Who is Patrick Moore, and why do so many environmentalists hate
him?
Moore has been denounced as an “eco-Judas” and a shill for the
timber and nuclear industries by prominent Canadian green activist
David Suzuki. He is “a turncoat who supports many of the things we
oppose,” according to a Greenpeace spokesman. He routinely is
lambasted for hiding secret ties to industries that use him like a
marionette; according to the green story line, Moore is “paid by
those industries to promote their products and mission.” He is not
a real scientist, they claim, but a “liar” who “sold his soul” and
for whom a special circle in Hell ought be reserved.
The problem for environmentalists, however, is that Patrick
Moore is one of them. And his tale raises serious questions about
just exactly who strayed from the orthodoxy, who the real
environmentalists are, and about the direction and aims of today’s
environmental movement.
The simple version goes like this: In the early 1970s, Patrick
Moore helped found Greenpeace, partly to oppose nuclear weapons
testing. In just a short time it developed into the planet’s
largest and most effective environmental organization. Moore broke
with his compatriots in the mid-1980s and has emerged now as one of
the foremost proponents of nuclear power, which drives his former
mates crazy.
It’s more complicated than that, of course, and the experience
of Patrick Moore illustrates the peril that comes when an activist
organization achieves political success. As a 24-year-old ecologist
in 1971, Moore hooked up with several scruffy environmental
agitators in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Vancouver was much like San Francisco at the time. Journalist
Bob Hunter, one of Moore’s early colleagues, lovingly described it
as having “the biggest concentration of tree-huggers, radicalized
students, garbage-dump stoppers, s**t-disturbing unionists, freeway
fighters, pot smokers and growers, aging Trotskyites, condo
killers, farmland savers, fish preservationists, animal rights
activists, back-to-the- landers, vegetarians, nudists, Buddhists,
and anti-spraying, anti-pollution marchers and picketers in the
country, per capita, in the world.”
Moore, Hunter, and several others loaded into an 80-foot-long
chartered halibut seiner called the Phyllis Cormack and
set out from Vancouver. Referring to themselves as the Don’t Make a
Wave Committee, they aimed for the Aleutian Alaskan island of
Amchitka, where they hoped to disrupt the U.S. government’s
upcoming underground nuclear test. The voyage was modeled after
that of a solitary Quaker sailor in the 1950s who sailed from
Honolulu to protest the hydrogen bomb tests at the Bikini
Atoll.
As the Phyllis Cormack left Vancouver, according to
legend, one of the activists on board flashed the peace sign as a
farewell. “Make it a green peace,” said another.
Voilà.
They didn’t get too far. Bad weather and the U.S. Navy thwarted
their efforts. The explosion occurred as planned. But out of this
failure came success. “That voyage,” according to Moore in a recent
interview, “was the founding of Greenpeace.” A movement was
born.
“We were interested in science,” says Moore. “That was our
grounding, a bunch of guys from the northwest grounded in science,
worried about the effects of nuclear testing in the ocean.” Moore
argues that many of the early Greenpeace activists were
committed—initially—to pursuing science-based environmentalism.
Moore was aboard a 1975 voyage that filmed a confrontation with
a Soviet whaling fleet in the Pacific Ocean. Greenpeace footage of
the Soviets harpooning a sperm whale was broadcast to national
outrage in the United States, giving the organization and the “Save
the Whales” campaign huge exposure. That helped spur the formation
of Greenpeace chapters all over the U.S., elevating Greenpeace from
a band of misfits to an influential national organization. It
wasn’t long before its reach extended to other nations as well.
Under the direction of Moore and allies like Bob Hunter and David
McTaggart, Greenpeace became a global behemoth with ambitions to
rival the United Nations.
By the mid-1980s, Greenpeace was solidly established as an
international giant. But along the way, it lost founder Patrick
Moore as an adherent. It had become, in his words, “an organization
populated by little storm-troopers out to enforce an
anti-intellectual ideology. This anti-intellectualism has become a
hallmark of Greenpeace.”
Moore noticed that the organization’s focus turned away from
science and toward politics. Several of his colleagues were keen to
initiate a campaign to ban chlorine worldwide. “I considered that a
terrible idea,” he says. “Chlorine is an element, after all, on the
periodic table. They called chlorine the ‘Devil’s Element’ but I
thought that adding chlorine to drinking water was one of the great
advancements in the history of human civilization.”
By the mid-1980s, after a number of tussles over how Greenpeace
should be run and what its goals should be, Patrick Moore walked
away from the organization he helped birth. Moore pursued causes he
considered to be in line with efforts to promote sustainable
development, among them aquaculture and forestry.
To his former colleagues, Moore had gone over to the dark side.
After all, people who cut down trees or pull fish from the seas
must be evil. Moore’s argument was that industries dependent upon
replenishing their products would necessarily incorporate ideas of
sustainability into their business practices. His green colleagues
called that view treason. On the first Greenpeace voyage back from
Amchitka, Moore recalls, his colleague Bob Hunter coined the phrase
“ecofascism”—approvingly. Hunter talked about the need to create a
belief system that people could adhere to with blind faith.
Moore traces the politicization of modern environmentalism back
to that conversation with Hunter. “The political aspects he
outlined there seemed totalitarian in nature.”
It’s an apt description, given recent attempts by Greenpeace to
erase Patrick Moore from its history. The official position of the
organization today holds that Moore is not one of the original
founders of the group; he merely was around somewhat in the early
days, but was not instrumental to the founding. Sadly for
Greenpeace, that contradicts many of its earlier publications and
pronouncements. Recently, Greenpeace has edited its website,
erasing all mentions of Moore as one of the organization’s
founders.
GREENPEACE PARTICULARLY wants Moore to vanish these days because
of his latest—and most egregious—apostasy: he supports nuclear
power. So they denounce and impugn him, calling into question his
integrity. Moore is co-chair of the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition
(CASEnergy), an organization promoting nuclear energy as a clean,
safe, and dependable source of power. Not surprisingly, CASEnergy
is financed by the nuclear industry, a fact about which nobody
makes any secret. To the apparatchiks who denounce Moore, however,
this is evidence he is a paid agent doing the bidding of nefarious
overlords.
Moore is content to let the arguments for and against nuclear
power stand on their merits. He claims to have had a genuine
conversion on the issue of nuclear power, believing it the only
technology capable of supplying the vast amounts of power that can
improve people’s lives while emitting no greenhouse gas
emissions.
For all the name-calling, the turncoat label is one that
rankles. “I haven’t turned in any of my positions or policies,”
Moore says. “I still want to save the whales. I am still an
environmentalist. The only exception is on the issue of nuclear
power. But that is a recent conversion, based on what I think is a
reasonable approach to the issues.”
Still, he can live with the malice that is directed at him.
“They hate me because I challenge their beliefs. And what they hold
are beliefs, they are not opinions based in factual information.
The reason I left was to move on to solution-oriented work. The
people I left behind are not interested in solutions. They are
interested in activism.”
It’s a telling commentary on today’s environmental movement that
it will expel one of its own for the crime of having sincere
differences of opinion on how to save the planet. “What I see now
is that they are in a state of decadence, like when an empire is
crumbling,” he says. “They are so wrong on so many issues, from
forestry to energy to genetics and agriculture. They are afraid of
technology and its ability to improve human life.”
