The icebreaker eventually did break the human blockade. Activists have also campaigned against Arctic drilling by everyone from the Russians to the Norwegians. On September 18, , the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise sailed near the Prirazlomnaya drilling platform and deployed four smaller boats. Those boats were full of Greenpeace activists who tried to board the drilling platform. The three activists who did successfully board the platform were detained by the Russian coast guard.
The next day, Russian authorities boarded the ship, seized control of it, and detained all crew members. Greenpeace is opposed to all uses of nuclear power. It called for France to shutter its nuclear electric generating capacity. Greenpeace is opposed to modern agricultural practices and techniques such as the use of genetically modified crops. On several occasions, its members have destroyed genetically engineered crops. In , Greenpeace activists destroyed an entire crop of genetically modified wheat that was under trials in Australia.
The activists wore hazmat suits emblazoned with the Greenpeace logo on them. In , Greenpeace protested against genetically modified corn in Mexico.
The country experimented with a type of genetically modified corn that would be used for animal feed. In an interview in , Moore said that his former comrades were condemning 2 million children to death. Greenpeace has also vocally opposed fish farming. In , the Arctic Sunrise joined a flotilla of fishing and sport boats that sailed toward fish farms off the coast of British Columbia. While the Greenpeace fleet did not attempt to interfere with operations, it hoisted an anti-fish farming banner.
Greenpeace has been an opponent of modern forestry practices. It has led protests of logging operations from Canada to Poland. It has also targeted corporations that manufacture wood products. Greenpeace even protested fast food giant KFC over rainforest deforestation. It has sought to tie itself to the larger progressive movement.
The organization endorses the policies of the broader progressive left, even outside the environmental agenda. Greenpeace is also a strong opponent of voter ID laws and endorsed a renewal of the Voting Rights Act. It has also endorsed gun control laws. Greenpeace relies on so-called direct action tactics. Greenpeace activists have trespassed on private property on many occasions.
The attention is then used to raise money from individuals all over the world. In , then-New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo threatened to investigate the energy company Chevron while the company was a defendant in a multi-billion-dollar lawsuit in Ecuador. The lawsuit charged Chevron with environmental damages to the Amazon rain forest in Ecuador, even though the company had not actually drilled for oil there.
According to court-ordered released emails for the trial, Cuomo was pushed to threaten legal action against Chevron by his former aide, Karen Hinton, and her husband, Howard Glaser, another former staffer for Cuomo. Moore's family made its living off the land. His father and grandfather were loggers, and his mother came from a clan of fishermen.
Perhaps this explains why, despite his animist tendencies, his ecological attitudes are grounded in an obsessive rationalism.
He's fascinated by nature's cycles, mechanisms, and systems, and he sees no reason to privilege natural systems over man-made ones. When he was 8, one of his toys was a one-cylinder engine that he would take apart and reassemble. For his dissertation research, he built a transmissometer, a device that measures water quality. He's as likely to wax didactic about the minutiae of paper pulping "There's more computer power in a paper mill than there is in a !
Moore is equal parts tinkerer and mystic, and his environmental thinking may be an attempt to reconcile those two impulses. Like many people who earn a living making speeches, Moore prefaces much of what he says with phrases like "my line on this is" and "as I like to put it.
Suddenly, presidents and prime ministers were talking about the environment. We had won society over to our way of looking at things. As I like to say, maybe it's time to figure out what the solutions are, rather than just focusing on problems. Moore got a glimpse of how an environmentally responsible society might function four years earlier, at the Nairobi Conference of the United Nations Environmental Program.
In a presentation given by Tom Burke, then leader of Friends of the Earth UK, he first heard a phrase that was an oxymoron by Greenpeace standards: sustainable development. It was several years before the idea gained wide currency, but for Moore, "The light went on. In other words, it was a job of synthesis. Moore's new interest in sustainable development led him increasingly far afield of the rest of the environmental movement and estranged him from the organization he had helped found.
Inspired by Elizabeth Mann Borgese's book Seafarm , he started a salmon farm and became head of the fledgling Salmon Farmer's Association - only to find himself pitted against Greenpeace, which blamed saltwater aquaculture for polluting the ocean. In , as his farm was going under due to a salmon glut, he joined the board of the Forest Alliance of British Columbia, a group created by the timber industry to address the accusations of environmentalists.
There, he saw his role as a mediator. He proudly points to his stubborn - and ultimately successful - insistence that the industry soften its resistance to national parks and government regulation. At the same time, however, he was attacking the eco crowd, proclaiming that "clear-cuts are temporary meadows. Moore's enemies have a simpler explanation for his conversion: revenge.
After all, he left Greenpeace amid complaints about an autocratic leadership style and abrasive personality. When it became obvious that he lacked enough votes to keep his seat on the board of directors, he went off to farm fish. When that didn't work out, he joined the loggers. And then there's money. Even 18 years after he left Greenpeace, Moore's business relationships with polluters and clear-cutters elicit disgust from his erstwhile comrades. In an email, former Greenpeace director Paul Watson charges, "You're a corporate whore, Pat, an eco-Judas, a lowlife bottom-sucking parasite who has grown rich from sacrificing environmentalist principles for plain old money.
Moore admits he's well paid for his speaking and consulting services. He won't say how well, avowing only that his environmental consultancy, Greenspirit Strategies, has been "very successful because we know what we're talking about and give good advice. They pay me to tell them what I think. The rest of the movement, he says, has shifted around him. It's possible that fat fees or wounded feelings give Moore's vehemence an edge. And it's not inconceivable that he's an out-and-out mercenary.
But although his critique of latter-day environmentalism strains in a few places, it does have a larger coherence. The unifying principle is simple: "There's no getting around the fact that 6 billion people wake up every morning with a real need for food, energy, and material.
Moore's accusation may read like a caricature, but its outlines are readily apparent in environmentalist thinking. Bill McKibben, one of the movement's preeminent intellectuals, warned in his book The End of Nature that human beings, not through any particular action but simply by becoming the dominant force on the planet, were destroying nature, a "separate and wild province, the world apart from man to which he adapted.
Perhaps the best evidence of Moore's integrity is his enthusiasm for genetically modified foods. He's not on the payroll of any biotech companies, yet he has become an outspoken GM advocate. Taking a daffodil gene and putting it into a rice plant: Is this Armageddon? Continue reading your article with a WSJ membership. Resume Subscription We are delighted that you'd like to resume your subscription. Please click confirm to resume now.
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