Posted on 03/16/2005 12:18:44 PM PST by Squawk 8888
FORTUNA -- Patrick Moore spent 15 years being arrested for causes he felt strongly about, doing things he now labels environmental extremism.
Moore, founding member of Greenpeace, spoke at the annual dinner Saturday of The Buckeye Conservancy, a nonprofit organization made up of more than 200 family, individual and commercial memberships representing more than 300,000 acres of forests and ranch land in Humboldt County.
"There's a lot of opinion in the environmental movement," Moore told the crowd of about 180 people packed into the River Lodge. "I support 100 percent any group that comes together and brings people from all communities ... to sit down and talk ... trying to find consensus. There are many, many points of view."
Born in the Vancouver, Canada, rain forest, Moore said he became "a born-again ecologist" and in the late 1960s founded Greenpeace, the international organization that uses non-violent direct action to expose global environmental problems.
But about 15 years later he "decided I would like to be in favor of something for a change."
"I made the transition from politics of confrontation, telling people what they should stop doing, to the politics of trying to find consensus on what we should do instead," he said.
He now heads an organization called Greenspirit, "a network of people who celebrate the human spirit in the context of our place in the natural world and Earth's own evolutionary journey."
The environmental activists of today, Moore said, practice "environmental extremism" and have a "zero tolerance policy."
The audience broke into prolonged applause when Moore said environmental activists "use green language in a clever way to cloak agendas that have more to do with anti-capitalism and anti-globalization than anything to do with science or ecology."
A contradiction in their philosophy, he said, was an anti-globalization protester he once saw wearing a cardboard sign that read: "Join the worldwide struggle against globalization."
Moore touched on a number of subjects during his hour-long speech, but the ones that hit closest to home included genetically modified organisms, salmon farming and forestry and timber.
"Genetically modified organisms. I call them genetically enhanced organisms," Moore said. "It means an improvement is being made. All the advancements in genetically enhanced technology are improvements."
An example, he said, is genetically modified rice that has had vitamin A introduced into the grains.
"Half a million kids go blind each year in parts of the world because of vitamin A deficiency," Moore said, adding that the vitamin A enhanced rice could prevent that.
But the rice has not been planted, he said, because of its "possible unknown negative effects."
This, he said, "is the precautionary principle because we don't know for sure ... . It is being totally misused."
Moore said genetically enhanced foods reduce pesticides, reduce soil erosion, increase production by using less land, improve human health and nutrition, "and there is no known damage."
Moore called aquaculture, or fish farming, "the future of protein in this world."
Yet, he said, there is "a huge and concerted campaign by environmental activists to destroy the industry of salmon farming in British Columbia and around the world."
Not everyone agrees with Moore. Tim McKay of the Northcoast Environmental Center, interviewed by phone Monday, took exception to a number of Moore's points, saying, "There are extremists of every kind. There are Realtor extremists, just plain greedy people and zealots."
McKay also said, "I have a lot of trouble with fish farming. You put half a million salmon in a pen, they create a lot of waste that drains into the estuary."
But on Saturday, Moore hit another nerve with his audience when he said, "California imports 70 percent of its lumber for construction and other purposes from other places and then locks up all its own forests and makes rules so people can't use the trees here in this state."
When the applause died down, Moore said this policy is "exporting the destruction of forests to other places like Canada. Well, keep it up. I'm from Canada, we love it. Keep buying our timber because we have good rules for forestry up there."
He said it is a myth that cutting forests depletes the forest acreage in the United States, saying forests cover about as much land in the United States and Canada as they did 100 years ago.
There is so much forestry "because we use so much wood," Moore said, "and that is sending a signal to the marketplace to plant more trees and produce more wood."
"As long as the demand for wood is strong and steady, land owners will keep their land forested in order to supply the demand," Moore said, adding, "It is a 100 percent win-win situation for the environment and the economy and yet activists today tell us the way to save the forests is to stop using wood."
FYI, and do you have any more on his speech.
And you know the funniest thing? There is no quicker way to eradicate marijuana than plant industrial hemp near it. They cross-pollenate (sp?) and the industrial hemp essentially overtakes the marijuana and reduces the THC levels.
Help us stamp out modern technology at Luddite.org
Playing chicken with Navy ships in restricted waters is hardly "nonviolent."
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One of the big problems is Greenpeace was taken over by the KGB in the 70s
Like a number of other groups. The founders had a good cause and just concerns. Then others (like the KGB) seen how they could hijack it and use it to there advantage.
That line stood our for me, too, but such bias in the media is so ubiquitous that I usually filter it out as background noise. Kinda like all the reporters casually tossing in assertions that carbon dioxide is cooking the planet.
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