Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist [Paperback]

Excellent book, very well written.

Should be compulsory reading for all our politicians, students, NGOs, and all environmental zealots and others, and just about everybody else interested in our future.

Congratulations to Patrick Moore for writing a courageous, intelligent, frank and insightful history and vision of being a 'greenie" and then finding a way of being a "sensible environmentalist". Powerful, as it is from someone who was on "the other side".

Quite brilliant, really.

Finally there is an environmentalist on the side of human kind. We belong here afterall! Almost everything we hear or read these days makes us the scourge of the earth. It is beyond refreshing to read something about the environment that is common sense based; that has real science behind it or in the case of uncertainty just a statement that it is uncertain. The lies perpetrated by the IPCC and briefly exposed in the main stream media are reviewed in this book and should remain in the public mind as a reminder that we need to question everything that we hear. I had heard that there were contrary opinions in the scientific community to the IPCC reports but I had no idea that there were 31,000 scientists stating that there is no conclusive proof of the IPCC findings and that there is no conclusive scientific evidence that we are having an impact on the climate. This is just one of the many issues discussed in the book; in the broadest sense this is a book about sustainable development; something we should all be concerned about.

You need to read this book draw your own conclusions and then share it with your friends.

Greenpeace co-founder Dr. Patrick Moore helped change the world, and now he wants to change it again through his highly enjoyable new book. Moore writes convincingly that the environmental movement has lost its way, and he outlines his vision for the way back to sanity.

In an engaging and entertaining style, Moore chronicles the exhilarating early days of Greenpeace, its roots in Vancouver, its improbable victories, its meagre budget, its brushes with disaster on the high seas, the media circus, and its meteoric rise to global celebrity. From stopping nukes to saving whales, the whole story is here.

But the book does not stop with tales of the Greenpeace glory days. Moore wades into the political morass that engulfed them when the organization's growth went wild. We read about how the movement nearly failed, how it emerged in its current form, and the forces that caused Greenpeace to take increasingly extreme positions.

A scientist with a Ph.D. in Ecology, Moore explains passionately his commitment to reason, which put him at odds with an increasingly ideologically driven Greenpeace. They were 'against' many things, but offered few practical solutions to the planet's challenges. Moore illuminates readers on how and why a movement about saving the planet has become, as he writes, "anti-human."

Moore takes on one activist myth after another, debunking spurious claims with facts and arguments, offering readers an education on key topics from forestry to fish farming. For example, there's a brilliant exposé of the trumped up hysteria over the planet's supposedly irreversible march toward mass species extinction, which he shows to be based on statistical wizardry and dubious assumptions.

Hearteningly, Moore advocates a clear path towards a bright and sustainable future, in stark contrast to the apocalyptic rhetoric we are deluged with every day in the media. Sadly, we are seeing a generation raised on the idea that humans have doomed the planet to certain, imminent and catastrophic disaster. Moore's sunnier outlook is welcome relief from the multitude of gloomy forecasts.

Moore has paid a high price for challenging environmental orthodoxy. Greenpeace has revised its history to erase Moore, literally airbrushing him away. "True believers" brand him as an apostate in the movement he helped create. Thankfully, Moore has taken on the challenge of reforming the dogmatic and intolerant institution that 'environmentalism' has become. This book could be the beginning of a new era of sensible environmentalism.

That would be a very good thing.