As to Big John’s apparent lack of understanding regarding the motivations of many who end up engaged in “environmental activism,” read on:
[quote]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.
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.”
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.”[/quote]
