Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist (28 page)

In fact it wasn’t long until the paper campaign morphed into a much broader one—a campaign for a global ban on chlorine in all industrial processes, including polyvinyl chloride (PVC), often simply referred to as vinyl. This is when Greenpeace really lost me. As a student of advanced biochemistry, I realized chlorine was one of the 92 natural elements in the periodic table and that it is essential for life. You don’t just go around banning entire elements, especially when life without them would be impossible! This was the first time I really noticed that none of my fellow directors, including Chairman David McTaggart, had any formal science education. They could variously be described as political and social activists, or as environmental entrepreneurs, looking for a career in the now highly popular environmental movement. These were perfectly acceptable orientations, but we were now dealing with very complex issues of chemistry and biology. The great divide between the physical sciences and the social sciences was making things extremely difficult.

I reminded my fellow directors that chlorine was one of the building blocks of the universe and questioned “whether banning an element was within our jurisdiction.” I reminded them that adding chlorine to drinking water represented the biggest advance in the history of public health and saved hundreds of millions from death due to cholera, typhoid, and other water-borne communicable diseases. I explained that more than 75 percent of our pharmaceuticals, including antibiotics, were based on chlorine chemistry. And if that wasn’t enough I said, “The best way to deliver the slightly chlorinated drinking water to the public is in a PVC pipe.” The other Greenpeace directors behaved as though these were minor exceptions to the general rule that chlorine should be banned worldwide, so I had to leave. Simple science made me a Greenpeace dropout.

To this day I am proud of most of the things we accomplished during my 15 years with Greenpeace. We got many things right in the early years of the movement: We stopped the bomb, saved the whales, and ended toxic discharge into the water and air. In retrospect the only issue I feel we got wrong was nuclear energy, and that was a big mistake with significant consequences. But with the decision to ban chlorine for all human uses, Greenpeace began to adopt a number of campaigns that were wrongheaded and in no way based on science or logic.

For me, this was when what had been science-based policy turned into a kind of religion based on belief rather than facts or evidence, as Bob Hunter had predicted years before. Greenpeace now calls chlorine the “devil’s element” and refers to PVC as “the poison plastic,” even though there is no evidence to show that it is toxic. And there are the following points to consider:

Table salt is sodium chloride (NaCl), about two-thirds chlorine by weight. It is an essential nutrient for plants and animals, including humans. This is why farmers put salt licks out for their livestock. The acid in our stomach that digests our food is hydrochloric acid. It is doubtful any form of life would be possible without chlorine.

There is more chlorine in the earth’s crust than there is carbon, which is the most essential element for life. Chlorine is the 11th most abundant element in the earth’s crust.

PVC is the most important plastic used in the construction of buildings. It is found in water and sewer pipes, electrical conduits, wiring insulation, siding, roofing, decks, flooring, and wall coverings. It is particular important in health care facilities, where it is used for blood bags, intravenous tubing, gloves, caps, flooring, and wall covering. Because it is smooth and impervious, it can easily be disinfected, making it easier to control the spread of staph infections and super-bugs.

There was some irony in the fact that at the same time Greenpeace was adopting a zero-tolerance policy on chlorine and PVC, I was busy building a fish hatchery in which all the plumbing was made from PVC pipe. I glued together thousands of feet and hundreds of fittings and marveled at what an efficient material PVC was to work with. The idea that it could be labeled “poison plastic” seemed way over the top to me. I had become intellectually alienated from my own organization.

No one can deny that many of the substances used in daily life are toxic when ingested in large doses. Try chasing a cup of table salt with a cup of gasoline, to name two such substances. As every toxicologist knows, “the poison is in the dose,” not in the substance itself. Many chemicals that are essential nutrients at low doses, such as table salt, are fatal at high doses. Anyone who has siphoned gasoline knows it is not an essential nutrient, and yet it is unlikely to cause any harm at low doses.

None of this matters to the “chemophobes,” those who generally fear chemicals. They tend to want to ban anything that has the potential to be toxic. If they had their way, today many elements in the periodic table would be eliminated, thus severely damaging the fabric of the universe, or at least the fabric of civilization. There are campaigns against lead, mercury, cadmium, chlorine, fluorine, bromine, tin, arsenic, and, of course, uranium. These elements all have important uses in health, technology, energy production, and lighting. We have been bombarded into thinking lead is deadly, yet many of us drive around with about 30 pounds of it in the battery of our cars.

It is natural, I suppose, to think that it would be good to get rid of everything “toxic.” But then how would we disinfect our water and how would we kill the bacteria that are trying to kill us? The reason chlorine is the most important element for public health is precisely because it is toxic. The fact is we need toxic substances to survive. Even herbal medicine is partly based on using plants that contain chemicals that are toxic to infectious agents that would otherwise overwhelm our own defenses.

Here I was one of five international directors of Greenpeace and there was nothing I could say or do to reverse this slide into voodoo science. Not one of my fellow directors had any education in science and yet they were making judgments about complex issues that involved chemistry and biology: Chlorine must be banned for the good of the environment and human health—
human health
for Pete’s sake. I guess junk science started before Greenpeace adopted the anti-chlorine campaign, but this was my first direct encounter with it and I was flabbergasted. Renate Kroesa was supposed to be a chemist, but she was the most fanatical of all in promoting this crazy idea. Most Greenpeace folk had no chemistry and simply bought into the rhetoric about the devil and the poison and then, of course, there were the evil chlorine-producing multinational corporations bent on subjugating humankind.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, Greenpeace, and most of the environmental movement, lost its way. Whereas early campaigns were based on an honest concern for human survival, whale extinction, and really toxic waste, they gradually drifted into sensationalism, fabrication, and downright lies in order to gain public support. I watched, helpless but for the pleas for common sense, as the organization I had helped found and build became my adversary in relation to a growing number of issues. This was not in my plans, for a time I tried to convince my fellow directors that they should stick to the facts. But the combination of David McTaggart’s political instincts and the growing power of the movement corrupted the organization. It was way past the time for me to move on.

On January 31, 1986, I drew my last Greenpeace paycheck and joined Quatsino Seafarms full-time to help take the salmon-farming venture from startup to production. Our first year-class of salmon was already in the sea pens, and the second year-class was hatching in the incubators. Brother Mike had his hands full running the operation and it was time for me to start looking for markets and planning for future expansion. I took the job on with enthusiasm, adding more capacity to our hatchery, as there was now a growing demand for salmon smolts from farms that didn’t have a hatchery. In our third year we produced 300,000 smolts, selling 200,000 of them to other farmers and making the hatchery a profitable operation in its own right.

In the early summer of 1986, I attended the first formal meeting of the fledgling B.C. Salmon Farmers Association. Brad and June Hope and Tom and Linda May were joined by a dozen or so folks who had either started farms or wanted to find out more about how to get into the business. Brad said we needed a spokesperson to deal with the media and the concerns about our industry among the public. They elected me president because I had a lot of experience with the media and could hold my own in a discussion or debate. Within a month I found myself publicly defending salmon farming against charges from the environmental movement, including Greenpeace. It was easy to see how I could be portrayed as a turncoat.

The activist campaign against salmon farming has grown steadily, keeping pace with the growth of the industry worldwide. Since its beginnings in Norway in the 1970s, salmon farming has become established in Scotland, Ireland, Chile, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. Salmon are a cold water species, so they do best in the abundant sheltered waters found in northern and southern coastlines, where glaciers once carved deep fjords and inlets. Salmon farming has proved controversial everywhere it operates, partly just because it is new and partly because it competes with existing wild fisheries. But the opposition has been most virulent in British Columbia. Today the province houses a small industry of full-time activists who are bent on damaging the salmon farming industry and its markets.

It’s clear to me that aquaculture, including salmon aquaculture, constitutes the future of healthy protein and oil, nutrients that we need to feed a growing population. Worldwide, aquaculture is now the fastest-growing food-producing sector, and there are good reasons for this.

First, the wild fisheries have been largely tapped out; there has been no increase in the global catch for about 15 years. Some wild fisheries are severely overfished and must be allowed to rebuild, a process that may take decades or longer. The Atlantic cod fishery is a classic example. Cod are large predatory fish, which are caught above the continental shelves in the North Atlantic. In the 1850s, 43 sail-powered schooners from the port of Beverly, Massachusetts, hauled in nearly 8,000 tons of cod from a portion of the Scotian Shelf each year. Mind you, back then the men fished using single-hooked hand-jigged lines dropped from small, two-man dories. Compare that to 1999, when 90 modern ships equipped with the latest fish-spotting sonar and massive nets hauled in only 7,200 tons from the entire Scotian Shelf. Scientists used the old ships logs to calculate that the current tonnage of adult cod in the North Atlantic is just 4 percent of what it was in 1852. This means the stocks have been depleted by 96 percent. The only practical way to increase seafood production and reduce the pressures on the wild fish stocks is aquaculture, which now provides nearly half of the world’s seafood and will soon produce more than half of it.
[2]
[3]

Second, fish are two to three times more efficient at converting feed into food for people than are land animals like cows, pigs, and chickens. There are two reasons for this: Fish are cold-blooded, so they don’t have to expend energy keeping their insides warm as mammals and birds must do. And fish live in a neutrally buoyant environment, so they don’t use energy to remain upright fighting gravity as we and other land animals do.

Third, the protein and oils from seafood are healthier than those from land animals. The omega-3 oils in seafood, especially in oily fish like salmon and tuna, cut the incidence of fatal heart attacks by up to 50 percent.
[4]
And it has been shown in a number of studies that these oils can also reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s disease by more than 50 percent.
[5]
[6]
A number of studies have shown omega-3 oils reduce stress, something many of us would benefit from.

The anti-aquaculture activists who belong to Greenpeace, the David Suzuki Foundation, the Coastal Alliance for Aquaculture Reform, and many other pressure groups do not share my views. These organizations claim to support the salmon farming industry, but only if it adopts “closed containment” technology. There is only one small catch: there is no such thing as “closed containment.” It would be like telling chicken farmers they can’t take the chicken manure out of the chicken coops and spread it on their fields. All agricultural systems have inputs and outputs - farming can’t be done in a vacuum. But the idea of a salmon farm that has no outputs seems to appeal to some people, so much so that the opposition political party in British Columbia has adopted “closed containment” as a condition for its support of salmon farming. Watch it wriggle out of that one if it wins an election someday.

Initially the activists demanded salmon farms be placed on the land where they couldn’t “pollute” the ocean. My initial response was to suggest that maybe we should put the dairy cows and chickens in the sea in order to avoid polluting the land. Seriously though, salmon need seawater to grow and placing farms on land would mean pumping huge volumes of ocean water uphill into shore-based tanks. This would require a tremendous amount of energy, likely from diesel-electric generators in remote, off grid locations, which would spew out air pollution and greenhouse gases. This would hardly constitute an environmental improvement. Faced with this fact the activists changed their demand to “closed containment” in the sea. They provided no suggestion of what to do with the waste from the fish or how to get new water in and let old water out. Basically, their “solution” would mean an end to the practice of salmon farming.