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Environment Forest Ecosystems Forest Industries Forest Management Forest Products Greenhouse Gases NAFI Submissions Policy and Politics Renewable Energy Sustainability |
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Hard Choices for the Environment MovementMore than twenty years ago I was one of a dozen or so activists who founded Greenpeace in The basement of The Unitarian Church in Vancouver, Canada.The Vietnam war was raging. Nuclear holocausts seemed closer every day. We linked peace, ecology and a talent for media communications and went on to build the world's largest environmental activist organisation. By 1986 Greenpeace was established in twenty-six countries and had an income of over a hundred million a year. In 1986 me mainstream of western society was already busy adopting the environmental agenda that was considered radical only fifteen years earlier. By 1986 The combined impact of Chernobyl, the Exxon Valdez, the threat of global warming and the ozone hole clinched the debate. All but a handful of reactionaries joined the call for sustainable development and environmental protection. Whereas previously the leaders of the environment movement found themselves on the outside railing at the gates of power, they were now invited to table in board rooms and caucuses around the `world. For environmentalists accustomed to the politics of confrontation this new era of acceptance posed a challenge as great as any campaign to save the planet. For me Greenpeace and the environmental movement in general is about ringing an ecological fire alarm, waking mass consciousness to the true dimensions of our global predicament. Pointing out the problems, defining their nature, the environmental movement does not necessarily have the solution to those problems and is certainly not equipped to put them into practice on its own. That requires the combined efforts of governments, corporations, public institutions and environmentalists. This demands a high degree of cooperation and collaboration. The politics of blame and shame must be replaced with the politics of working together for a win win solutions. So it was no coincidence that the round table consensus-based negotiation process was adopted by thousands of environmental leaders including myself. It's the logical tool for working in a new spirit of green cooperation. It may not be a perfect system for decision making, but like Churchill said about democracy, it's the worst form of government except for all the others. A collaborative approach promises to give environmental issues their fair consideration in relation to the traditional economic and social priorities. Some environmentalists didn’t see it that way. Indeed there had always been a minority of extremists who took a no-compromise in defence of mother nature position. They were the monkey wrenchers, tree spikers and boat scuttlers of the earth first and Paul Watson variety. Considered totally uncool by the largely pacifist intellectual mainstream of the movement they were a colourful but renegade element. Since its founding in the late 1960s the modern environmental movement has created a vision that was intemational in scope and room for people of all political persuasions. We prided ourselves in subscribing to a philosophy that was trans-national, trans-political and trans-ideological. For Greenpeace the Cree legend Warriors of the Rainbow referred to people of all colours and creeds working together for a greener planet. The traditional sharp division between left and right was rendered meaningless by the common desire to protect our life support systems. Violence against people and property were the only taboos. Non violent direct action and peaceful civil disobedience were the hallmarks of the movement. Truth mattered, and science was respected for the knowledge it brought to the political debate. Now this broad based vision is challenged and has been for the last five or ten years by a new philosophy of radical environmentalism. In the name of deep ecology many environmentalists have taken a sharp turn to the ultra left ushering in a mood of extremism and intolerance. As a clear signal of this new agenda, in 1990 Greenpeace called for a grass roots revolution against pragmatism and compromise. As an environmentalist in the political centre I now find myself branded a traitor and a sellout by this new breed of saviours. My name appears in Greenpeace's Guide to Anti-environmental Organisations. Even fellow Greenpeace founder and campaign comrade, Bob Hunter, refers to me as the eco Judas. Yes, I am trying to help the Canadian forest industry improve its environmental performance. As Chair of the Forest Practices Committee, as the Forest Alliance of BC, an industry sponsored initiative, I have led the process of drafting and implementing the- principles of sustainable forestry that have been adopted by a majority of the industry in British Colombia, my home Province. These principles establish goals for environmental protection, forest management and public involvement. They are providing a framework for dialogue and action towards improvement in forest practices and it's not that I don't think the environment's in trouble. The hole in the ozone is real and we are over populating and over exploiting many of the earth’s most productive eco systems. And, as we have seen recently, even hard won campaigns such as that to stop French nuclear testing in the South Pacific can be reversed and provide good cause for dramatic action. That'’s where Greenpeace should be and I'm glad to see them there. But two profound in the late l980s triggered the split between those advocating a pragmatic or small "1" liberal approach to ecology and the zero tolerance attitude of extremism. The first event mentioned previously was the widespread adoption of the environmental agenda by the mainstream of business and government. This left environmentalists with the choice of either being drawn into collaboration with their former enemies or taking ever more extreme positions. Many environmentalists chose the latter route. They resisted the concept of sustainable development and took a strong anti-development stance. Surprisingly enough the second event that caused the environmental movement to veer to the left was the fall of the Berlin Wall. Suddenly the international peace movement had a lot less to do. Pro communist groups in the west were discredited. Many of their members moved into the environmental movement bringing with them their neo-Marxism and pro Sandanista sentiments. These factors, over the last ten years, have combined to contribute to a new variant of the environmental movement that is so extreme that many people, including myself believe its agenda is a greater threat to the global environment than that posed by the mainstream of society. Now I must emphasise I'm not painting the environmental movement with a broad brush as entirely extremist. There are elements of extremism and elements of moderation within the environmental movement and each of the groups within the environmental movement has varying degrees of these sentiments within it, but by and large over the last ten years, the agenda of the environmental movement, particularly as it has been expressed through the media to the public, has been taken over by the extremist element. I want to give you my belief of the characteristics of environmental extremism so you can measure the statements that you hear against these characteristics and determine whether they are reasonable statements and realistic statements or whether they are extremist statements. First, environmental extremists tend to be anti human. The human species is characterised as a cancer on the face of the earth. Extremists perpetuate the belief that all human activity is negative, whereas the rest of nature is good. This results in alienation from nature and subverts the most important lesson of ecology that we are a part of nature and interdependent with it. This aspect of environmental extremism leads to disdain and disrespect for fellow humans and the belief that it would be good if a disease such as AIDS were to wipe out most of the population. It is anti science and anti technology. Eco extremists dream of returning to some kind of technologically primitive society. Horselogging is the only kind of forestry they fully support. All machines as seen as inherently destructive and unnatural. The Sierra Club's recent book "Clearcut, The Tragedy of Industrial Forestry" is an excellent example of this perspective. Western industrial society is rejected in its entirety as is nearly every known forestry system including shelter woods, seed free and small group selection. The word "nature" is capitalised every time it is used and we're encouraged to find our place in the world through chimeric dreaming and swaying with the trees. Science is invoked only as a means of justifying the adoption of belief that have no basis in science to begin with. Environmental extremists are anti organisation. They tend to expect the whole world to adopt anarchism as the model for individual behaviour. This is expressed in their dislike of national governments, multi national corporations and large institutions of all kinds. It would seem that critique applies to all organisations except the environmental movement itself. Corporations are criticised for taking profits made in one country and investing them in other countries. This being proof they have no allegiance to local communities. Where is the international environmental movements allegiance to local communities? How much money raised in the name of aboriginal peoples has been distributed to them? How much has gone to research forestry systems that are environmentally and economically superior? It is anti trade. Eco extremists are opposed not only to freetrade but also to international trade in general. This is based on the belief that each bio-region should be self sufficient in all its material needs. If it's too cold to grow bananas that’s too bad, you get no bananas. Certainly anyone who studies ecology comes to realise the importance of geographic units such as water sheds, islands and estuaries. As foolish as it is to ignore ecosystems it is absurd to put fences around them as if they were independent of their neighbours. In its extreme version bio-regional is just another form of ultra nationalism and gives rise to same excesses of intolerance and xenophobia. It is anti free enterprise. Despite the fact that communism and state socialism have failed, eco extremists are basically anti-business. They dislike competition and are definitely opposed to profits. Anyone engaging in private business, particularly if successful is characterised as greedy' and lacking in morality. The extremists do not seem to find it necessary' to put forward an alternative system of organisation that would prove efficient at meeting the material needs of society. They are content to set themselves up as the critics of international free enterprise while offering nothing but idealistic platitudes in its place. It is anti democratic. This is perhaps the most dangerous aspect of radical environmentalism. The very foundation of our society, liberal representative democracy, is rejected as being too human centred. In the name of speaking for the trees and other species we are faced with a movement that would usher in a era of eco fascism. The planetary police would answer to no one but mother earth herself And it is basically anti civilisation. In its essence eco extremism rejects virtually everything about modern life. We are told that nothing short of returning to primitive tribal society can save the earth from ecological collapse. No more cities, not more airplanes, and no more polyester suits. It's a naive vision of a return to The Garden of Eden. And if you don’t think this sentiment of eco extremism is still alive and well today I have a letter very recently just the other day actually, from the Native Forest Network of Tasmania. It is written to a member of The Forest Industry of Australia and it talks about how the Australian environmental groups are in general support of pine plantations in this document, but they go on to say the Native Forest Network, Southern Hemisphere - I suppose there’s a counterpart in the north-supports the above positions on the understanding that it is necessary to adopt a global phase out strategy of consumer based industrial capitalism. Now there's an agenda for us. This will not occur overnight, mind you, they say. It may take some years. Therefore it is necessary to adopt an interim position supporting ecologically sustainable plantations. Of course when The perfect universe unfolds sustainable ecological plantations will not be permitted because they are art of industrial consumer based capital. Now what does this really mean? Would you take the advice from people who took a position like this on the subject of forest practices? Someone who was against consumer based - now, what are we supposed to float ethereally above the material rim and stop consuming? We’re an organism of life on planet earth, part of the evolution. We must consume to live. We shouldn't over consume. We should recycle. We should care about the earth but you cannot stop the fact that we are a consumer based species so that doesn’t make much sense to me. What is industrial capitalism? Is there a different kind? What is that, pre industrial capitalism that they're thinking about perhaps? And capitalism itself -are they talking about the market based economy when they speak of capitalism or is something more evil than that?. I’d like the answers to these questions before I would engage in a meaningful dialogue with the Native Forest Network about the subject of trees. The challenge today for all environmentalists is to resist the path of ever increasing extremism and to know when to talk rather than fight. To remain credible and effective they must reject the anti human anarchistic approach. This is made difficult by the fact that many individuals and their messengers, the media, are naturally attracted to confrontation and sensation. I don't believe there's anyway of overcoming that We must live with the fact that people want sensation. So it isn't easy to get excited about a committee meeting if you could be bringing the state to its knees at a blockade. The best approach though to our predicament is to recognise the validity of both the bio regional, that is, local and the global vision for social and environmental sustainability. Issues such as over population and sustainable forestry practices require international discussion and resolution as they are international issues, but composting of food wastes and bicycle repairs can be accomplished locally. We must think and act both globally and locally, always cognisant of impacts at one level caused by actions at another. Extremist that rejects this approach will only bring disaster to all species including humans. Now I have to report that it's been a year or so since I started elaborating on this theme, and a lot has happened in that year and just recently I see signs of a major sea change within the environmental movement. I'm informed that Greenpeace International at its headquarters in Amsterdam is bringing in a new Executive Director who is much more along the lines of working with industry and government to find solutions. The World Wild Life Fund has actually always been much more reasonable. The World Wide Fund for Nature as you perhaps know it here, has always been more reasonable in its approach to these issues, so eco realism, as it is rapidly becoming known, will hopefully begin to take over from the eco extremist point of view. Eco realism recognises the fact that environmental values must be incorporated into social and economic values. We cannot have a world in which the only thing that matters is all of the rest of lives besides the human beings. It simply wont work that way. We must defend our own survival as individuals. Hopefully we can bring our population under control in the near future and get it into a more sustainable position. But there's no way' we're going to do that with an extremist and dogmatic position. I find myself as I say, I support almost everything that Greenpeace and the environmental movement does in terms of the issues that they address. I'm not in favour of dumping nuclear waste in the sea anymore than anybody else is, but I do think on one very large area of policy, forestry, they are completely off base. And let me just elaborate on that for a few moments because the critique of radical environmentalism is nowhere more appropriate than it is on the issue of forests and forestry. Greenpeace and a large part of the rest of the environmental movement is leading a campaign for a global ban on clearcutting or clearfelling or clearing or however you wish to describe it - cutting all the trees down in an area of forest. They want lumber and paper manufacturers to use a label that states Their product is "clear cut free" - Canada in particular, has been chosen as a target for consumer boycotts because it uses clearcutting in forestry. It doesn'’t matter that the world's most knowledgeable foresters and silver culturalists believe that clear cutting is the most appropriate form of harvesting in many types of forest. It doesn’t matter that most forestry in Germany where this campaign is being headquartered is done by the clearcut method. They want to boycott Canada anyway. The public is generally unaware of the basic flaws in the campaign to end clear cutting world wide. They don't realise there's no clear definition of this term '‘clearcut'. How can you call for a ban on something that you can t even define? They refuse to engage in the dialogue that would define it. As I say, how many stumps in a group does it take before you have a clearcut? There is no definition of this anywhere in The scientific literature. There cannot be. It is in fact an extremely subjective word. And the practice of clearcutting is so widespread because it is perceived to be by scientists the best method of managing and renewing forests that there's no possibility of a supply of clearcut tree paper, for example. It simply will not happen. It's so important to recognise, and the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations has documented this world wide, it is farming and urban development that causes deforestation. Forestry causes reforestation otherwise it's not forestry, it's just exploitive logging and even exploitive logging, if you just leave the land alone for long enough it will turn to a forest again. If forests were not capable of recovering in their full and complete biological splendour from virtual total destruction there would be no forests on the earth. It is the nature of forests to be able to recover from ice ages, climate change, volcanos, fires, insect outbreaks, windthrow. If they couldn't recover they wouldn't be there because they’ve been doing it for hundreds of millions of years. As a matter of fact in most temperate types of forest where fire is the predominant cause of destruction, regular catastrophic disturbance is almost necessary to the health of the forest. It's kind of like how people need a certain amount of stress to stay healthy. Forests almost need to be disturbed drastically every now and again to remain healthy or they fall into a state of decline and I wont provide huge scientific accounts of this but believe me my study of forest ecology leads me to believe very strongly that that is the case and there are so many examples of it around the world that can be shown. In fact the amount of forest cover is increasing in the temperate forests of the world today by 0.2% per year due to reafforestation of previously cleared agricultural lands. That's your pine plantations in Australia and in New Zealand and in Chile and the eucalyptus in Brazil and the pine and spruce in Scotland and the increasing forest cover in Sweden where farms that were once cleared of forest are now being returned to trees. It’s only in the tropics that deforestation continues apace, and there it's not because of lumbering. Lumbering causes a very minor percentage of deforestation in this world. It's caused by clearing land for growing food. It's caused by sheep, cows, goats. It's caused by potatoes, corn and sugar cane and oil palms and coconut palms and all kinds of agricultural things but it is not caused by lumbering. People who cut trees for wood generally put another crop back. Wood is the most sustainable of all of the material resources that we use in our culture. The Greens should be calling for more forests to be grown, more trees to be planted and more trees to be cut. This is the fundamental flaw in their position. I'm not saying we should cut all the trees down and not grow any back. We need to increase the amount of land that is forested in this world because if you compare wood with cement, steel, plastic, and aluminium, and any other material substance which forms the basis of our material culture, wood wins every time because it is grown by the sun, and the forest floor is the factory where it is produced and if it is renewed continuously the species that depend on that forest will be renewed as well. I don't care what kind of trees it is. Forests are better than non forests. Any kind of forest is better than no forest. The first requirement of sustainable forestry is trees. It's hard to have it without them. But when you do have trees growing in an area of land, then you have sustainable forests. You see the whole issue of sustainable forestry has also become very clouded in misinformation and confusion. It's not really that complicated, but the problem is people are looking to the past for the answer. They’re saying - is this piece of wood from a sustainably managed forest? Well how would it be here if it hadn’t grown in a tree? There had to be a tree to get this wood. You see sustainable forestry is not about what happened in the past. There's no point in looking in a rear view mirror besides which you can't change it so what's the point? Sustainable forestry is about the future. It's about whether or not the land that this wood was grown on is now a shopping mall, or a sheep paddock, or is it a forest? That's what really matters and of course it matters which species of trees are in that forest because that determines a great deal about the other forms of life. Natural forests of native species are probably preferable from a biological diversity point of view than exotic plantations although exotic plantations are a lot better than no forest at all. People have got to get that in perspective and I don’t think i't’s in perspective. As I say, wood is the most sustainable and renewable of all material items in our culture. Just to show you how crazy this debate can get: Bobby Kennedy Junior, the son of the late Bobby Kennedy who was murdered during his presidential campaign in San Francisco, Bobby Kennedy Junior is now a lawyer with the Natural Resources Defence Council in Washington DC, a large group of lawyers working in the environmental movement. He has intervened in Canada's forestry debate by coming up and visiting environmental groups and getting his picture taken with aboriginal people in canoes and things like that and making quite a splash of himself for coming up to save our forests and aboriginal people, and, recently, I was at a reception in Soho in Manhattan in New York at a trendy little art gallery where he was welcoming some environmental activists from British Colombia, and just before he got up and made his speech in which he proclaimed that the Canadian system of politics and justice was inferior to that of the United States and this was the compelling reason that caused him to want to go up there and save us from ourselves, I was standing with a group of environmental extremists who were having a lively conversation about the need for wood tree paper. As they say in the Native Forest Network letter increased use of alternative fibres', that’s code word for hemp. What these people were saying was they wanted to talk the tobacco farmers in the US to grow hemp and kenaf). Kenaf seemed to be the big item of the day instead of tobacco. This would earn them double eco points you see because they would stop people from smoking- and getting lung cancer and save trees by using kenaf to make the paper instead of using trees. I piped in. I said, well, you know, wouldn't it be better to plant hardwood trees of the species that were there before they deforested that place and turned it into a tobacco farm. That was part of the Carolinian hard wood forest one of the most beautifully diverse forest eco systems in the eastern United States, just gorgeous big hard wood oaks and tulip trees and ash and elm, a tremendous variety. "No" she said immediately. "People can't plant forests. People can only' plant trees". I thought about that for a minutes and, yes, okay, you want to think that it's not natural if people plant the trees and therefore it's a farm or a plantation or something like that, fine. I said: "But wouldn't the squirrels and birds like trees better even if it was just trees than this exotic mono culture annual crop of kanaf which is in fact a hibiscus species from The Indian sub continent. At least tobacco is native to North America". No, that would not do, and as I went on to explain: "You know if you want to substitute all the wood pulp with non wood pulp you're going to how deforest half of North America to find enough land to grow all this hemp and kanaf on. Wouldn't it be better to plant forests to make the paper?". They don't get it that if you don't make paper out of trees there's no incentive to grow trees. It's a ridiculous point of view and makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. I want to add towards closing that I am totally supportive of an excellent system of representative eco system protection. In British Colombia we are now moving towards doubling our parks and wilderness to twelve percent of the total land base to include representation of all the environmental types that are native to our country. It's such an important thing to do but the balance must be struck. We can't lock up all our forests because they are the source of wood which is the most renewable material in our culture and if we use less wood we will use more cement and steel and plastic and have to build more coal fired plants, more nuclear power plants, dam more rivers to get the energy to make these materials. This formula is clear. It's science, and there is no getting away from it. We must grow more forests and use more wood. And I think with that, except for these two last points, one of which just think about for a minute - why do urban people, why are they capable of delinking their moral judgement of their own use of forest products from those people who are supplying them and doing the hard work out in the woods to get those forest products to market? They'’re the evil ones, the evil tree cutters out there in the mountains. Me, sitting in my wooden chair in my wooden house reading my paper newspaper, I'm not to blame for this. Somehow people have disconnected those two things. I say a world without forests is as unthinkable as a day without wood. It's not like we can get by a day without wood. Just because we don't get hungry for it every two or three hours like we do with food doesn't mean we don't need wood as much for our culture and our survival. There's no getting away from that, so we have to find the balance. And the last point is: It's extremely important to remember that one's urban sense of aesthetics should not be equated with morality and what is good and bad. The Sierra Club reinforces this by saying anyone can identity destructive forestry practices. You don't have to be a professional forester to recognise bad forestry anymore than you have to be a doctor to recognise ill health. If logging looks bad, it is bad. If a forest looks mismanaged it is mismanaged. The fact is urban people do not find the concrete landscape around them to be aesthetically offensive by and large, nor the farmlands which have been deforested of all their native biodiversity. That looks quite pastoral in fact, lovely. But a sea of stumps, recently cut, and about to be returned to native ecology is offensive to the urban eye. I think you do have to be a doctor to tell if someone has the HIV virus. I don't want to try and figure that out just by looking at somebody, and I think you have to be a professional forest ecologist to know whether forestry is being done properly and in a sustainable way. Garret Harden, who wrote the `Tragedy of the Commons back in 69, a seminal essay in modem environmental thinking, should be read again by the environmental movement. Perhaps they forget that he said this: "The morality of an act can not be determined from a photograph. One does not know whether a man killing an elephant or setting fire to a grassland is harming others until one knows the total system in which his act appears. It is tempting to ecologists as it is to reformers in general to try to persuade others via the photographic shortcut, but the guts of an argument can't be photographed. They must be presented rationally in words". Clearly environmental extremists have ignored this sage advice. Thank you very much. Biography Dr. Patrick Moore has been a leader in the international environmental field for over 20 years. He is a founding member of Greenpeace and served for seven years as a Director of Greenpeace international. As the leader of many campaigns Dr. Moore was a driving force shaping policy and direction while Greenpeace became the world's largest environmental activist organisation. Recently, Dr. Moore has been focused on British Columbia and the promotion of sustainability, consensus building, and collaborative efforts among competing concerns. He was a member of the BC Round Table on the Environment and Economy from 1990 - 1994 where he was active on a number of committees. In 1990, Dr. Moore founded and chaired the BC Carbon Project, a multi-stakeholder group that worked to develop a common understanding of climate change as it applies to BC. As Chair of the Forest Practices Committee of the Forest Alliance of BC, he leads the process of developing the "Principles of Sustainable Forestry" which have been adopted by a majority of the industry. 1991 Dr. Moore founded Greenspirit, an environmental consultancy focussing on public involvement in the resource and energy sectors.
Honours BSc in Forest Biology, University of British Columbia |
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