Oct 30, 2006

Leading Greenspirit, not failing with Greenpeace

 
Patrick Moore of Greenspirit believes - Fifteen years of Greenpeace campaigns later I had some new insights. It was time to switch from confrontation to consensus, time to stop fighting and start talking with the people in charge. I became a convert to the idea of sustainable development and the need to consider social and economic issues along with my environmental values. I adopted the round table, consensus approach as the logical next step in the evolution of the movement for sustainability.
 
Little did I realize at the time how this would bring me into open and direct conflict with the movement I had helped bring into the world. I now find that many environmental groups have drifted into self-serving cliques with narrow vision and rigid ideology. At the same time that business and government are embracing public participation and inclusiveness, many environmentalists are showing signs of elitism, left-wingism, and downright eco-fascism. The once politically centrist, science-based vision of environmentalism has been largely replaced with extremist rhetoric. Science and logic have been abandoned and the movement is often used to promote other causes such as class struggle and anti-corporatism. The public is left trying to figure out what is reasonable and what is not.
 
For more details fro Patrick Moore : Hard Choices for the Environmental Movement