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.