Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist (2 page)

This was when I first fully realized there was another step beyond pure environmental activism. The real challenge was to figure out how to take the environmental values we had helped create and weave them into the social and economic fabric of our culture. This had to be done in ways that didn’t undermine the economy and were socially acceptable. It was clearly a question of careful balance, not dogmatic adherence to a single principle.

I knew immediately that putting sustainable development into practice would be much more difficult than the protest campaigns we’d mounted over the past decade. It would require consensus and cooperation rather than confrontation and demonization. Greenpeace had no trouble with confrontation—hell, we’d made it an art form—but we had difficulty cooperating and making compromises. We were great at telling people what they should stop doing, but almost useless at helping people figure out what they should be doing instead.

It also seemed like the right time for me to make a change. I felt our primary task, raising mass public awareness of the importance of the environment, had been largely accomplished. By the early 1980s a majority of the public, at least in the Western democracies, agreed with us that the environment should be taken into account in all our activities. When most people agree with you it is probably time to stop beating them over the head and sit down with them to seek solutions to our environmental problems.

At the same time I chose to become less militant and more diplomatic, my Greenpeace colleagues became more extreme and intolerant of dissenting opinions from within.

In the early days we debated complex issues openly and often. It was a wonderful group to engage with in wide-ranging environmental policy discussions. The intellectual energy in the organization was infectious. We frequently disagreed about specific issues, yet our ultimate vision was largely shared. Importantly, we strove to be scientifically accurate. For years this had been the topic of many of our internal debates. I was the only Greenpeace activist with a PhD in ecology, and because I wouldn’t allow exaggeration beyond reason I quickly earned the nickname “Dr. Truth.” It wasn’t always meant as a compliment. Despite my efforts, the movement abandoned science and logic somewhere in the mid-1980s, just as society was adopting the more reasonable items on our environmental agenda.

Ironically, this retreat from science and logic was partly a response to society’s growing acceptance of environmental values. Some activists simply couldn’t make the transition from confrontation to consensus; it was as if they needed a common enemy. When a majority of people decide they agree with all your reasonable ideas the only way you can remain confrontational and antiestablishment is to adopt ever more extreme positions, eventually abandoning science and logic altogether in favor of zero-tolerance policies.

The collapse of world communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall during the 1980s added to the trend toward extremism. The Cold War was over and the peace movement was largely disbanded. The peace movement had been mainly Western-based and anti-American in its leanings. Many of its members moved into the environmental movement, bringing with them their neo-Marxist, far-left agendas. To a considerable extent the environmental movement was hijacked by political and social activists who learned to use green language to cloak agendas that had more to do with anticapitalism and antiglobalization than with science or ecology. I remember visiting our Toronto office in 1985 and being surprised at how many of the new recruits were sporting army fatigues and red berets in support of the Sandinistas.

I don’t blame them for seizing the opportunity. There was a lot of power in our movement and they saw how it could be turned to serve their agendas of revolutionary change and class struggle. But I differed with them because they were extremists who confused the issues and the public about the nature of our environment and our place in it. To this day they use the word
industry
as if it were a swear word. The same goes for
multinational, chemical, genetic, corporate, globalization,
and a host of other perfectly useful terms. Their propaganda campaign is aimed at promoting an ideology that I believe would be extremely damaging to both civilization and the environment.

Greenpeace had grown so large by the early 1980s that there was nothing one person could do to turn this tide. I put up a spirited debate on many issues at our council meetings, but when you are outvoted, that’s democracy for you. There were a number of issues that gradually made it clear to me I was not in line with the politically correct thinking of the day.

One of the earliest manifestations of the extremism that developed in Greenpeace was its campaign to ban the element chlorine worldwide. It began innocently enough with campaigns against 2,4,5-T and dioxin, both rather objectionable substances that deserve to be restricted unless they are absolutely necessary. Both these chemicals happen to contain chlorine, and it wasn’t long until this very important member of the periodic table of elements was dubbed the “devil’s element” by the majority of representatives in our governing assembly. Even though I suggested banning entire elements was probably outside our jurisdiction, the hard-liners won the day.

It didn’t matter that about 85 percent of our medicines are manufactured with chlorine chemistry, or that the addition of chlorine to drinking water represented the biggest advance in the history of public health. By 1991, four years after I left, Greenpeace had adopted a resolution calling for an end to “the use, export, and import of all organochlorines, elemental chlorine, and chlorinated oxidizing agents,” stating, “There are no uses of chlorine which we regard as safe.”
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They might as well have called for a ban on living because it is not safe either. I knew I had made the right decision in parting ways, but it saddened me deeply that my Greenpeace had come to this. The “devil’s element” is in fact the most important of all the elements for public health and medicine. This didn’t matter to my colleagues, and for me it was proof enough that their fundamentalist position was antihuman in nature.

My growing interest in sustainable development had attracted me to aquaculture, the practice of farming the oceans rather than just hunting wild fish. Many fish stocks were badly overfished, and it was clear to me the best way to take the pressure off the wild stocks was to learn to farm them. We made this transition on the land 10,000 years ago with agriculture, and again with farming trees (silviculture) 250 years ago in Europe. I believed Greenpeace should adopt a policy of supporting sustainable aquaculture as a positive contribution to protecting the marine environment. Not only did this fall on deaf ears, a lot of my colleagues were actually hostile to the idea. I thought, If these people are against farming fish, what on earth are they in favor of?

Thus began a divergence of opinion about the way forward. I favored a balanced approach that recognized the necessity of factoring the needs of nearly seven billion people into the equation. I believed we could continue to provide the food, energy, and materials required for civilization while at the same time learning to reduce our negative impacts on the environment.

There is an unfortunate tendency among environmental activists to characterize the human species as a negative influence on the earth. We are likened to a malignant cancer that is spreading, threatening to destroy biodiversity, upsetting the balance of nature, causing the collapse of the global ecosystem. The great myth of the movement is that humans are not really part of nature, that we are somehow “unnatural” and apart from the “pure” natural world. For some reason this idea, like original sin, appeals to people who feel guilty about their existence. We are not worthy, they think.

How ironic that a central teaching of ecology is that humans are part of nature and inextricably connected to it along with all other forms of life. In this sense we are no different from a seagull or a starfish or a worm. But somehow the “deep ecologists” have managed to twist things to make us inferior even to worms, as if all other life forms are superior to us. I don’t buy this philosophy of self-loathing.

Since I left Greenpeace, its members, and the majority of the movement, have adopted policy after policy that reflects their antihuman bias, illustrates their rejection of science and technology, and actually increases the risk of harm to people and the environment. They oppose forestry even though it provides our most abundant renewable resource. They have zero tolerance for genetically modified food crops, even though this technology reduces pesticide use and improves nutrition for people who suffer from malnutrition. They continue to oppose nuclear energy, even though it is the best technology to replace fossil fuels and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. They campaign against hydroelectric projects despite the fact that hydro is by far the most abundant renewable source of electricity. And they support the vicious and misguided campaign against salmon farming, an industry that produces more than a million tons of heart-friendly food every year.

This divergence in opinion and policy is the result of a single difference of perspective. The extreme environmentalists see humans as the problem, an impediment to salvation, a blight on the landscape. Sensible environmentalists see humans as part of nature and as individuals who are capable of intelligent analysis and decision making and who can learn to integrate themselves into the web of life. The subject of forests and forestry offers a perfect example of this dichotomy.

Anti-forestry activists like those who belong to the Rainforest Action Network argue that we should minimize the number of trees we cut down and hence reduce the amount of wood we use. We are told this will “save” the forests. Indeed, in the absence of humans the forests would do just fine. But there isn’t an absence of humans; there are nearly seven billion of us. We need materials to build our homes, offices, factories, and furniture, and we need farmland to produce food and fiber. It’s not as if we can just stop eating or using resources, it’s a matter of survival. If we decided to reduce our wood consumption, we would automatically increase our consumption of steel, concrete, and other nonrenewable resources. This would require a huge increase in energy consumption, largely from fossil fuels, to manufacture the steel and concrete, adding to air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. So on balance, using less wood would result in increased damage to the environment.

Once we accept the existence of nearly seven billion people, the entire equation is altered. Now we want to maximize the use of renewable resources and keep as much land forested as possible. One of the best ways to do this is to use more wood sustainably. In fact, the more wood we use the more trees must be grown to supply the demand and the greater the economic incentive to keep land forested. This is a major reason North America has about the same area of forest today as it did 100 years ago; because we use so much wood, landowners plant trees and keep their land forested in order to supply the demand. It’s not rocket science, but this fundamental economic relationship has managed to escape the attention of many activists, who automatically believe the way to save the forest is to reduce the use of wood.

There certainly are examples of unsustainable forest use, which results in the loss of forests. But these cases have virtually nothing to do with the forest industry and everything to do with poverty. In poor and underdeveloped countries where wood is the primary fuel for cooking and heating, forests have suffered badly. This is the case in many of the drier regions in the tropics, where fuel wood and charcoal production have denuded whole landscapes. Add to this the grazing pressure caused by goats, sheep, and cows and you have an unsustainable situation. In many of the tropical developing countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the forests are shrinking as hundreds of millions of people cut a patch of forest to plant crops and graze animals just to grow enough food for their family. They don’t have enough wealth to reforest land that is cut for fuel or timber, so the inevitable result is continued deforestation.

But outside of this context of extreme poverty, if people stopped using wood, there would be no incentive for private or public landowners to reforest their land. It would make more sense to get rid of the trees and plant corn, cotton, or soybeans, which are perfectly good crops that can pay the taxes and provide income for the landowners. It is really fortunate the demand for wood is high in North America, as it results in continually reforested landscapes.

It is regrettable that the public has been led to believe deforestation is caused by using wood to build our homes, package our goods, and provide paper for printing, packaging, and sanitation. The forest industries that provide wood for these purposes are, almost without exception, engaged in the practice of reforestation, the opposite of deforestation. In fact, more than 90 per cent of deforestation is caused by the conversion of forests to agriculture. The balance largely results from the unsustainable gathering of fuel wood and illegal logging that is followed by conversion to farming.

Clearly we can’t solve this problem by banning agriculture or the use of wood for cooking and heating. Further on in the book we will analyze this issue more thoroughly, in particular, the role of intensive agriculture and forest management in conserving natural forests and biodiversity.