It is the appearance of environmental and ecological extremists as insensitive to real-life consequences in the very populations they seek to persuade-particularly those people living under the world’s most abject conditions-that Moore seems most apt to question, expose and assail.Ī prime example of what Moore sees can be found in the unswerving opposition to the use of genetic modification, including for food production, and in the Northwest no conversation on the subject is safe from a segue into salmon.
With some melancholy, Moore finished the story. “If you look at the chemicals in your cold and flu medicines and other pharmaceuticals you will find that about 80% of them are based on chlorine chemistry,” Moore explained.Īccording to Moore, all logic and common sense were unable to overcome zealous activism. “I said you guys, ‘That’s one of the elements in the periodic table.’ It’s one of the building blocks in the universe and I don’t know if it’s in our jurisdiction to be banning something that important,” Moore said, a chuckle rippling through the audience.īut, in Moore’s view, banning chlorine had implications greater than the cosmic weight of arrogance. When the group began to mobilize to ban chlorine-in all its forms-from worldwide use, the scientist in Moore became aware of irreconcilable differences with the extremists in the movement. It’s a point of view that is hard to argue against rationally, but clashes on just that point eventually became the wedge forcing him to exit Greenpeace. “But when you start talking about all the chemicals and substances that are used in all of our products and services … you need to know something about chemistry and biology in order to analyze those kinds of issues correctly.” in marine biology to think the whales should be saved,” Moore said. in nuclear physics to be against nuclear war, and you don’t need a Ph.D. On issues as wide-ranging as agricultural genetic modification, foresting policy, hydro-electric power, nuclear energy (an issue on which his own opinion has changed since working for Greenpeace) and climate change, Moore described case after case in which science and logic have been ignored and substituted with flimsy rationale to rally an under-informed public to a popular cause. native and popular environmental speaker rolled casually through a discourse on what he argues is the backward agenda of the environmental extreme. Soliciting rapt attention and ironic laughter, the cerebral Vancouver, B.C.
Moore spoke to a room of hundreds who came down to Seattle’s waterfront for the 9 th Annual Washington Policy Center Environmental Policy Conference and Lunch.
Confessions of a greenpeace dropout series#
Patrick Moore slayed sacred cows of the clean Earth movement one by one, a series of fanatically-held beliefs Moore argues are often unscientific and lead to the creation of poor-even dangerous-public policy. Thursday, former Greenpeace director and author of “ Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist ” Dr. At an environmental policy conference in Seattle, Wash.
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