Birth of Greenpeace reviewed at
2002 WEAO Conference

By Steve Davey

Dr. Patrick Moore

Environmental professionals are used to hearing from experts and are frequently plagued by the protest groups who are often ill-informed but extremely media savvy. The 2002 Water Environment Association of Ontario Conference heard the views of a man who not only had been there and done that, but could articulate his experiences, with scientific facts interwoven with his own fascinating history which reads like science fiction. The truth is sometimes stranger than fiction.

Dr. Patrick Moore, formerly of Greenpeace, now of Greenspirit, took the conference along the road from the birth of Greenpeace to his own conversion, during his long protest-filled trek to a Damascus of science and reason. His is a fascinating story of a scientist and idealist who had sailed in a leaky boat on the first Greenpeace protest against nuclear testing in Alaska before taking on French atmospheric nuclear testing in the South Pacific. He proved to be an equal opportunity protester when he became involved in protests against Soviet Union factory whaling. Far from shore in the North Pacific, rubber boats were pitted against Russian harpoons, and the courage and determination of the protesters was seen on international TV, with coverage in newspapers and magazines around the world.

He reflected that as the 21st century began, environmental thinkers were divided along a sharp fault line. First were the doomsayers who predicted the collapse of the global ecosystem, resulting in "an Apocalypse of Biblical proportions". Then there are the technological optimists who believe that we can feed 12 billion people and solve all our problems with science and technology. They try to debunk all environmental concerns and subscribe to growth for its own sake.

Dr. Moore said: "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.

"By the mid-1980s, Greenpeace had grown from a church basement into an organization with an income of over (US) $100 million per year, offices in 21 countries and over 100 campaigns around the world, now tackling toxic waste, acid rain, uranium mining and drift net fishing as well as the original issues. But compromise and co-operation between government, industry, academia and the environmental movement is required to achieve sustainability.

"It is this effort to find consensus among competing interests that has occupied my time for the past 15 years. Not all my former colleagues see things that way," he said. "They reject consensus politics and sustainable development in favour of continued confrontation and ever-increasing extremism, ushering in an era of zero-tolerance and left-wing politics. They are anti-science and technology, with all large machines seen as inherently destructive and unnatural. Science is invoked to justify positions that have nothing to do with science and unfounded opinion accepted over demonstrated fact."

The chlorine saga

He said that Greenpeace was close to his heart, but it has strayed further than he could tolerate on the issue of chlorine, an element that is used in a wide variety of industrial, medical, and agricultural applications. In 1985,Greenpeace took up the campaign to eliminate chlorine from all industrial processes, and essentially remove it from human use, despite its enormous benefits to society. No matter who or what was to blame for the tragic deaths in Walkerton, there is no doubt about the fact that a little chlorine could have prevented this incident. But not even this will change Greenpeace's misguided policy; it is based on blind dogma, not on science or logic.

Following his paper, Dr. Moore attended a press conference where he enlarged on particular environmental issues. He said that biosolids applications in our forests might have considerable economic, as well as environmental, benefits.

Consultants' Forum

In addition to the wide range of technical and scientific papers, a special session on consulting was convened. The Consultants Forum comprised Rod Holme, P.Eng., of Earth Tech Inc., George Powell, P.Eng., CH2M HILL Canada Limited, and Bill DeAngelis, P.Eng., American Water Services Canada Corp. Rod was the seventh Canadian President of AWWA, and both George and Bill are Past Presidents of WEAO. The meeting was chaired by Tom Davey, Publisher, Environmental Science & Engineering magazine.

It was apparent that the issues of consultants' tendering for projects had become complex, costly, and in some cases, self-defeating, to the aims of obtaining engineering excellence. The low salary scales of the environmental engineering profession were vigorously debated. Comparisons were made between the per diems of environmental engineers compared to certain other professionals. When it was suggested that budgets would not allow more generous treatment of engineers and analytical chemists, Tom Davey pointed out that the life cycle of environmental engineering projects spanned decades. As many projects vastly outlived their designers by decades, any savings by owners using the Low Bid Ethos as the main criterion was miniscule compared to the monetary and environmental values of engineering excellence.

During some rigorous debate from the floor, it was suggested that municipalities had not got the money to pay more for engineering excellence, Tom retorted: "Look at Walkerton. In addition to human suffering and death, how many millions went into legal fees and inquiries which could have been prevented by spending a fraction of these costs on infrastructure, maintenance and mains replacement, along with operator training? If pipelines were as visible as potholes in the roads, the public would be demanding that funds be spent to improve and maintain our water infrastructure."

This article was abridged from Environmental Science & Engineering magazine, which also contains many more articles not posted on our Web Site. See our home page on how to order your subscription. We regret we can only accept orders from Canada and the United States.