[escepticos] RV: The great Green con-trick

["Javier Armentia" <planetario@...>]

Esto puede ser de interés dentro de la lista, al menos colateral... Lo
reenvío con respeto y espero que nadie se sienta ofendido si es que lo
considera offtopic, pero ciertamente, como uno de los fundadores de Grinpís
considera que la organización ha abandonado completamente la ciencia, entra
dentro de lo que solemos comentar por estos pagos.
Saludos

javier armentia

Enviado: lunes 8 de mayo de 2000 11:54
Asunto: Re: The great Green con-trick


> Complete article from 'The Mail on Sunday' May 7 2000:
>
> 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 rainforests
> campaign ...
>
>
> The great Green con-trick
>
> by Dr Patrick Moore
>
>
> For 15 years, as founder and director of Greenpeace, I was
> a 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
> whalers' 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 recognise 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 Berlin 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 'lungs 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 could 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 what
> the road to Hell is paved with.
>
> These celebrity campaigners were at it again in New York's
> Carnegie Hall last month for the 11th annual Save the
> Rainforest rock concert. Sting, Sir Elton John, Billy Joel
> and Tom Jones joined unlikely hands with Ricky Martin,
> Gladys Knight and Stevie Wonder before a sell-out crowd of
> 1,800. People in the front paid $2,000 for the privilege.
>
> 'When the trees are bulldozed, 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 Sellafieldm 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 activists appear to
> want. I think we are as much a part of Nature as any other
> species.
>
> With a group of other forestry experts I visited eight of
> Brazil's 26 states. We flew over the Amazon rainforest and
> met all the environmental authorities, the World Wide Fund
> for Nature and conservation groups. We studied satellite
> pictures of the entire area, and we found more than 80 per
> cent of the forest intact.
>
> But if the rainforest was being destroyed at the rate critics
> say, it would have vanished ages ago.
>
> So where do the statistics come from which supposedly prove
> we are rapidly advancing towards the total destruction of the
> rainforests? Basically, the figures are a sophisticated con-
> trick based on bad science.
>
> What is happening is that land is being counted that is being
> cleared following a programme of replanting. It is not virgin
> forest. The same pieces of land are being counted over and
> over again. If you keep adding up these areas, Man has cut
> down 50 times the size of the Amazon already.
>
> It is this cavalier disregard for scientific truth which has
> left me so disillusioned with Greenpeace. Other examples
> include the misguided assault on genetically modified crops,
> the admitted misinformation about toxic wastes on the Brent
> Spar oil rig, and the boycott campaign against Canadian forest
> products.
>
> I spent years fighting for what I believed in, and felt that
> by about the mid-Eighties we had achieved the breakthrough.
> By them most people agreed with us. Big business and
> governments wanted to co-operate with environmentalists.
>
> To me, at that point it is logical to make the transition
> to working with people to find solutions based on science
> and reason. Our cause had become mainstream. But, of course,
> that's not what the activists wanted, nor did it fit in with
> their political agendas.
>
> Instead, we have an environmental movement that is run by
> people who want to fight - not to win.
>
> --
> John Atkinson
> http://www.manx2.demon.co.uk/index.htm
> Email: jha en bigfoot.com
>