Patrick Moore (consultant)

Patrick Moore
Born	1947 (1947) Winter Harbour, British Columbia
Nationality	Canadian
Education	BSc Biology and Forest Biology, PhD, Ecology, Honorary Doctorate of Science
Occupation	ecologist
Employer(s)	Greenspirit Strategies Ltd., Vancouver, Canada
Known for	early member of Greenpeace, independent and sometimes contrary opinions on environmental policy.
Title	Chair and Chief Scientist
Parent(s)	W.D. (Bill) Moore and Beverly Moore (nee North)
Website	http://www.greenspirit.com

Patrick Moore (born in 1947) is an ecologist and environmental activist, known as one of the co-founders of Greenpeace, in which he was a diretor from 1971 to 1986. Today he is the co-founder, Chair and Chief Scientist of Greenspirit Strategies in Vancouver, a consulting firm that advises government and industry on a wide range of environmental and sustainability issues. He is a frequent public speaker at meetings of industry associations, universities, and policy groups.

He has sharply and publicly differed with many policies of major environmental groups,including Greenpeace, on other issues including forestry, biotechnology, aquaculture, and the use of chemicals. He is an outspoken proponent of nuclear energy and sceptical of human responsibility for climate change.

Early life

Moore was born in 1947, in Port Alice, British Columbia and raised in Winter Harbour, on Vancouver Island. He is the third generation of a British Columbian family with a long history in forestry and fishing. His father, W. D. Moore, was the president of the B.C. Truck Loggers Association and past president of the Pacific Logging Congress. Moore obtained a Ph.D. in ecology from the Institute of Animal Resource Ecology, University of British Columbia under the direction of Dr. C.S. Holling and Dr. Hamish Kimmins.

Career

Greenpeace

According to Greenpeace: How a Group of Ecologists, Journalists, and Visionaries Changed the World by Rex Wyler, the Don't Make a Wave Committee was formed in January 1970 by Dorothy and Irving Stowe, Ben Metcalfe, Marie and Jim Bohlen, Paul Cote, and Bob Hunter and incorporated in October 1970. The Committee had formed to plan opposition to the testing of a five megaton hydrogen bomb in 1971 by the United States Atomic Energy Commission on Amchitka Island in the Aleutians. Moore joined the committee in early 1971 and, as Greenpeace co-founder Bob Hunter wrote, “Moore was quickly accepted into the inner circle on the basis of his scientific background, his reputation [as an environmental activist], and his ability to inject practical, no-nonsense insights into the discussions.” From September 2005 until its alteration in February 2007, the Greenpeace International web site included Patrick Moore in a list of "founders and first members". Greenpeace decided, more than 20 years after Moore left the organization, that he was no longer a founder. The Greenpeace members who did this were probably not born when Patrick Moore helped found Greenpeace.

Moore traveled to Alaska with Jim Bohlen to testify against the hydrogen bomb tests before the US Atomic Energy Commission. In September 1971, Moore was a member of the crew of the Phyllis Cormack, a chartered fishing boat which the Committee sent across the North Pacific in order to draw attention to the US testing of the 5 megaton bomb. Greenpeace was the name given to the boat for the voyage and it would be the first of the many Greenpeace protests. Following the first voyage, key crew members decided to formally change the name of the Don't Make a Wave Committee to the Greenpeace Foundation. These decision makers included founders Patrick Moore, Bob Hunter, Rod Marining and Ben Metcalfe.

Following U.S. President Richard Nixon's cancellation of the remaining hydrogen bomb tests planned for Amchitka Island in early 1972, Greenpeace turned its attention to French atmospheric nuclear testing at Mururoa Atoll in the South Pacific. In May 1972, Moore traveled to New York with Jim Bohlen and Marie Bohlen to lobby the key United Nations delegations from the Pacific Rim countries involved. Moore then went to Europe together with Ben Metcalfe, Dorothy Metcalfe, Lyle Thurston and Rod Marining where they received an audience with Pope Paul VI and protested at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. In June, they attended the first UN Conference on the Environment in Stockholm where they convinced New Zealand to propose a vote condemning French nuclear testing, which passed with a strong majority.

Moore again crewed the Phyllis Cormack in 1975 during the first campaign to save the whales, as Greenpeace met the Soviet whaling fleet off the coast of California. During the confrontation, film footage was caught of the Soviet whaling boat firing a harpoon over the heads of Greenpeace members in a Zodiac inflatable and into the back of a female sperm whale. The film footage made the evening news the next day on all three US national networks, initiating Greenpeace's debut on the world media stage, and prompting a swift rise in public support of the charity. Patrick Moore and Bob Hunter appeared on Dr. Bill Wattenburg's talk radio show on KGO and appealed for a lawyer to help them incorporate a branch office in San Francisco and to manage donations. David Tussman, a young lawyer, volunteered to help Moore, Hunter, and Paul Spong set up an office at Fort Mason. The Greenpeace Foundation of America (since changed to Greenpeace USA), then became the major fundraising center for the expansion of Greenpeace worldwide.

Presidency of Greenpeace Foundation in Canada

In early 1977, Bob Hunter stepped down as president of the Greenpeace Foundation and Patrick Moore was elected president. He inherited an organization that was deeply in debt. Greenpeace organizations began to form throughout North America, including cities such as Toronto, Montreal, Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, Boston, and San Francisco. Not all of these offices accepted the authority of the founding organization in Canada even though they were using its name and its deeds to raise funds. Moore and the board of the Greenpeace Foundation in Vancouver called two international meetings to discuss governance proposals. During this time David Tussman, and the board of the San Francisco group announce their intention intended to break away from the Greenpeace Foundation and take the money raised by the Foundation's effort's with them. After efforts to settle the matter failed, the Greenpeace Foundation filed a civil lawsuit in San Francisco charging that the San Francisco group was in violation of trademark and copyright by using the Greenpeace name without permission of the Greenpeace Foundation. David Tussman was clearly in breach of his legal obligation to represent the best interests of the Greenpeace Foundation as he had volunteered to provide then with legal council in the first place.

The lawsuit was settled at a meeting on 10 October 1979, in the offices of lawyer David Gibbons in Vancouver. Attending were Moore, Hunter, David McTaggart, Rex Weyler, and about six others. At this meeting it was agreed that Greenpeace Foundation was the legitimate owner of the word "Greenpeace". It was decided that Greenpeace International would be created. This meant that Greenpeace would remain a single organization rather than an amorphous collection of individual offices. David McTaggart, who had come to represent all the other Greenpeace groups against the Greenpeace Foundation, was named Chairman. The debts of Greenpeace Foundation were paid off by the other Greenpeace groups. Moore became President of Greenpeace Canada (the new name for Greenpeace Foundation) and a director of Greenpeace International. Other directors were appointed from the USA, France, the UK, and the Netherlands. Moore served for nine years as President of Greenpeace Canada, as well as six years as a Director of Greenpeace International.

In 1985, Moore was on board the Rainbow Warrior before it was bombed and sunk by the French government. He and other directors of Greenpeace International were greeting the ship off the coast of New Zealand on its way to protest French nuclear testing at Mururoa Atoll. Expedition photographer, Fernando Pereira, was killed. Greenpeace's media presence peaked again.

After Greenpeace

In 1986, after leaving Greenpeace by his own choosing, Moore established a family salmon farming business, Quatsino Seafarms, at his home in Winter Harbour. In this year he was also elected president of the British Columbia Salmon Farmers Association. From 1990-4 he was appointed to the British Columbia Round Table on the Environment and the Economy and founded and chaired the B.C. Carbon Project. In 1991, he joined the board of the Forest Alliance of BC, an initiative of the CEOs of the major forest companies in British Columbia. As chair of the Sustainable Forestry Committee of the Forest Alliance he spent ten years developing the Principles of Sustainable Forestry, which were later adopted by much of the industry. In 1991, Moore also founded Greenspirit to "promote sustainable development from a scientific environmental platform". In 2002, Tom Tevlin and Trevor Figueiredo joined Moore in the formation of the environmental consultancy company Greenspirit Strategies Ltd. Patrick Moore is Chair and Chief Scientist of the organization.

Moore served for four years as Vice President of Environment for Waterfurnace International manufacturing geothermal heat pumps. In 2000, Moore published Green Spirit - Trees are the Answer, a photo-book on forests and the role they can play in solving some current environmental problems. He also made two appearances on Penn & Teller: Bullshit! in episodes Environmental Hysteria (2003) and Endangered Species (2005). In 2006, Moore became co-chair (with Christine Todd Whitman) of a new industry-funded initiative, the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, which promotes increased use of nuclear energy. In 2010, Greenspirit Strategies was recruited to write a report for the Indonesian logging firm Asia Pulp & Paper (APP), a multi-national falsely accused of widespread and illegal rainforest clearance practices.

Views

In 2005, Moore criticized what he saw as scare tactics and disinformation employed by some within the environmental movement, saying that the environmental movement "abandoned science and logic in favor of emotion and sensationalism." Moore contends that for the environmental movement "most of the really serious problems have been dealt with", seeking now to "invent doom and gloom scenarios". He suggests they romanticise peasant life as part of an anti-industrial campaign to prevent development in less-developed countries, which he describes as "anti-human". Moore was interviewed in the 2007 film documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, in which he expressed similar views. In 2007 The Guardian reported on his writings for the Royal Society arguing against the theory that mankind was causing global warming, noting his advocacy for the felling of tropical rainforests and the planting of genetically engineered crops. He has expressed his positive views of logging on the Greenspirit website. In 2010, Moore was commissioned by forestry giant Asia Pulp and Paper to report on its logging activity in Indonesia's rainforests, resulting in a glowing review.

Alternative energy

Although he spoke out against nuclear power in 1976, today he supports it, along with renewable energy sources such as hydroelectric, geothermal, biomass, and wind. In Australian newspaper The Age, he writes "Greenpeace is wrong — we must consider nuclear power". He argues that any realistic plan to reduce reliance on fossil fuels or greenhouse gas emissions need increased use of nuclear energy. He has publicly acknowledged that this is in stark contrast to his views on this subject some decades earlier (as has another pioneer environmentalist, Stewart Brand). Moore is supported by the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), a national organization of pro-nuclear industries and in 2009 he chaired their Clean and Safe Energy Coalition. As chair, he suggested that the mainstream media and the environmentalist movement is not as opposed to nuclear energy as in decades past.

Global warming

Moore calls global warming the "most difficult issue facing the scientific community today in terms of being able to actually predict with any kind of accuracy what's going to happen". In 2006, he wrote to the Royal Society arguing there was "no scientific proof" that mankind was causing global warming.

Genetically modified foods

In 2006, Moore addressed a Biotechnology Industry Organization conference in Waikiki saying, "There's no getting away from the fact that over 6 billion people wake up each day on this planet with real needs for food, energy and materials", and need genetically engineered crops to this end. He also told the gathering that global warming and the melting of glaciers is not necessarily a negative event because it creates more arable land and the use of forest products drives up demand for wood and spurs the planting of more trees.

Criticism

Moore's views and change of stance (see above) have evoked controversy in environmentalist arenas. He is accused of having "abruptly turned his back on the environmental movement" and "being a mouthpiece for some of the very interests Greenpeace was founded to counter". His critics point out Moore's business relations with "polluters and clear-cutters" through his consultancy. Moore has earned his living since the early 1990s primarily by consulting for, and publicly speaking for a wide variety of corporations and lobby groups such as the Nuclear Energy Institute. Monte Hummel, MScF, President, World Wildlife Fund Canada has claimed that Moore's book, Pacific Spirit, is a collection of "pseudoscience and dubious assumptions." Dr Leonie Jacobs of the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands has accused Moore of being paid by the timber industry in order to deliberately mislead the public about logging.

Bibliography

• Wyler, Rex (2004) Greenpeace: How a Group of Ecologists, Journalists, and Visionaries Changed the World. Rodale Press. ISBN 1-59486-106-4
• Moore, Patrick (1995) Pacific spirit : the forest reborn. Terra Bella Publishers Canada. ISBN 1-896171-07-9
• Moore, Patrick (2000) Green Spirit: Trees are the Answer. Greenspirit Enterprises. ISBN 0-9686404-0-0
• Moore, Patrick (2010) "Trees are the Answer, 10th Anniversary Edition." Beatty Street Publishing Inc. ISBN 978-0-9864808-0-5
• Moore, Patrick (2011) "Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist." Beatty Street Publishing Inc. ISBN 978-0-9864808-2-9

External links

• Greenspirit, Patrick Moore's website
• Greenspirit Strategies, Patrick Moore's consultancy
• Guardian article on Moore "Why is a former Greenpeace activist siding with Indonesia's logging industry?" by George Monbiot. 2 December 2010.
• Audio Interview with Moore from MassiveChange.com
• Source Watch on Patrick Moore
• Going Nuclear: A Green Makes the Case - Washington Post, 16 April 16 2006
• Why I Left Greenpeace - The Wall Street Journal, 22 April 2008
• Patrick Moore , Forest Action Network website about Patrick Moore
• [6] Wired article on Patrick Moore