Who is Patrick Moore?
Dr. Patrick Moore has been a leader in the
international environmental field for over 30 years. He is a founding member of
Greenpeace and served for nine years as President of Greenpeace Canada and
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 organization.
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Patrick Moore – Cofounder of
Greenpeace
After
more than 15 years of co-founding and heading up Greenpeace, Patrick Moore
switched sides and views. Instead of the radical environmental activism that
Greenpeace encompasses, Moore
now focuses on how we can benefit humans while remaining as environmentally
safe as possible.
Patrick
Moore was born in 1947 and raised in Winter Harbour, British Columbia,
a fishing and logging village on the northwestern tip
of Vancouver Island often referred to as the
Pacific rainforest. His father was a logger and the past president of the B.C.
Truck Loggers Association, while his mother came from a family of fisherman. At
the age of fourteen, Moore was sent to boarding
school in Vancouver.
Later, at the University
of British Columbia he
studied life sciences. Throughout his time at UBC, Moore discovered his love for ecology,
because it gave him an understanding of the rainforest he lived in as a child
(Moore, “Environmentalism” 1).
In 1971, Moore started Greenpeace out of his hometown.
The group was originally called the ‘Don’t Make a Wave
Committee’ (Bate, par. 2). The committee went to Alaska
to protest against US nuclear testing in the Aleutian
Islands. They set out on an old fishing boat from the Vancouver harbor to
disrupt the tests, but were intercepted by the U.S. Coast Guard and arrested.
Despite the arrest, the mission ended up being successful. President Nixon
cancelled the remaining nuclear tests (Moore,
“Environmentalism” 3).
During his 15 years with
Greenpeace, Moore
was the scientific spokesperson. He served for nine years as president for
Greenpeace Canada,
and seven years as director for Greenpeace International Borders, par. 3). The
organization campaigned against nuclear testing, seal hunting, uranium mining,
toxic waste dumping, and whaling, just to name a few.
Moore’s fame with Greenpeace includes a
photograph of him sitting on a Canadian baby seal in 1978 to prevent it from
being clubbed. The photo showed up in over 3000 newspapers worldwide (Bate,
par. 2). The result: by 1984 baby seal fur was banned from the European market
(Moore,
“Environmentalism” 3).
Another famous Greenpeace moment
was in 1985 when Moore and other Greenpeace members went out on a ship called Rainbow
Warrior to protest the French nuclear weapon testing in the Pacific. The
ship was sunk in the New
Zealand port, with speculations that it had
been planted with explosives by the French military (“Greenpeace”).
Today Greenpeace has an annual
income of over $100 million in donations and grants, and offices in 22
countries (Moore,
“Environmentalism” 4). Its international headquarters are in Amsterdam, Netherlands
(“Greenpeace”).
In the 1980s, Moore did a complete 180-degree turn and
joined the other side. In 1984 he left Greenpeace, feeling their views had
become too extreme and that it is unrealistic to be completely anti-business,
anti-technology and anti-civilization. In his article “Environmentalism
for the Twenty-first Century” in IPA Review, Moore says, “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
goal is to solve these worldwide problems while maintaining the newly
popularized environmental values while also being socially and economically
responsible. This he calls ‘sustainable development’ (Moore,
“Environmentalism” 4).
In 1986 Moore
began salmon farming back on Vancouver Island.
He supported fish farming despite its harmful effects on the marine environment
and its encouragement of predator control programs, which involves shooting
seals, sea lions and bears, and chasing whales away with underwater sonic
blasts. Moore
feels that a fish’s ability to convert two to three times as much of
their food intake into body mass development than cows, pigs or chickens, fish
can feed more people per unit of feed than meat (Bate, par. 10). Moore eventually became
president of the B.C. Salmon Farmers Association.
The fish farm business did not
turn out to be too lucrative, leaving Moore
in financial trouble. He was forced to close the business. In 1991 he contacted
the B.C. Forest
Alliance, an
unbiased timber industry support group, and became spokesperson for the B.C.
logging industry.
1991 also marked the beginning of
Moore’s
environmental consulting firm, Greenspirit. The
company brings together different parties to solve issues and come to a common
ground.
One of Moore’s current enthusiasms is for
genetically modified foods, an issue Greenpeace is entirely against. Although
it has risks, Moore
says, there are more risks in not developing it. One major issue Moore has been fighting
for is that of adding a daffodil gene to rice to make the genetically modified
product “Golden Rice”. This new discovery can prevent children with
Vitamin A deficiencies in Asia and Africa from
going blind. Genetic research and development can increase farmland and forest
productivity and improve health (Moore “Battle” par. 10-11).
Moore
currently lives in Vancouver
and still works with the B.C. logging industry, writing articles, performing
speeches, and appearing on television for them.
Works Cited
Bate, Roger. “Moore
Wisdom Needed.” Economic Affairs
24.2 (June 2004): 72.
Borders, Max. “The Reformers: Patrick
Moore.” <http://www.abetterearth.org/article.php/684.html>.
“Greenpeace.” Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclopedia.
2005 <http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761580663/Greenpeace.html>.
Moore, Patrick. “Battle for Biotech Progress.” The
American Enterprise
(March 2004). 3 April 2006
<http://www.theamericanenterprise.org/issues/articleID.17889/article_detail.asp>.
---. “Environmentalist for
the Twenty-first Century.” IPA Review 52.3 (September
2000): pages 3-8. 3 April 2006 <http://www.ipa.org.au/files/review52-3.pdf>.
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