The Mail
On Sunday

The Great Green Con-Trick

Dr. Patrick Moore, the academic and renowned ecologist, was a founder member of Greenpeace, and later became its president. He helped to create the direct-action campaigning style which made the environmental protest group famous throughout the world. But now he is appalled by what it has become and in this searing attack he condemns the extremists who, he believes, have taken over Greenpeace, and the celebrities who have flocked to support the rainforest campaign.

"For 15 years, as a founder and director of Greenpeace, I was the leader in the most successful environmental pressure group the world has ever seen. I was a veteran of frontline battles against everything from nuclear waste to whaling.

We sailed our ship into the blast zones of US and French nuclear tests. We placed ourselves in the firing line of whaler’s harpoons.

But having spent half a lifetime courting danger and arrest, I now look at the mainstream environmental movement that I loved and can barely recognize it. Why? Because it has abandoned science to follow agendas that have little to do with saving the earth.

Of course, there were always extreme, irrational and mystical elements within our movement but they tended to be kept in their place during the early years. Then, in the mid-Eighties the ultra-leftists and extremists took over. After Greenham Common closed and the Britain Wall came down, these extremists were searching for a new cause and found it in environmentalism. The old agendas of class struggle and anti-corporatism are still there – but now they are dressed up in environmental terminology.

What has been lost are the principles of the early environmental movement: that all campaigns should be based on valid research. We won public support because our protests were founded on logical, scientific arguments.

That has largely gone now, to be replaced by a policy of sensationalism, misinformation and never-ending conflict.

Activists would have you believe Amazonia and large tracts of my native Canada are being stripped bare by greedy multinational logging companies. The only way to save the world, they say, is to save the Amazon’s 2,700,000 square miles of near-impenetrable woodland.

Greenpeace says that in the past four years an area the size of France has been destroyed. William Shatner – Star Trek’s Captain Kirk – came down to earth to narrate a National Geographic video saying: "Rainforest is being cleared at the rate of 20 football fields per minute."

They portray the forests as the "lings of the earth: - absorbing carbon dioxide and pumping out oxygen without which we would all suffocate on a mess of polluting hydro-carbons. But it is all nonsense. You would burn every forest in the world, never mind the Amazon, and it would have an insignificant impact on oxygen levels in the atmosphere.

It amazes me to see the movement behaving the same way over forestry – our most sustainable primary industry – as it did about nuclear war.

And into this heady brew came pop singers and actors, anxious to create a caring impression. I place the rock singer Sting in the same category as a lot of the eco-warriors. He has good intentions – but we all know that the road to Hell is paved with.

These celebrity campaigners were at it again in New York’s Carnegie Hall last month for the 11^th annual Save the Rainforest rock concert. Sting, Elton John, Billy Joel and Tom Jones joined unlikely hands with Rocky Martin, Gladys Knight and Steview Wonder before a sell-out crowd of 1,800. People in the front paid $2,000 a seat for the privilege.

"When the trees are bull-dozed, a way of life is destroyed," Trudie Styler, Sting’s wife and the driving force behind the Rainforest Foundation, told the audience. She also said the foundation would fund natives of Guyana to study law so they could fight their own battle to save their land: "They want to know how to help themselves."

But a growing body of opinion says the only people they need saving from are Mr. And Mrs., Sting.

Certainly, the environmental movement continues to campaign on many fronts that are backed up by science. Nuclear waste dumping at Sellafield, excessive use of fossil fuel (and subsequent concern about climate change) and toxic discharges are legitimate issues.

I have a pragmatic view about people and the environment, however, we have to co-exist.

There are six billion people in the world who require things every day for their survival. It is no good wishing that there were no people on the planet, which is what many of these new activities appear to want. I think we are as much a part of Nature as any other species."