Saturday, January 23, 2016

Confession from a Co-Founder of Greenpeace

It has been nice having some rain this week, even if it did slow down work. Next week looks pretty good. We will try to finish planting trees before the next storms hit.
   Of course, we have 150% normal rainfall. The state and the Feds have announced 0% water allocation for the year. I know the reservoirs are still low. They would fill faster if they didn't flush all this rainfall down to the ocean. Just saying.

Some of you think I am a little hard on the enviros. I thought you night be interested in hearing from a reformed environmentalist. Patrick Moore is a co-founder of Greenpeace. He stepped away a few years ago and he has been vilified by his former colleagues. I have met Moore. He seems to be a pretty good guy.

Environmentalism for the 21st Century
By Patrick Moore


As we begin the 21st century, environmental thinkers are divided along a sharp fault line. There are the doomsayers who predict the collapse of the global ecosystem. There are the technological optimists who believe that we can feed 12 billion people and solve all our problems with science and technology. I do not believe that either of these extremes makes sense. There is a middle road based on science and logic, the combination of which is sometimes referred to as common sense. There are real problems and there is much we can do to improve the state of the environment...
For me it was time to make a change. I had been against at least three or four things every day of my life for 15 years; I decided I'd like to be in favor of something for a change. I made the transition from the politics of confrontation to the politics of building consensus. After all, when a majority of people decide they agree with you it is probably time to stop hitting them over the head with a stick and sit down and talk to them about finding solutions to our environmental problems...

All social movements evolve from an earlier period of polarization and confrontation during which a minority struggles to convince society that its cause it is true and just, eventually followed by a time of reconciliation if a majority of the population accepts the values of the new movement. For the environmental movement this transition began to occur in the mid-1980s. The term sustainable development was adopted to describe the challenge of taking the new environmental values we had popularized, and incorporating them into the traditional social and economic values that have always governed public policy and our daily behavior. We cannot simply switch to basing all our actions on purely environmental values. Every day 6 billion people wake up with real needs for food, energy and materials. The challenge for sustainability is to provide for those needs in ways that reduce negative impact on the environment. But any changes made must also be socially acceptable and technically and economically feasible. It is not always easy to balance environmental, social, and economic priorities. Compromise and co-operation with the involvement of government, industry, academia and the environmental movement is required to achieve sustainability...

As an ecologist and environmentalist, not a political scientist or political activist, I have always shied away from strong opinions on poverty and class. But it seems unacceptable to me that so many hundreds of millions of people live at a material standard that we in the industrialized countries would not consider acceptable for a dignified life. I believe there is a great deal to be learned by exploring the relationships between ecology and politics. In some ways politics is the ecology of the human species. The two subjects have developed such completely different disciplines and terminologies that it is hard to think of them together. But I believe we must if we are to gain a truly holistic understanding of the relationship between ourselves and our society, and the Earth on which we ultimately depend...


MAY THE FOREST BE WITH YOU

If you would like to read Moore's complete statement you can find it at-
http://www.maninnature.com/Management/Conservation/WConservation1f.html

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