Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist (25 page)

While I surveyed one of the most beautiful natural scenes I had ever witnessed, I was summoned to the radio room for a media call from Brussels. “The European Commission has voted to recommend a ban on seal skin imports. What do you think of this?” Tears welled in my eyes as I composed myself to tell the reporter about the scene we had just come upon, seals leaping in a glorious sunset as if they had already heard the news. We had put our hearts and souls into this effort for seven years and now all but the final nail was in the coffin of this unfortunate ritual. I provided the reporter with the mandatory victory statement and we all sank into our bunks with a grateful feeling.

The seal hunt was never a simple issue, and it isn’t to this day, as Greenpeace was never able to obtain a complete ban on killing baby seals for fur or meat. Many people equated Greenpeace’s baby harp seal campaign to the whale campaign, wrongly assuming that the harp seal was an endangered species. Others felt it was immoral for anyone to kill a seal, even the Inuit of the Canadian north and the Eskimos of Alaska. I have always believed that the reason for the seal campaign was very different from the whale campaign, even though they both involved marine mammals.

The campaign to save the whales was truly about endangered species. They are the largest animals that have ever lived and have brains larger than our own. I would argue that whales, dolphins, and porpoises should be given a special status; sacred cows if you wish, and we should respect them as symbols of living creation. The campaign to stop the baby seal slaughter was about the unethical practice of wading into the breeding colony of a wild animal and bludgeoning the nursing young to death by the hundreds of thousands. In other words, it is more an issue of animal welfare than it is of conservation. The seals are not an endangered species and they are in a different evolutionary class from whales. But no one would support the mass slaughter of the nursing young of other wild mammals—baby deer, for example—just to get their spotted hides for wallets and purses. So I can’t see why it is an acceptable practice with seals. I do, however, think it is acceptable for people to hunt adult seals for subsistence, in the same way that it is acceptable to hunt deer for food.

In 1984, after a Royal Commission, Canada announced an end to the annual slaughter of harp seal pups. Great rejoicing ensued, but it was unfortunately premature. After some years passed, the seal hunt was re-invented and during the past three years more than 250,000 seal pups have been taken annually in the slaughter. The difference? Now they wait a week or so longer until most of the pups are weaned, but they are still babies. I don’t use the word
babies
lightly because it is so emotional, but that’s how I feel about this outdated practice. Surely it will end some day.

Upon my return to Vancouver after the victory, I opened an envelope containing an invitation that would change my thinking forever. After the Conference on the Environment in Stockholm in 1972, the UN had established the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1974. It was the first UN agency to be established in a developing country and its role was to build an international program of research and education in environmental issues. In order to provide a focus for nongovernment environmental organizations to interact with UNEP, the Environment Liaison Center was established and my old friend Gary Gallon, the ecocrat from Vancouver, was hired as the first executive director.

Gary had sent the invitation and it was an opportunity to join in a meeting with 85 other environmental leaders from around the world to celebrate the 10
^th
anniversary of the Stockholm Conference. In 1972 the environmental movement was just getting its wings. By 1982 we were a force for governments and corporations around the world to contend with. We 85 environmentalists attending the meeting in Nairobi represented the global influence that had been achieved in those 10 short years.

The central purpose of our three-day meeting was to fashion a statement representing our demands for improvements in environmental laws and regulations around the world. The first day was pretty rough as environmental leaders from developing countries, such as Brazil and India, tried to make sense of the antidevelopment thinking of environmentalists from North America and Europe. Environmentalists from the industrialized countries were largely against “megaprojects” like large hydro dams, water diversion projects, and massive nuclear plants. The environmentalists from developing countries explained that being against development would get you laughed out of the room where they came from. We soon realized that we had to be in favor of some kind of development, the kind that would not destroy the environment. The concept of sustainable development was born there in Nairobi.

It was Tom Burke, leader of Friends of the Earth UK, whom I first heard use the term
sustainable development
. It must have been very recently coined if I hadn’t heard it already as I was right in the thick of the movement. Tom seemed to naturally fill the position of chairman of our newly acquainted band of activists. Much of the discussion over the next few days revolved around this new idea, what it meant and how it could be put into practice.

Many people imagine the term sustainable development was a compromise between environmentalists and developers or industrialists. This is not so. It was a compromise between environmentalists from developed countries and environmentalists from developing countries. Development was all right as long as it was sustainable, whatever that meant, and a debate about the meaning of the term continues to this day.

The second I heard the words I was catapulted into a sudden realization of what this meant for the future of environmental thinking. It meant a great synthesis was about to occur in the collective conscience of people looking for a solution to the deep conflicts between the environmental movement and industrial civilization. This would require balancing environmental, social, and economic values rather than stressing one at the expense of the others. And it would necessitate cooperation and compromise among competing values rather than perpetual confrontation.

So long as Greenpeace had addressed issues such as nuclear testing and whaling it was not really necessary to consider the social or economic ramifications. Not many people at the time would argue nukes were good for society and it wasn’t as if whale meat or oil were central to the world economy. The whaling industry, and the sealing industry, did make the argument that local people would be thrown out of work, and in Canada this had backfired on Greenpeace. But on a global level the benefits of ending nuclear testing, whaling, and baby seal bashing clearly overwhelmed any small benefits.

As Greenpeace and the rest of the environmental movement broadened their campaigns, they began to take on issues that impacted far more directly on the economic and social aspects of civilization as a whole. Subjects like agriculture, forestry, mining, fisheries, energy, and manufacturing have an impact on every individual on Earth and they are essential for the survival of our whole civilization. It is simply not possible to address these issues with environmental values alone. The social and economic values must be considered equally unless one is willing to ignore the existence of nearly seven billion people and their daily needs.

Another way of looking at it is while there are some specific practices that should be banned (e.g., dumping toxic waste in rivers and seas, driftnet fishing, nuclear testing), most large issues are best dealt with by campaigns for reform rather than outright banning. We can’t ban farming, forestry, or mining. Activist groups are much better at dealing with issues that can be portrayed as black and white and good versus evil. That is partly why they have now arrived at positions such as “ban clearcutting worldwide,” “ban nuclear energy,” “ban genetically modified food crops,” “ban chlorine and PVC (vinyl),” and “ban submarine mine tailings disposal.” This zero-tolerance approach is useless when it comes to providing our civilization with the materials and energy it needs to survive.

On the other hand it had become abundantly clear, and this was one of the main messages of the environmental movement, that industry and government must take environmental values into greater account in all their decisions. In other words the new environmental values we had helped forge had to be integrated into the traditional economic and social values governing public policy and our individual daily behavior. This process of incorporating environmental values into our decision making lies at the heart of sustainable development theory (nowadays simply called sustainability). It’s not about pitting the environment against the economy and society, as if we could have one without the others, it’s about finding an appropriate balance among them.

When the human population was low and technologically unadvanced, people did not need to consider the environment. We needed the environment 500 years ago as much as we need it now, but we weren’t causing much of a negative impact on it back then. Therefore we really didn’t need to be “aware” of it or to make laws to protect it. As the population and technology grew, they began to impact the environment severely enough that they began to undermine the very resources we depend on for survival in the first place.

An important exception to this relatively low impact before industrialization was the early extinction of many species of large mammals and birds as humans migrated to new lands. When people arrived in Australia about 60,000 years ago, they hunted many species of slow-moving large animals to extinction. These species had survived for many millions of years without any humans to bother them. They could get away with being slow because they were bigger than any native predator. But they weren’t ready for spears and clubs. The same pattern developed in the New World when humans arrived by land bridge and raft about 15,000 years ago. The mammoths, mastodons, sabre-toothed tigers, and many other large mammals were exterminated for food. Interestingly, many other large mammals that had evolved with humans in the Old World: wolves, caribou, grizzly bears, and moose migrated to the New World with the humans and are here to this day.

The transformational power of sustainability theory is that it turns a foot soldier fighting environmental wars into a diplomat looking for peaceful solutions. It steers one from a stance of confrontation, telling people what they should stop doing, to trying to find consensus about what we should do instead. There is simply no escaping the fact that nearly seven billion people wake up every morning on this planet with real needs for food, energy, and materials. Sustainability is partly about continuing to provide for those needs, maybe even providing more food and energy for people in developing countries, while at the same time reducing our negative environmental impact. Not all my colleagues at the meeting in Nairobi agreed with this approach. Many, especially those from the developed countries, rejected the idea of sustainable development because it seemed too much of a compromise. It meant they would have to abandon the “good guy-bad guy” approach to environmentalism and recognize we were all in the same boat. It meant they might become “assimilated” by the established order.

I came away from Nairobi a changed person. I now realized that as an environmentalist I could either act as if the nearly seven billion people didn’t matter (or pretend they didn’t even exist) or I could expand my thinking to include them as part of the challenge. The latter approach seemed both more honest and more intellectually stimulating. It got me outside the box of purely environmental thinking and into the real world of recognizing the entire system. Early in the evolution of the environmental movement, Barbara Ward had written a book titled Spaceship Earth.
[1]
I thought, “Why not One Human Family on Spaceship Earth” as a way of describing this vision for sustainability.

I would stay with Greenpeace as an international director for another three years, but these new thoughts of sustainable development were never far from my mind. We’ll return to this theme in greater detail later in the book. However, for now let’s get back to some good old Greenpeace campaigns.

[1]
. Barbara Ward,
Spaceship Earth
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1966).

Chapter 11 -
Jailed Whales, Curtains of Death, Raising Fish, and Sinking Rainbows

Many of us had felt for a long time if there was one thing that should be banned it was the live capture of orca whales for display in aquariums. Ever since Paul Spong had studied Skana, the first captive orca in Canada, we had followed the subject closely. But because we viewed the factory whaling issue as so much more important, we had put all our energy into that campaign. When the International Whaling Commission voted to ban factory whaling altogether in June 1981, the job was done, so we could turn our attention to ending the practice of capturing orcas from the wild.

By the time we geared up in earnest, 56 orcas had been taken from their pods since 1967 along the west coast of Canada and the United States. They were transported to aquariums all across North America, including the Vancouver Aquarium and the four large Sea World facilities in California, Florida, Ohio, and Texas. It was eventually determined by the identification of individual orcas that there were only about 300 whales in the wild from Alaska to California. In other words, nearly one-sixth of the population had already been taken. The United States ended live whale capture in 1973, putting more pressure on Canada and causing the collectors to go farther afield to Iceland and Japan to satisfy the demand. Many of the whales died shortly after being taken into captivity, usually from bacterial infections, so there was a constant demand for replacements. In the early years there was virtually no success at captive breeding. We felt these two facts alone indicated inhumane conditions. Orcas were simply too large for a small pool and should be left in the wild, where they usually live for more than 30 years. Some have lived into their 70s.