, August 21, 2005, http://archive.southcoasttoday.com/daily/08-05/08-21-05/kennedy.htm

  [3]. BBC News, “Greenpeace Opposes Wind Farm Plan,” April 6, 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/4415787.stm

  [4]. Michael Crichton, “Remarks to the Commonwealth Club,” San Francisco, September 15, 2003, http://www.monsanto.co.uk/news/ukshowlib.phtml?uid=7662

  [5]. “The Current Mass Extinction,” http://www.well.com/~davidu/extinction.html

  [6]. Robert Kennedy Jr., April 27, 2005, http://climatequotes.com/celebrities/robert-f-kennedy-jr/

  Chapter 3 -

  Beginnings

  My life began in the tiny fishing and logging village of Winter Harbour on the northwest tip of Vancouver Island, in the rain forest by the Pacific. My mother and father were the children of true pioneers, who had come to this remote place and learned to make a living from a tough wilderness. I grew up thinking 150 inches of rain a year was normal and that the ultimate freedom was a 12-foot wooden skiff with a two-horsepower outboard motor. There was no road to—or even in—Winter Harbour. I commuted with a few other children on my dad’s small wooden tugboat to a one-room schoolhouse two miles away. It was a peaceful childhood, playing on the tide flats by the salmon-spawning streams in the rain forest.

  The original Kwakiutl inhabitants of Winter Harbour called their village Cliena. They had survived by the beach for thousands of years on the abundant salmon, clams, and berries, and built their houses of cedar planks taken from the forest behind them. Over the years the people of Cliena were decimated by measles, smallpox, and other diseases introduced by early European settlers. (Many other aboriginal communities met a similar fate.) The village site had long been abandoned by the time my grandfather established his float camp in Winter Harbour in 1936, the few native survivors having relocated to the nearby community of Quatsino. I was born into this far-flung floating village on June 15, 1947.

  The floating logging camp I was born into in Winter Harbour had about 50 residents. The family houses are on the right and the single men’s cabins are on the left. This photo was taken in 1951.

  The logging camp where I grew up was on floats made of old-growth trees cut along the shoreline. There were a dozen bunkhouses for the single men, a cookhouse, blacksmith shop, office, movie hall, and a half-dozen family houses. The fishing was best behind the cookhouse, where the flunky (the cook’s assistant) threw the food scraps into the ocean (the “salt chuck” to us). Mothers worried their children would fall into the salt chuck and drown. A bulky kapok life jacket was mandatory dress outside the house. My first brush with death came at age four when I fell between two float-logs and became stuck facedown in the water between them. Luckily one of the loggers found me before I drowned.

  There were no frills in the life of a West Coast logger in those early years. Four men bunked in each 12-by-24-foot shack, one to a corner, with a 45-gallon oil drum woodstove in the center, where rain soaked clothes were hung to dry. They worked six or seven days a week, getting up in the dark, working in the rain and wrestling in the mud to fix broken machinery. It was hard, relentless work, falling the huge trees, winching them down the mountain to the sea, where they could be boomed to the mill, all the while staying alert to avoid being slashed by a snapping cable or crushed by a run-away log. When the loggers were not working, there was nothing much to do back at the bunkhouse but play cards or listen to the radio. It was a lonely and sometimes miserable existence.

  The float camp was moved ashore in 1954. This white house by the large spruce tree was my home until I was 14.

  The early float camp era was ending during my boyhood. As the merchantable trees along the water’s edge had all been harvested, myfather, Bill Moore, obtained a lease in 1954 from the Kwakiutl to establish a permanent community on the original native village site. Roads were built to access timber farther up the valleys. Diesel-powered engines had replaced steam engines some years before, but it was the introduction of the motorized chainsaw, which replaced double-bitted axes and crosscut handsaws, that revolutionized logging. Productivity increased dramatically with this improvement in technology. Loggers and their families shared in the postwar boom in material culture and working-class affluenc
e. It was a wonderful time to live in the rain forest.

  I didn’t know I lived in a rain forest; to us it was simply “the woods” and it rained a lot. When it rained for 30 days straight, we began to miss the sun. My playground and backyard was a recent clearcut across the road from our house. We didn’t call it a clearcut because the word wasn’t known; it was simply an opening or the “slash.” The slash was a better place to play than the deep dark of the old-growth forest surrounding us. It was brighter and when the sun shone it was warmer and drier. The only other places where the sun came out were down on the dock and on the tide flats. In the clearing you could sit on a stump in the sun and all summer long the berries grew: first the salmonberries, then thimbleberries, then huckleberries, and finally the salal berries. They were all deliciously different and we shared them with birds, deer, and bears. As time went on, new trees came up and added year-round green to the logged area. The hemlocks, cedars, and firs that competed for sunlight eventually crowded out the berry bushes. It was time to move on and to play in a more recent clearcut. From this experience I developed a very different impression of logging than one might gain from the popular press today.

  My dad, Bill Moore, worked alongside the other loggers six days a week, spending evenings and Sunday afternoon in the office tending to company affairs.

  Today I can walk through forests where my grandfather clearcut logged 60 and 70 years ago, and if it weren’t for the presence of rotting, moss-covered stumps, you would never know the forests had once been cleared. The new forest is so lush and full of shrubs and ferns that all evidence of disturbance has disappeared. Bears, wolves, cougars, ravens, owls, eagles, and all the other forest-dwellers live there. The trees are straight and tall. Although they have not yet reached the great size of their predecessors, they form a dense and growing cover on land once cleared bare. The marvel of this renewal is that it took place entirely on its own, without the slightest help from human hands. There had been no thought given to reforestation or any other aspect of restoration.Nature has regenerated almost in spite of human disturbance and is rapidly returning to itsoriginal condition.

  My dad was a big man who had inherited the logging camp at age 21 when his father, Albert, passed away. It was the beginning of World War II, the business was $40,000 in debt, a large sum at the time, and there were 60 grizzled loggers, all older than he was, and he had to be the boss. Dad worked day and night for 20 years before he could see any light at the end of the tunnel. In the woods dad could curse a blue streak while lines snapped and machines broke down. At home he was a well-read family man, who, although stern at times, would joke and play with us during his few hours away from work. He taught me about leadership and the fact that someone must take responsibility for making decisions, at home, in the workplace, and in government. He had a small business but he loomed large in his industry, becoming president of two industry associations, the BC Truckloggers Association and the Pacific Logging Congress. He cared about working people; he founded and chaired a number of initiatives in forestry education, worker safety, and loggers’ sports. The saddest thing I’ve ever seen was his 10-year battle with Alzheimer’s as it brought a proud man to his knees.

  While dad taught me leadership, my mom, Beverly, taught me how to think. Also well read, she was the daughter of a hard-working West Coast salmon fishing family that struggled through the Great Depression. My granddad, Art, and his three brothers had pioneered the salmon fishing industry in Winter Harbour in the late 1930s. They were involved in the creation of the Kyuquot Fisherman’s Co-op, an effort to get out from under the yoke of the big fish buyers who paid next to nothing for their hard labor. He and Granny Mary were Socialists of a peaceful nature. But like their Russian comrades they were atheists and rejected capitalism. This philosophy strongly influenced Mom, although her education and love of knowledge tempered her political fervor.

  My mom, Beverly, and my dad, Bill, about to go to “town” on a float plane, circa 1960. Our little village by the sea is in the background, the camp cookhouse is above.

  When I was 15 Mom introduced me to the great British philosopher, Bertrand Russell. While I found the first book she recommended, Why I Am Not a Christian, interesting, it was his writing in the social and scientific fields that really turned me on. I raced through Authority and the Individual, a treatise on the conflict between our rights as individuals and our obligations to the greater good of society. Then I discovered Our Knowledge of the External World and Inquiry into Meaning and Truth.I was fascinated by Russell’s grasp of the scientific method but even more impressed with his critical thinking. Thus began my lifelong pursuit of knowledge in the sciences and my near obsession with thinking critically as a way of separating facts and logic from misinformationand propaganda.

  In an era when classroom sex education didn’t exist Mom taught me about the birds and the bees in a nice way. No doubt she was a big part of the reason there were no unwanted pregnancies in my younger years.

  Around the same time I was sent off to boarding school in Vancouver, at age 14, the road came to Winter Harbour, 250 miles of bad gravel from the nearest pavement at Campbell River. We thought the road would bring new settlers to the village. Instead, it prompted an exodus. Today there are 11 full-time residents in my hometown, there were 75 before the road came in. I love it there.

  My four years at St. George’s private school in Vancouver were formative in a number of ways. I excelled in the arts and sciences and I made friends who I count as my best friends today. I found out I disliked contact sports, English rugby being the school’s idea of how real men were made. Give me tennis or skiing over sports that require extreme body contact. So I failed as a jock even though I admired my fellow students who thought nothing of risking life and limb to get a ball across the line.

  After graduating from St. George’s I enrolled in the Faculty of Science at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver in 1965, and soon developed a passion for the life sciences. During those years I really came to appreciate my home village in the wilderness. I had always been mechanically inclined: I was monkey-wrenching engines by the time I was eight and I built my first 12-foot plywood boat when I was 13. I imagined I would become an engineer or architect. Auspiciously, in retrospect, I nearly failed my first year at university after being at the top of my class throughout high school. It was a simple case of going a little wild after the imposed discipline of an English-style boarding school, but it meant I didn’t qualify to enter the School of Engineering. Oscar Sziklai, a forestry professor-friend of my dad’s, encouraged me to apply to the School of Forestry. Soon after I began to study trees and forests I realized I was even more fascinated by biology than by engineering or mechanics.

  After excelling in first-year forestry I was given the opportunity to fashion my own program, a combined honors degree in forestry and biology. This allowed me to study a broad range of life-science subjects: genetics, biochemistry, soil science, plant physiology, and forest science. Then I discovered ecology, the study of how all living things are interrelated, and how we are related to them. Having grown up in an agnostic household I had always viewed science as a purely technical subject, the objective of which was to dispel mystery rather than to foster it. Now I saw that through the science of ecology one could come to appreciate the infinitely complex nature of the universe and gain an insight into the mystery of life. I realized the feeling of tranquility and wonder I had experienced as a child in the rain forest was a kind of prayer or meditation. Ecology gave me a sort of religion, and with it the passion to take on the world. I became a born-again ecologist.

  Upon graduating with honors I was awarded a Ford Foundation Fellowship to enroll in a PhD program at the university of my choice. I picked Washington University in St. Louis, where Dr. David Gates, a leader in research on photosynthesis and food chain energetics, agreed to head my thesis committee. In June of 1969 I drove from Vancouver to St. Louis in my Volkswagen camper microbus, sporting a pre
tty big Afro, to discover America for the first time. The campus was beautiful but the city center had been burned to the ground the previous summer during the riots following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. A nearby river was so polluted it would regularly catch on fire. It was the height of the Vietnam War and even grad students were being drafted. Fear and loathing darkened the beauty of the campus... I felt like Bilbo the Hobbit witnessing Mordor for the first time. It was certainly no place for a country kid from Canada to study ecology.

  So I traveled on through the South and east to Key West, Florida, and back across Texas to California, where I visited the University of California at Davis, known for excellence in agriculture and ecology. There was no burned-out city there, but the dread of being drafted into an unpopular war was the same as in St Louis. I couldn’t fathom the idea of being among fellow students who lived in fear every day. I turned tail and headed back to my peaceful home in Western Canada, where I convinced my professors to let me do my PhD at the University of British Columbia.

  I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was part of what became known as the “reverse brain drain.” The brain drain referred to the fact that many young Canadians, after benefiting from publicly funded educations, chose to move to the United States where salaries were higher and taxes lower. For a period of a few years during the Vietnam War this trend reversed as Canadians chose to stay home and many of the brightest Americans came to Canada to avoid the war.

  One of my mentors was C.S. (Buzz) Holling, a pioneer in computer modeling of insect population dynamics. He agreed to let me do an interdisciplinary PhD in ecology and environmental science, which allowed me to take courses in any faculty. I studied environmental law, environmental economics, forest ecology, oceanography, marine biology, mineral engineering, and soil science, among other subjects.