• Other commercial uses of the forest must be protected and taken into account when planning logging operations. These values include tourism, livestock grazing, hunting, fishing, trapping, honey production, and berry, mushroom, and foliage picking.
Public Involvement and Recreation
• Local communities must be directly involved in decisions that affect their stability, employment, economic viability, and quality of life.
• Communities and individuals have a right to access information, to be involved in forest planning, and to monitor industrial performance.
• Forests should be managed with concern for recreational use by the public. This includes the appearance of roadsides and harvested areas and assistance in providing campsites, picnic areas, boat ramps, and trails.
• Visual impact should be taken into consideration when planning logging operations near communities, recreation areas, and along major travel corridors.
• Environmentally appropriate practices, such as recycling, waste oil recovery, solid waste reduction and management, energy efficiency, pollution control, the appearance of industrial sites, and a positive attitude toward environmental programs, must be incorporated in all forest industry operations.
Research and Monitoring
• Research and development programs must be undertaken to increase knowledge of forest management, to generate more value-added products, and to protect the environment.
• There must be an independent forest practices monitoring system that reports its findings to industry and the public.
The Principles of Sustainable Forestry were signed by 13 industry CEOs at a public media conference on February 28, 1992, in Vancouver. This represented well over 90 percent of the forest industry in B.C. Over the next five years a tremendous amount of work was done to bring the companies policies in line with the principles. Today all these points are virtually taken for granted and are considered standard operating procedure. The Forest Alliance taught me real progress could be made, and relatively quickly, when well-meaning people roll up their sleeves and work to get the job done. Just as we did to stop the hydrogen bomb tests in the early years of Greenpeace!
In 1991 I had been recruited into my first environmental consulting job by the architect and planner, Arnie Fullerton, who was working with the chemist Ron Woznow, who had recently been appointed head of the newly established BC Hazardous Waste Commission. Arnie and I were tasked with making recommendations for the collection of toxic wastes and the establishment of treatment facilities. The reaction from environmental groups, including Greenpeace, was that there shouldn’t be any toxic waste and therefore that it was not necessary to have treatment facilities and that if we did attempt to build any they would try to stop us. It was clear they weren’t seeking solutions and were determined to make it very difficult for anyone who was.
Around this time an old acquaintance of mine, businessman Ross McDonald, got in touch with me to talk about how he could become involved in environmental issues. He encouraged me to join him in forming a new initiative and asked me what an appropriate name for such a venture might be. I came up with Greenspirit in late 1991 and have operated under that banner ever since. The green allowed me to keep the green in Greenpeace, where I had campaigned for years, and the spirit had a double meaning: it reflects both the spiritual side of ecology—we’re all one—and the feeling of team spirit as in a sports contest. Ross and Arnie and I formed an informal partnership, rented office space in downtown Vancouver, and worked to find projects we could all be involved in. It never really gelled but we learned a lot from one another before gradually drifting our separate ways. But Greenspirit was born!
My work with the Forest Alliance was already under way and I was gaining other clients who were eager to join the movement for sustainability and corporate responsibility. I soon became the senior consultant and lead spokesperson for the Forest Alliance, reporting at first to Jack Munro and then to Tom Tevlin, who had been hired from Burson-Marsteller to be the executive director of the group. Tom and I have had a close professional relationship ever since. I reported to him as a consultant, and he reported to the Forest Alliance Board, of which I was the most active member. We developed a strong partnership during the 10 years of Forest Alliance work. Then in 2001, along with our colleague, Trevor Figueiredo, we incorporated Greenspirit Strategies Ltd. to offer advice to government and industry on the wide range of issues encompassed by environment and sustainability. We leased an office in the old warehouse district of Yaletown in downtown Vancouver, and continue working there today.
In the autumn of 1992, the World Wildlife Fund published a thick document titled “Forests in Trouble,” which gave its view of the “crisis” facing the world’s forests.[4] It contained a section on Canada, which was entirely about British Columbia and which repeated many of the false claims being spread by the anti-forestry campaign. This was at the height of the effort by activists to orchestrate a boycott of B.C. forest products in Europe, a boycott focused largely in Germany and the U.K. It appeared the report’s author, Nigel Dudley, had simply interviewed the anti-forestry folks in B.C. and had neglected to check any of his “facts” with the relevant government agencies or with the industry associations. For example, the paper claimed the rate of timber harvesting was increasing when, in fact, it had been falling for the past three years and everyone knew it would continue to fall. The report stated all the old-growth forest would be gone in 15 years. That was nearly 20 years ago and there are nearly 100 million acres of original forest remaining in the province today.
We made a public fuss about the sloppy nature of the report, which was all the more damaging because it had been published by the well-respected WWF. They responded by offering us a meeting with the head of their Canadian organization, Monte Hummel, with whom I had become acquainted during the Greenpeace campaign against trophy hunting. I attended along with Jack Munro and Tom Tevlin for the Forest Alliance; WWF was represented by Monte and his chairman, Adam Zimmerman, then president of Noranda, one of Canada’s largest companies and the majority owner of MacMillan Bloedel, B.C.’s largest forest company. The meeting began cordially but soon turned sour as we presented our complaints, about 40 of them, set out clearly in point form. I guess the old Greenpeace campaigner came out in me, as I was more aggressive than diplomacy of this nature called for. Monte became offended and at the end of the meeting, when I offered to buy him a beer, he said that would be a cold day in hell. The meeting broke up and the Forest Alliance contingent invited Adam Zimmerman, a long-time friend of Jack Munro, for a beer and debriefing in the hotel lounge.
Realizing this was a somewhat historic occasion I phoned my old pal Bob Hunter to see if he could join us. Adam Zimmerman, now retired, is one of those rare examples of a senior corporate executive who is also a genuine intellectual. He wrote about sustainable development and how it applied to resource industries like forestry long before it became fashionable for companies to issue annual Sustainability Reports. And Jack Munro, more labor populist than intellectual, is equally comfortable with his Harley Davidson–riding crowd and sipping tea with the Queen of England. Bob Hunter arrived to see his old Greenpeace buddy Pat sitting with the president of the biggest forest company in the country and the former head of the largest forest worker’s union in North America. I didn’t realize it at the time as the conversation was quite good-humored, but Bob went away from the gathering convinced that I had sold my soul to the devil. He promptly commenced writing a six-part series in the North Shore News, a local Vancouver weekly paper in which Bob had maintained a regular column during the years since he left Vancouver for Toronto. It was a scathing personal attack and there was no one in our circles who didn’t read every installment.
Bob reflected the mood of the environmental movement and much of the public at the time: the forest industry represented all that was evil in the corporate world. Rape, pillage, plunder, devastation, loss of virginity and innocence—these words w
ere all used to denounce the tree-cutters and the providers of wood and paper. It was in these columns that I was described as an “eco-Judas.” In his inimitable talent for coming up with clever phrases Bob accused me of “schlepping for the stumpmakers.” In the aftermath about half my friends disowned me, buying into Bob’s claim that I was a sellout and a traitor to the cause. It’s amazing how fickle some friends are. While I spent 15 years on the frontlines of the movement living on a subsistence income, some of my doctor and lawyer friends were bringing in six figures, cheering me on all the way. They were generous with their time, volunteering on many occasions. But they didn’t dedicate the best years of their lives to the movement. Many of them fit the description “millionaire socialists” as they were all for the underdogs in society, even though they were decidedly not among them. Our lawyer friend, the late David Gibbons, denounced me as a “quisling,” not a nice thing to call a guy.
In retrospect I believe they were upset because I was no longer serving their ideological ambitions, no longer living out their fantasy of how to save the planet. How dare I decide to carve out a future focused on how I see the world rather than doing their bidding for the rest of my life?
It’s funny how a single event can shape the rest of your life. I had thought my discovering the science of ecology and then my conversion to sustainable development had been the major turning points in my personal evolution. But it was the trial-by-fire of public humiliation that really made me take a stand for what I believed in. I didn’t care how many insults were hurled my way; I knew sustainable forestry was not only possible but also essential to balancing the needs of civilization with the protection of the environment. I realized it was my old friend Bob and many other good and not-so-good friends who were barking up the wrong tree. But in this case their bark took a real bite out of my reputation. I entered a period of wholesale shunning by the environmental community and its friends in the media.
Shortly before he died, Bob Hunter offered me a prolific apology over a few glasses of wine in my kitchen in Vancouver. This was witnessed by my wife, Eileen, and by my eco-warrior buddy, Rex Weyler. Bob realized that he had made the mistake of attacking the person rather than debating the issue. My rule–put family and friends above politics.
None of this daunted me. I was determined to do what I knew was right. I really had no choice. I either caved in to people who I did not agree with or I followed my conscience. I knew it would be a long struggle because so many environmentalists, and so many people who lived in cities, had already made up their minds on the subject. Indeed nearly 10 years would pass before I could claim to be vindicated in my beliefs. During those 10 years, from the early 1990s to the early 2000s, I endured attack after attack, usually in the form of name-calling. The media made a willing conduit for this style of assault, repeating the “eco-Judas” slur time after time. If I thought I had developed a thick skin during my time with Greenpeace, that was nothing compared to the hide I developed during these years. It culminated in 1996 with the launch of the “Patrick Moore is a Big Fat Liar” website by the Forest Action Network, a band of anti-forestry campaigners who thought nothing of using misinformation and distortion to further their cause. They published what they claimed to be my “Ten Top Lies.” Realizing it is possible to get away with saying nearly anything on the Internet, I seriously considered suing for libel but then, instead, published “Patrick Moore is Not a Big Fat Liar” on my own website.[5] Over the years people who read the material on both websites get a pretty good idea of my position. So in a way the name-callers did me a favor. It’s always gratifying when you can use your critics words to your own advantage.
In retrospect the anti-forestry campaign was the beginning of a trend in the environmental movement that targets the people who produce the material, food, and energy for all of us. This pits the vast number of people who live in urban environments against the very people who work hard in the country to provide the essentials of civilized life. It is a modern version of Aesop’s Fable “The City Mouse and the Country Mouse,” only today the city mice are in a huge majority and control the major media outlets. They can usually drown out the protestations of loggers, farmers, miners, energy producers, and fisher folk. They bite the hand that feeds them. It is time to change that pattern and to give the people who do the hard work in the hot sun and driving rain their due.
On a dark and rainy morning in December 1992, Eileen and I were awakened by a crashing sound outside our front door. Upon going downstairs to investigate Eileen hollered up that I had better come down and take a look. Someone had dumped eight giant garbage bags of horse manure on our front porch and steps. A note was left with “Tree Killer” scribbled on it. It wasn’t a pretty sight or smell.
Eileen did not want the embarrassment of our neighbors noticing 400 pounds of horse crap on our porch. I quickly dressed and went out into the torrential downpour, grabbed a shovel and the wheelbarrow, and spread all the manure over our front and back flower beds before daylight. The next spring and summer our garden was more beautiful with blooms than it had ever been. Embarrassment was avoided, and talk about making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear!
In 1995, nearly 10 years after I left Greenpeace, an event occurred that made it even clearer I had made the right choice in leaving the group. Shell Oil was granted permission by the British environment ministry to dispose of the North Sea oil storage platform, Brent Spar, in deep water in the North Atlantic Ocean. Greenpeace immediately accused Shell of using the sea as a “dustbin.” Greenpeace campaigners maintained that there were hundreds of tonnes of petroleum wastes on board the Brent Spar and that some of these were radioactive. They organized a consumer boycott of Shell and the company’s service stations were fire-bombed in Germany. The boycott cost the company millions in sales. Then German chancellor Helmut Kohl denounced the British government’s decision to allow the dumping. Caught completely off guard, Shell ordered the tug that was already towing the rig to its burial site to turn back. They then announced they had abandoned the plan for deep-sea disposal. This embarrassed Britain’s prime minister, John Major.
An independent investigation subsequently revealed that the rig had been properly cleaned and did not contain the toxic or radioactive waste Greenpeace claimed it did. Greenpeace wrote to Shell apologizing for the factual error. But the group did not change its position on deep-sea disposal despite the fact that on-land disposal would cause far greater environmental impact.
During all the public outrage directed against Shell for daring to sink a large piece of steel and concrete, it was never noted that Greenpeace had purposely sunk its own ship off the coast of New Zealand in 1986. When the French government bombed and sank the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour in 1985, the vessel was permanently disabled. It was later refloated, patched up, cleaned, and towed to a marine park, where it was sunk in shallow water as a dive site. Greenpeace said the ship would be an artificial reef and would support increased marine life.
The Brent Spar and the Rainbow Warrior are in no way fundamentally different from each other. The sinking of the Brent Spar could also be rationalized as providing habitat for marine creatures. It’s just that the public relations people at Shell were not as clever as those at Greenpeace. And in this case Greenpeace got away with using misinformation even though it had to admit its error after the fact. After spending tens of millions of dollars on studies, Shell announced that it had abandoned any plan for deep-sea disposal and supported a proposal to reuse the rig as pylons in a dock extension project in Norway. Tens of millions of dollars and much precious time wasted over an issue that had nothing to do with the environment and everything to do with misinformation, misguided priorities, and fundraising hysteria.
To make matters worse, in 1998 Greenpeace successfully campaigned for a ban on all marine disposal of disused oil installations. This will result in hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars, in unnecessary costs. Many of these rigs and their components cannot be recyc
led in a cost-effective manner. One obvious solution would be to designate an area in the North Sea, away from shipping lanes, for the creation of a large artificial reef and to sink obsolete oil rigs there after cleaning them. This would provide a breeding area for fish and other marine life, enhancing the biological and economic productivity of the sea. But Greenpeace isn’t looking for solutions, only conflicts and bad guys.
[1]. Roger Fisher and William Ury, Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In (New York: Penguin Books, 1983).
[2]. Patrick Moore, “From Confrontation to Consensus,” April 1998, http://www.greenspirit.com/key_issues.cfm?msid=32
[3]. Patrick Moore, “Are All Carbon Atoms Created Equal?” October 19, 1991,
http://www.beattystreetpublishing.com/confessions/references/are-carbon-atoms-equal
[4]. Nigel Dudley, “Forests in Trouble: A Review of the Status of Temperate Forests Worldwide,” WWF International, September 2002, http://www.equilibriumresearch.com/upload/document/forestsintroubleexsum.pdf
[5]. Patrick Moore, “Patrick Moore is Not a Big Fat Liar,” 1996, http://www.greenspirit.com/logbook.cfm?msid=44
Chapter 14 -
Trees Are The Answer
You may ask, If trees are the answer, then what is the question? I believe trees are the answer to many questions about the future of human civilization and the preservation of the environment. Questions like, “What is the most environmentally friendly material for home construction?” “How can we pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and how can we offset the greenhouse gas emissions caused by our excessive use of fossil fuels?” “How can we build healthy soils and keep our air and water clean?” “How can we provide more habitat for wildlife and biodiversity?” “How can we increase literacy and provide sanitary tissue products in developing countries?” “How can we make this earth more green and beautiful?” The answer to all these questions and more is “trees.” From the most practical question of what to build a house with to the most aesthetic issue of how to make the world prettier, trees provide an obvious solution. In other words I am a tree-hugging, tree-planting, tree-cutting fanatic. Trees show us there can be more than one answer to a question, and sometimes the answers seem to contradict one another. But I hope to demonstrate that just because we love trees and recognize their environmental value doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use them for our own needs.
Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist Page 25