Founder of Greenpeace speaks out...

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http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.03/moore_pr.html

Eco-Traitor
Three decades ago, Patrick Moore helped found Greenpeace. Today he promotes nuclear energy and genetically modified foods - and swears he's still fighting to save the planet.

By Drake Bennett

Patrick Moore has been called a sellout, traitor, parasite, and prostitute - and that's by critics exercising self-restraint. It's not hard to see why they're angry. Moore helped found Greenpeace and devoted 15 years to waging the organization's flamboyant brand of environmental warfare. He campaigned against nuclear testing, whaling, seal hunting, pesticides, supertankers, uranium mining, and toxic waste dumping. As the nonprofit's scientific spokesperson, he was widely quoted and frequently photographed, often while being taken into custody.

Then, in 1986, the PhD ecologist abruptly turned his back on the environmental movement. He didn't just retire; he joined the other side. Today, he's a mouthpiece for some of the very interests Greenpeace was founded to counter, notably the timber and plastics industries. He argues that the Amazon rain forest is doing fine, that the Three Gorges Dam is the smartest thing China could do for its energy supply, and that opposition to genetically modified foods is tantamount to mass murder.

Moore's turnabout was the biggest change of heart since Harold "Kim" Philby left Her Majesty's secret service for the Soviet Union - or was it? Moore insists that he hasn't changed a bit. His professional life, he says, has been a single-minded quest for true ecological sustainability. To his opponents, however, it adds up to little more than an ideologically bankrupt series of betrayals.

Consider the public hearing held at Boston City Hall on October 23 last year. The matter at hand was a proposal to ban the purchase of polyvinyl chloride products using city funds. An impressive array of expert witnesses testified in favor of the resolution - an Environmental Protection Agency toxicologist, a Tufts University economist, a Boston Public Health Commission official, the head of purchasing for a cancer research center. The production and incineration of PVC products, they argued, releases chemicals known as dioxins, exposure to which can lead to endocrine disorders, cancer, diabetes, infant mortality, and cognitive and developmental problems in children.

Then Patrick Moore took the floor. "It's a good thing most of the people who got up here before me weren't under oath," he began. "There is not a public benefit to be derived from a ban on PVC." The whole issue is "based on bad science and misinformation."

First of all, Moore argued, total dioxin emissions have dropped 90 percent since 1970, to levels safely below those that cause health problems. Furthermore, dioxins are not some newfangled product of the industrial age. They've been around as long as fire. If the council wanted to make a real difference, he said, it could ban backyard burning, which spews nearly 60 times more dioxins than PVC manufacturing, or residential fireplaces, which emit 10 times more.

Throughout his presentation, Moore made barbed references to the devious forces behind the legislation, the same pack of Luddites who "hijacked a considerable portion of the environmental movement back in the mid-'80s and who have become very clever at using green language to cloak campaigns that have more to do with anti-industrialism, antiglobalization, anticorporate, all of those things which are basically political campaigns."

It was a bravura performance. When Moore returned to his seat, he was greeted with handshakes and backslaps from the folks who had paid his way: the Vinyl Institute.

For Moore, the PVC showdown was part of a larger crusade to reform environmentalism. He derides today's activists as philosophically unmoored and blindly technophobic, and he offers an alternative philosophy that not only accepts but celebrates humankind's growing ability to alter the planet. With a tip of the hat to best-selling "skeptical environmentalist" Bjørn Lomborg (and perhaps Thomas Paine), he has anointed himself the sensible environmentalist and set out to win converts. There haven't been many. So far, Moore has succeeded mostly in making himself a pariah and a cautionary tale.

Greenpeace was born in 1971 when an aging fishing boat steamed out of Vancouver, British Columbia, to disrupt an American nuclear test at the far end of the Aleutian Islands. Halfway there, the boat was intercepted by the US Coast Guard and the crew arrested. But the mission proved successful: The subsequent global show of support for the band of plucky environauts caused President Nixon to cancel the remaining tests. When the crew returned to shore, it adopted the name of the boat, Greenpeace, and turned its mediagenic activism into a global institution. By the mid-1980s, the organization had offices in 21 countries and an annual income of more than $100 million in donations and grants.

Patrick Moore was on board for that inaugural voyage, and he went on to serve as president of Greenpeace from 1977 to 1979 and as a member of the international board for seven years after that. He was a natural activist, impassioned and articulate, and his PhD from the University of British Columbia gave him a mantle of scientific legitimacy. Greenpeace veteran Rex Weyler recalls that "you could put Moore in front to talk to the media on scientific issues, and you could always rely on him. He'd get his facts straight, and he was tough as nails in any debate."

In his study in the neat, airy Vancouver home he shares with his wife, Moore keeps scrapbooks of his activist days. News clippings show him, with a cloud of tawny hair and a bandit's mustache, poring over nautical charts and shielding baby seals. Today the mustache is gone. The mane has receded to a mat of gray.

Moore won't have anything to do with Greenpeace these days, but he still gets a charge out of talking about the early campaigns. He shows me an aerial photo of a tiny raft floating in the way of a supertanker. The ship fills half the frame, like a snub-nosed sea monster. He and Weyler are on the raft, about to be arrested by the US Coast Guard. "Cool, eh?" he says with a hot-rodder's grin.

Moore was made-to-order for Greenpeace. He was raised in Winter Harbour, a village on the far northwestern tip of Vancouver Island. "It was like growing up in a dreamworld," he says. "My most memorable moments were in my boat with the motor turned off, floating over the shallow tide flats and looking down at all the marine life, or in the forest with the moss and the ferns." It's easy to see how that little wood sprite went on to study ecology and fashioned himself into an environmental shock trooper. Even today, Moore can sound druidic when talking about the natural world. He's a firm believer in James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, which posits that Earth is a self-regulating superorganism. He hates the word weed, he says, because "it's a value judgment about plants."

Moore's family made its living off the land. His father and grandfather were loggers, and his mother came from a clan of fishermen. Perhaps this explains why, despite his animist tendencies, his ecological attitudes are grounded in an obsessive rationalism. He's fascinated by nature's cycles, mechanisms, and systems, and he sees no reason to privilege natural systems over man-made ones.

When he was 8, one of his toys was a one-cylinder engine that he would take apart and reassemble. For his dissertation research, he built a transmissometer, a device that measures water quality. He's as likely to wax didactic about the minutiae of paper pulping ("There's more computer power in a paper mill than there is in a 747!") as about the life cycle of the moths in the eaves of his porch. Moore is equal parts tinkerer and mystic, and his environmental thinking may be an attempt to reconcile those two impulses.

Like many people who earn a living making speeches, Moore prefaces much of what he says with phrases like "my line on this is" and "as I like to put it." As he likes to put it, he left Greenpeace in 1986 because "I'd been against at least three or four things every day for 15 years, and I decided I'd like to be in favor of something for a change. Suddenly, presidents and prime ministers were talking about the environment. We had won society over to our way of looking at things. As I like to say, maybe it's time to figure out what the solutions are, rather than just focusing on problems."

Moore got a glimpse of how an environmentally responsible society might function four years earlier, at the 1982 Nairobi Conference of the United Nations Environmental Program. In a presentation given by Tom Burke, then leader of Friends of the Earth UK, he first heard a phrase that was an oxymoron by Greenpeace standards: sustainable development. It was several years before the idea gained wide currency, but for Moore, "The light went on."

"When I understood sustainable development," he recalls, "I realized that the challenge was to take these new environmental values that we had forged and incorporate them into the traditional social and economic values that drive public policy. In other words, it was a job of synthesis."

Moore's new interest in sustainable development led him increasingly far afield of the rest of the environmental movement and estranged him from the organization he had helped found. Inspired by Elizabeth Mann Borgese's book Seafarm, he started a salmon farm and became head of the fledgling Salmon Farmer's Association - only to find himself pitted against Greenpeace, which blamed saltwater aquaculture for polluting the ocean.

In 1991, as his farm was going under due to a salmon glut, he joined the board of the Forest Alliance of British Columbia, a group created by the timber industry to address the accusations of environmentalists. There, he saw his role as a mediator. He proudly points to his stubborn - and ultimately successful - insistence that the industry soften its resistance to national parks and government regulation. At the same time, however, he was attacking the eco crowd, proclaiming that "clear-cuts are temporary meadows."

Moore's enemies have a simpler explanation for his conversion: revenge. After all, he left Greenpeace amid complaints about an autocratic leadership style and abrasive personality. When it became obvious that he lacked enough votes to keep his seat on the board of directors, he went off to farm fish. When that didn't work out, he joined the loggers.

And then there's money. Even 18 years after he left Greenpeace, Moore's business relationships with polluters and clear-cutters elicit disgust from his erstwhile comrades. "He'll whore himself to anything to make a buck," says Paul George, founder of the Western Canada Wildlife Committee. In an email, former Greenpeace director Paul Watson charges, "You're a corporate whore, Pat, an eco-Judas, a lowlife bottom-sucking parasite who has grown rich from sacrificing environmentalist principles for plain old money."

Moore admits he's well paid for his speaking and consulting services. He won't say how well, avowing only that his environmental consultancy, Greenspirit Strategies, has been "very successful because we know what we're talking about and give good advice." Nonetheless, he adds, he refuses to tailor his opinions to please a client. "People don't pay me to say things they've written down or made up. They pay me to tell them what I think." Furthermore, he maintains that his positions - with the exception of his take on nuclear energy (which he now favors) - have hardly changed since 1971. The rest of the movement, he says, has shifted around him.

It's possible that fat fees or wounded feelings give Moore's vehemence an edge. And it's not inconceivable that he's an out-and-out mercenary. But although his critique of latter-day environmentalism strains in a few places, it does have a larger coherence. The unifying principle is simple: "There's no getting around the fact that 6 billion people wake up every morning with a real need for food, energy, and material." It is this fact, he charges, that environmentalists fail to grasp. "Their idea is that all human activity is negative, while trees are by nature good," he says. "That's a religious interpretation, not a scientific or logical interpretation."

Moore's accusation may read like a caricature, but its outlines are readily apparent in environmentalist thinking. Bill McKibben, one of the movement's preeminent intellectuals, warned in his 1989 book The End of Nature that human beings, not through any particular action but simply by becoming the dominant force on the planet, were destroying nature, a "separate and wild province, the world apart from man to which he adapted." In effect, McKibben's argument blurs the line between man changing the planet and destroying it.

Perhaps the best evidence of Moore's integrity is his enthusiasm for genetically modified foods. He's not on the payroll of any biotech companies, yet he has become an outspoken GM advocate.

"This is where the environmental movement is dangerous," he says. "Environmentalists are against golden rice, which could prevent half a million kids from going blind every year. Taking a daffodil gene and putting it into a rice plant: Is this Armageddon?"

Even if the benefits of golden rice have been oversold - something Moore doubts - the limitations of one particular and still-experimental crop shouldn't discredit the possibilities of the entire technology. For all GM's risks, he argues, there are greater risks in failing to develop it.

what a hypocrite

Sounds like he grew up.

he got common sense.............

Concur

He certainly did.

A lot of folks could do themselves a lot of good listening to what Mr. Moore has to say rather than wholly concentrating on who he works for.

Having said that, I'll point out that I'm a huge fan of the plastics industry. Try doing anything in construction or electronics today without modern plastics. Can you say - dirt hut?

__________________
-livin' in the terminally flippant zone

Try making a Toyota Prius without it, too.

Patrick Moore & I have had our differences over the years. If you subscribe to the forestry listserver, you could find our correspondence back in the 1990's.

He had no credibility with Greenpeace (Greenpeace hasn't stumbled into science since it's inception) and has no credibility today (again, ignoring scince that conflicts with his opinions).

His only reason for fame is a modest skill for polemical writing and as a has-been enviro who is now an industry shill.

Enjoy.

B

just looking at the opposing viewpoints vis a vis Greenpeace and Mr. Moore on things like: DDT, nuclear energy and Dioxin; I'm going with Mr. Moore every time.

__________________
-livin' in the terminally flippant zone

Opinions are like *********s, everybody has one.

Views and opposing views, if based on opinion, are identically valuable and thus, worth exactly that. Patrick Moore's opinions are not a basis for rational argument as they are not scientific in the sense of letting the facts drive the conclusions that he promotes.

I'm not saying he's wrong (necessarily), just that his acquaintance with science is casually one-sided.

Not unlike a prostitute.

B

I'm not listening to his opinion, I'm listening to his factual knowledge. With regard to DDT, dioxin and nuclear energy his opinion is more factually based than the opinion of Greenpeace. I agree, opinions are like *********s. Some smell more than others.

__________________
-livin' in the terminally flippant zone

Whatever.

If you wish to promote an idea by using a "personality", choose one who has credibility. It's EXACTLY equivalent of using Shawn Penn or some other high-profile, low-knowledge loser. F**k'em one and all.

B

I'm not promoting an idea by personality. In the above article, what Mr. Moore said regarding dioxin was factual. The flip side of the "promoting an idea via personality" coin is the "he doesn't know what he's talking about because he's an industry shill or got paid off by ______". It seems to be a broken record when anyone says something counter the feel-good environmental movement.

This is why I said his ideas are worth listening to. Rather than punt the person, punt his argument. If one is a shill, like Al Gore for example, his arguments are fairly easy to counter.

With regard to the article in the OP there is very little regarding actual fact (the stuff on dioxin and PVC) and more on fluff about Mr. Moore. It is, however, an illustrative look at emotional vs. intelligent thinking which is very pertinent in today's environmental movement.

__________________
-livin' in the terminally flippant zone

So he's realized he is really a capitalist looking at early retirement. I like him even more now