John Elvin. Insight on the News. Volume 13, Issue 38, 20 October 1997.
When Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore walked away from the group 10-odd years ago, he believed he was wrapping up, not jumping ship. Now he’s enduring catcalls of ‘eco-Judas.’
The war, it seemed to me, was over.” With that thought in mind, self-described radical environmentalist Patrick Moore walked away from Greenpeace, the legendary headline-grabbing activist group he helped found in 1971. He had spent 15 years orchestrating daring stunts to save the whales and challenge nuclear testers. And there came a time, in the mid-1980s, when Moore began to believe that mainstream society had adopted most of the once-controversial goals of the environmental movement in which he believed. With a strong sense of major accomplishment, Moore retired from the fray to take up salmon farming in his native British Columbia.
It wasn’t long, Moore tells Insight, before “Greenpeace came out against salmon farming. That kind of blew my mind.” He listened to what they said found it an “absolutely ludicrous, anti-science campaign” and told his former colleagues so.
A third-generation forester with doctoral credentials, Moore next found himself in opposition to Greenpeace on forestry issues. He had moved beyond confrontation, coming to believe that concerned parties could achieve solutions through dialogue. Greenpeace did not and does not share that view. “They refused to join a community-based, consensus-approach, roundtable to seek solutions to land-use problems,” he says. Greenpeace preferred to stay outside that process because of what Moore sees as “a childish inability to grow and recognize the basic fact that there are very real social and economic needs that have to be met every day for 5.9 billion people.”
Having joined the Forest Alliance, an industry-backed group devoted to join “environmental protection and economic stability,” Moore now is accused by former Greenpeace colleagues of “schlepping for the stump-makers.” Because of Moore’s conclusion that solutions only can be reached through cooperation and collaboration between governments, corporations, public institutions and environmentalists, he has been labeled an eco-Judas. “They think I’m bad for helping the forest industry become more environmentally acceptable in the way it does things,” he says. “They can go jump in a lake.”
That would make quite a splash. Greenpeace has claimed a worldwide membership of 2.9 million. Actually, the group has been in decline for some years now, particularly in the United States. From a 1991 peak of 1.2 million members in the United States, membership now is around 400,000. With a peak annual budget of more than $100 million, the group now faces major budget cuts and office closings due to diminishing contributions.
As Moore sees it, the composition of Greenpeace has changed dramatically since his heyday. He says the fall of communism brought an influx of anti-corporate extremism to the environmental movement because, “suddenly, the international peace movement had a lot less to do. Pro-Soviet groups in the West were discredited. Many of their members moved into the environmental movement, bringing with them their eco-Marxism and pro-Sandinista sentiments.
“A lot of those in the peace movement were anti-American and, to an extent, pro-Soviet. By virtue of their anti-Americanism, they tended to sometimes favor the communist approach. A lot of those people, a lot of those social activists, moved into the environmental movement once the peace movement was no longer relevant.” Social activists, he suggests, “are now using the rhetoric of environmentalism to promote other collectivist agendas, such as class struggle—which I personally believe is a legitimate area, but I don’t believe it’s legitimate to mix it up with environmentalism.”
In addition to the activist influx, those who joined early on and remain in the group today have become more radicalized. Moore explains that as society adopted many of its original social and economic goals, the environmental movement “abandoned science and logic and moved to the left. Unfortunately, environmentalism is still defined by the media and by our culture as an adversarial role. If you want to remain in that adversarial role while society is adopting many of your more reasonable positions, you have to become more extreme in your positions.”
So members with a more radical mind-set ascended to power—”monkey-wrenchers, tree-spikers and boat-scuttlers,” he says, many sporting fatigue uniforms and red berets. Intolerance and extremism became the norms, the Greenpeace founder continues, and the organization adopted a policy of preaching “fear not fact.”
Moore’s moderate, centrist views soon found him branded a traitor. Well, he is certainly no traitor to his heritage and upbringing. He grew up in the logging business in the B.C. rainforest. Today, walking the land clear-cut by his grandfather, he finds trees that “are straight and tall … and … form a dense and growing cover on land once cleared bare.” He defends modern forestry in his best-selling book, Pacific Spirit, the Forest Reborn. (Readers with Internet access may review text and photos from the book at www.greenspirit.com).
While he travels extensively to preach eco-sanity, Moore definitely is most at home in British Columbia, particularly in its vast forests. Since the early 1970s, public sentiment favoring conservation and preservation has wrought great changes in the province, doubling the area devoted to parks and wilderness—now 7 million acres—and imposing strict codes for the logging industry that have driven up the cost of doing business by 75 percent. Not good enough, the radicals say, and they’ve turned to outsiders for support.
Among some 36 Hollywood celebrities supporting a boycott of B.C. forest products and signing on to an ad condemning the “chainsaw massacre” of forests in western Canada have been project leader Oliver Stone, Robert Redford, Tom Cruise, Penny Marshall and Barbra Streisand. “For them to come out against British Columbia’s most important and most renewable industry without ever having been here … it’s not quite right,” Moore says in one of his more low-key assessments of the interference.
It is indeed a new day in British Columbia. Environmental activists who were once cultural heroes now find themselves under arrest for guerrilla-warfare tactics such as blockading logging roads. Citizens invite them to go home—to the United States or Europe—sometimes rather forcefully. Their former American Indian allies have branded them “environmental colonialists.”
Activists seem stunned by the rejection. In a lengthy posting on the Internet, the Rainforest Action Network (a San Francisco-based activist group) goes on at length in uncomprehending shock over the removal of its trespassing troops from trees they had climbed to hamper logging-removal accomplished under the approving eyes of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. And, true to Moore’s observation that the extremists are becoming more extreme, the protesters blame their troubles not so much on loggers they want to put out of work but on alleged “white supremacists” they’ve found lurking in the B.C. backcountry.
The radicals argue that logging brings about deforestation with resultant climate change and extinction of species. “Some 50,000 species of plants and animals disappear from the planet each year,” said a wire-service story quoting officials of the World Wildlife Fund, or WWF. “Commercial loggers are mainly to blame,” the story said, again quoting the activists of the WWF. Moore has called on the WWF to back up its claims, “to name one species” that has become extinct due to logging. The group was unable to name a single extinct species; yet, since first appearing in the press in March 1996, the charge continues to surface without mention of Moore’s unmet challenge. The actual facts of the matter, according to Moore, are that UN studies show 95 percent of deforestation is due to agriculture and settlement, which “only makes sense as the whole purpose of forestry is to grow trees, i.e., to keep the land forested.”
Last April, Moore made a pilgrimage to Washington, largely ignored by the media, to appear before a House subcommittee on Forests and Forest Health to counter arguments from a Sierra Club official advocating an end to commercial logging on public lands. (While almost universally ignored, mention of his testimony did appear in one publication, Insight, in the Washington in Brief section.) The Sierra Club termed Moore’s testimony a “multimillion-dollar public-relations hoax.” Debbie Sease, the club’s legislative director, said, “The choice of this witness sends a signal that the industry recognizes that it faces a public-relations nightmare.”
Assuming a contrarian role, Insight pointed out to Moore that no less an eminence than Vice President Al Gore, in his environmental romance novel, Earth in the Balance, has told Americans that logging is part of “the war against nature” and, in further defense of trees, that “if they are cut and burned to the ground, the future of our own species is thereby endangered,” continuing: “Al Gore doesn’t understand the cause of deforestation, and the environmental movement doesn’t want it understood. Forestry almost is never responsible for deforestation because the aim is to reforest. Al Gore is in that school that has bought into the lie, perpetuated by the World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace, that logging is the main cause of deforestation and the main cause of environmental extinction. When you look at the facts, clearing for agriculture and towns plus exploitive non-commercial fuel gathering are the main causes. The environmental movement never, ever talks about that.”
It would be quite a misperception to say Moore has done a complete turnabout or thrown in with the modern robber barons. “I’m still an environmentalist,” he said recently. “It’s just that we have to move from the politics of confrontation to the politics of cooperation.”