Greenpeace founder supports salmon farming
The environmentalist Patrick Moore was born in a small logging village on northern Vancouver Island and he joined Greenpeace before it was even called by that name, and mainly for the purpose of protesting the testing of nuclear weapons. “We chartered an old fishing boat to sail to ground zero to focus public attention on the nuclear tests. We believed the revolution should be a celebration. We sang protest songs, drank beer, smoked pot and had a generally good time” he said in a recent excerpt from his new book, Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist printed in the Vancouver Sun.
“By 1982”, Moore says “Greenpeace had grown into a full-fledged international movement with offices and staff around the world. We were bringing in $100 million a year in donations and half a dozen campaigns were occurring simultaneously.” But around that same time, Moore said he would be influenced by two factors that led to his ultimate departure from the now famous organization. Firstly, he discovered what he calls “the concept of sustainable development”, which he claims many environmentalists- especially those from rich countries- are dead set against. “The second was the adoption of policies by my fellow Greenpeacers that I considered extremist and irrational”. And he states that for environmentalists to move forward with sustainable development would “be much more difficult than the protest campaigns we’d mounted over the decade. It would require consensus and cooperation rather than confrontation and demonization. Greenpeace had no trouble with confrontation- hell, we’d made it an art form- but we had difficulty cooperating and making compromises”.
Moore, who received a doctorate in ecology from the University of British Columbia, says of many in the environmental movement that they came from the former peace movement, “bringing with them their neo-Marxist, far-left agendas. Their propaganda campaign is aimed at promoting an ideology that I believe would be extremely damaging to both civilization and the environment“. Moore believes that we should be growing and using more wood, develop hydroelectricity and nuclear energy as well as geothermal energy- all aimed at reducing our reliance on fossil fuels.
And “Aquaculture, including salmon and shrimp farming, will be one of our most important future sources of healthy food. It will also take pressure off depleted wild fish stocks and will employ millions of people productively”, says Dr. Patrick Moore from Winter Harbour, Vancouver Island, B.C. On March 7, at a gala dinner he will receive the National Award for Nuclear Science from the Einstein Society in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
