Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist (9 page)

My dad, Bill Moore, worked alongside the other loggers six days a week, spending evenings and Sunday afternoon in the office tending to company affairs.

Today I can walk through forests where my grandfather clearcut logged 60 and 70 years ago, and if it weren’t for the presence of rotting, moss-covered stumps, you would never know the forests had once been cleared. The new forest is so lush and full of shrubs and ferns that all evidence of disturbance has disappeared. Bears, wolves, cougars, ravens, owls, eagles, and all the other forest-dwellers live there. The trees are straight and tall. Although they have not yet reached the great size of their predecessors, they form a dense and growing cover on land once cleared bare. The marvel of this renewal is that it took place entirely on its own, without the slightest help from human hands. There had been no thought given to reforestation or any other aspect of restoration.Nature has regenerated almost in spite of human disturbance and is rapidly returning to itsoriginal condition.

My dad was a big man who had inherited the logging camp at age 21 when his father, Albert, passed away. It was the beginning of World War II, the business was $40,000 in debt, a large sum at the time, and there were 60 grizzled loggers, all older than he was, and he had to be the boss. Dad worked day and night for 20 years before he could see any light at the end of the tunnel. In the woods dad could curse a blue streak while lines snapped and machines broke down. At home he was a well-read family man, who, although stern at times, would joke and play with us during his few hours away from work. He taught me about leadership and the fact that someone must take responsibility for making decisions, at home, in the workplace, and in government. He had a small business but he loomed large in his industry, becoming president of two industry associations, the BC Truckloggers Association and the Pacific Logging Congress. He cared about working people; he founded and chaired a number of initiatives in forestry education, worker safety, and loggers’ sports. The saddest thing I’ve ever seen was his 10-year battle with Alzheimer’s as it brought a proud man to his knees.

While dad taught me leadership, my mom, Beverly, taught me how to think. Also well read, she was the daughter of a hard-working West Coast salmon fishing family that struggled through the Great Depression. My granddad, Art, and his three brothers had pioneered the salmon fishing industry in Winter Harbour in the late 1930s. They were involved in the creation of the Kyuquot Fisherman’s Co-op, an effort to get out from under the yoke of the big fish buyers who paid next to nothing for their hard labor. He and Granny Mary were Socialists of a peaceful nature. But like their Russian comrades they were atheists and rejected capitalism. This philosophy strongly influenced Mom, although her education and love of knowledge tempered her political fervor.

My mom, Beverly, and my dad, Bill, about to go to “town” on a float plane, circa 1960. Our little village by the sea is in the background, the camp cookhouse is above.

When I was 15 Mom introduced me to the great British philosopher, Bertrand Russell. While I found the first book she recommended,
Why I Am Not a Christian
, interesting, it was his writing in the social and scientific fields that really turned me on. I raced through
Authority and the Individual
, a treatise on the conflict between our rights as individuals and our obligations to the greater good of society. Then I discovered
Our Knowledge of the External World
and
Inquiry into Meaning and Truth
.I was fascinated by Russell’s grasp of the scientific method but even more impressed with his critical thinking. Thus began my lifelong pursuit of knowledge in the sciences and my near obsession with thinking critically as a way of separating facts and logic from misinformationand propaganda.

In an era when classroom sex education didn’t exist Mom taught me about the birds and the bees in a nice way. No doubt she was a big part of the reason there were no unwanted pregnancies in my younger years.

Around the same time I was sent off to boarding school in Vancouver, at age 14, the road came to Winter Harbour, 250 miles of bad gravel from the nearest pavement at Campbell River. We thought the road would bring new settlers to the village. Instead, it prompted an exodus. Today there are 11 full-time residents in my hometown, there were 75 before the road came in. I love it there.

My four years at St. George’s private school in Vancouver were formative in a number of ways. I excelled in the arts and sciences and I made friends who I count as my best friends today. I found out I disliked contact sports, English rugby being the school’s idea of how real men were made. Give me tennis or skiing over sports that require extreme body contact. So I failed as a jock even though I admired my fellow students who thought nothing of risking life and limb to get a ball across the line.

After graduating from St. George’s I enrolled in the Faculty of Science at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver in 1965, and soon developed a passion for the life sciences. During those years I really came to appreciate my home village in the wilderness. I had always been mechanically inclined: I was monkey-wrenching engines by the time I was eight and I built my first 12-foot plywood boat when I was 13. I imagined I would become an engineer or architect. Auspiciously, in retrospect, I nearly failed my first year at university after being at the top of my class throughout high school. It was a simple case of going a little wild after the imposed discipline of an English-style boarding school, but it meant I didn’t qualify to enter the School of Engineering. Oscar Sziklai, a forestry professor-friend of my dad’s, encouraged me to apply to the School of Forestry. Soon after I began to study trees and forests I realized I was even more fascinated by biology than by engineering or mechanics.

After excelling in first-year forestry I was given the opportunity to fashion my own program, a combined honors degree in forestry and biology. This allowed me to study a broad range of life-science subjects: genetics, biochemistry, soil science, plant physiology, and forest science. Then I discovered ecology, the study of how all living things are interrelated, and how we are related to them. Having grown up in an agnostic household I had always viewed science as a purely technical subject, the objective of which was to dispel mystery rather than to foster it. Now I saw that through the science of ecology one could come to appreciate the infinitely complex nature of the universe and gain an insight into the mystery of life. I realized the feeling of tranquility and wonder I had experienced as a child in the rain forest was a kind of prayer or meditation. Ecology gave me a sort of religion, and with it the passion to take on the world. I became a born-again ecologist.

Upon graduating with honors I was awarded a Ford Foundation Fellowship to enroll in a PhD program at the university of my choice. I picked Washington University in St. Louis, where Dr. David Gates, a leader in research on photosynthesis and food chain energetics, agreed to head my thesis committee. In June of 1969 I drove from Vancouver to St. Louis in my Volkswagen camper microbus, sporting a pretty big Afro, to discover America for the first time. The campus was beautiful but the city center had been burned to the ground the previous summer during the riots following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. A nearby river was so polluted it would regularly catch on fire. It was the height of the Vietnam War and even grad students were being drafted. Fear and loathing darkened the beauty of the campus… I felt like Bilbo the Hobbit witnessing Mordor for the first time. It was certainly no place for a country kid from Canada to study ecology.

So I traveled on through the South and east to Key West, Florida, and back across Texas to California, where I visited the University of California at Davis, known for excellence in agriculture and ecology. There was no burned-out city there, but the dread of being drafted into an unpopular war was the same as in St Louis. I couldn’t fathom the idea of being among fellow students who lived in fear every day. I turned tail and headed back to my peaceful home in Western Canada, where I convinced my professors to let me do my PhD at the University of British Columbia.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was part of what became known as the “reverse brain drain.” The brain drain referred to the fact that many young Canadians, after benefiting from publicly funded educations, chose to move to the United States where salaries were higher and taxes lower. For a period of a few years during the Vietnam War this trend reversed as Canadians chose to stay home and many of the brightest Americans came to Canada to avoid the war.

One of my mentors was C.S. (Buzz) Holling, a pioneer in computer modeling of insect population dynamics. He agreed to let me do an interdisciplinary PhD in ecology and environmental science, which allowed me to take courses in any faculty. I studied environmental law, environmental economics, forest ecology, oceanography, marine biology, mineral engineering, and soil science, among other subjects.

Shortly after I began my studies an announcement was made that would help shape the future of environmental policy and law in my home province. Utah Mining and Smelting of San Francisco was developing a large open pit copper mine near the sea on northern Vancouver Island, not far from my home at Winter Harbour. The company had applied for a permit to dispose of 40,000 tons of mine tailings per day into Rupert Inlet, a deep fjord in Quatsino Sound. Over the next 25 years it would produce $3 billion worth of copper and become the world’s deepest open pit at 1,200 feet below sea level. A number of the fledgling environmental groups, a few university professors, and 150 or so individuals filed objections with British Columbia’s Pollution Control Branch to stop the mine from dumping its waste into the sea. The battle was joined.

I realized this was a perfect subject for my interdisciplinary PhD thesis as it involved the environment, industry, government regulation, communities, pollution, marine science, and economics. The company, backed by consultants, claimed the mine waste would immediately settle to the bottom of the inlet and stay there. My preliminary research contradicted this, predicting the tailings would be stirred into the surface waters due to the tidal circulation pattern in the inlet. With the support of my professors I filed an objection with the Pollution Control Branch, explaining that I had evidence the mining company and its consultants were wrong. The director of Pollution Control denied my objection, along with most of the others. Only one organization, The Pacific Salmon Society, and three lay individuals were chosen to appear at a public hearing. It’s hard to imagine today but in 1969 the director had the authority to deny any objector; in fact this was to be the very first public hearing in B.C. on the subject of industrial pollution.

I didn’t give up so easily. I contacted the Pacific Salmon Society, found out its members knew relatively little about the specifics of the issue, and invited myself to their next board meeting. After explaining my hypothesis to them they made me vice-president and appointed me as their representative to the public hearings. I then had the opportunity to present my evidence in public, completely disagreeing with the company and its experts. The media, always eager for a good controversy, duly reported this. It was noticed in high places that a certain graduate student was meddling in B.C.’s affairs of state.

It was not long before the head of my thesis committee, forest ecologist Hamish Kimmins, called me into his office. He advised me that the dean had been approached by a high authority who recommended that if I was interested in getting a job with industry or government after graduating perhaps I should “change the nature of my inquiry.” I balked at this threat, really got my back up, and with a young man’s air of invincibility decided to continue my investigation. I was not just a born-again ecologist now, I was a radical environmental activist and it all happened because I cared more about science than politics.

I fashioned a research agenda that included measuring the turbidity (lack of clarity) and temperature of the water in Rupert Inlet. I did this for a year before the mine began to dump its tailings into the inlet and for a year afterwards. I proved beyond a doubt that the powerful tides mixed the tailings throughout the water column and regularly brought them to the surface. By the time I was supposed to graduate, the mining company had hired two of the five professors on my thesis committee as consultants, and the head of the geology department had forced his way onto my committee. At my oral defense it was obvious I was in trouble, three against three. My defense dragged on for a year with the opposing professors making pathetic claims that there was something wrong with my science. Eventually, the dean of Graduate Studies had to bring in an independent adjudicator, who thankfully sided with me. I got my PhD in ecology.