"The sensible environmentalist"
Ryan Tubongbanua / The Collegian
Patrick Moore was a founding member of Greenpeace. Today he believes in a form of environmentalism that focuses more on science and technology.
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By Bradley Hart
and Rebecca Martin
The Collegian
Former Greenpeace founding member and environmental activist Patrick Moore told an audience of hundreds that the movement he helped create has resorted to scare tactics and extremism.
Patrick Moore came to Fresno State’s Satellite Student Union Tuesday night to discuss environmentalism and the wide-ranging history of the movement.
Despite his history with Greenpeace, Moore left the organization in 1986, in part to protest what he calls the “extremism” of the group beginning in that period.
Today Moore calls himself the “sensible environmentalist” and said he bases his ideas around science and logic rather than the “scare tactics” of the modern environmentalist movement.
In 1991 he founded a group called Greenspirit that advocates for his brand of environmentalism.
About Greenspirit
• Nuclear energy is a part of a sustainable energy mix, along with other renewables like wind and geothermal heat pumps.
• Greenspirit believes that wood is the most renewable and sustainable of all major building materials and wood has the least impact in terms of total energy use.
• Hemp is not a better subsititute for cutting trees to make paper. It is an exotic plant requiring more nutrients than other crops and heavy rotation.
• Environmentalism must be beyond nationalism, politics and ideology. |
Moore said the greatest problem facing environmentalism today is that it is framed as a far leftist movement. He attributed much of the current environmentalist movement’s ideas to an influx of neo-Marxists and anti-capitalist members in the years after the fall of the Soviet Union.
He said the positions of many within the movement serve to harm the real mission of environmentalists by marginalizing them politically.
“It’s anti-capitalism, anti-globalism. They never attract the middle ground,” Moore said.
Moore was born near Vancouver, British Columbia and became what he calls a “born again environmentalist” in the 1960s when he became one of the founding members of Greenpeace.
In 1971 he joined the group in protesting the testing of hydrogen bombs in Alaska and the South Pacific in addition to helping Greenpeace protestors place themselves between Russian whalers and their prey in the north Pacific.
Moore said groups like Greenpeace have largely abandoned logic and science in favor of zero-tolerance policies on environmental issues like genetically modified crops and salmon farming in the oceans.
One of the key issues in his decision to leave Greenpeace, Moore said, was the group’s resistance to fish farming, or aquaculture, in the world’s oceans.
“We’re against whaling, we’re against sealing, we’re against net fishing, we’re against net dragging, we’re against dang near every way people are getting food out of the ocean. How about if we’re in favor of sustainable aquaculture,” Moore said.
Another hot-button issue Moore touched on was global warming. While Moore said humans are most likely responsible for some increase in the earth’s temperature over recent decades, he cast doubt on the idea that the change is abnormal and irreversible.
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