Fiddle, Fiddle, Fiddle As Flames Rise - Sea Shepherds' Paul Watson

[hatrack]

EDIT

We fight a losing battle, especially out on the oceans where there are fantastic profits to be made from illegal exploitation of marine species yet very little economic incentive to protect these species. Added to this is the corporatization of environmental groups as they evolve into national and international feel good businesses. People literally join them to feel good and then the groups juggle a mixture of fear-mongering and pseudo-solutions to make it appear that progress is being made.

There is however plenty to be fearful about. The mass disappearance of animal and plant species, the global destruction of coral reefs, the melting of the ice shelves, the toxification of the oceans, deforestation, etc. If people are not afraid for the future, they are simply not paying attention to what is happening to the world around them.

Yet these large groups of which I am the co-founder of one (Greenpeace) and presently a national director of another (The Sierra Club USA) are simply strumming banjos and tapping their feet to the fiddles as the environment deteriorates around them. The waste of funds on triviality by all these organizations is astounding. We have lost our great bellowing voices like David Brower and Edward Abbey. We are rapidly losing the passion that built this movement to people more concerned about investment portfolios and political posturing. There still are individuals fighting the good fight and some of these individuals are in a position to be heard and to be effective. But their numbers are so small and growing smaller. We have Elizabeth May with the Sierra Club of Canada still leading the charge against the enemies of the environment in Canada. In the United States the Club has devolved into a xenophobic paranoid group of eco-papists more concerned about appeasing the Democratic Party, the Christian Right, trophy hunters, and the politically correct than they are about actually saving the environment.

Thankfully we still do have individuals like Jane Goodall and Birute Galdikas, Dave Foreman and Yvon Chouinard amongst others still fighting the odds to champion specific species, or habitats or working to provide environmentally non-harmful products.

But we have few politicians even remotely concerned about environmental issues and no one wants to touch the issue of population. Even a hint that one may think there is a population problem is an invitation to be stamped with the label of racist or misanthrope.

EDIT

http://www.countercurrents.org/cc-watson250306.htm

[Dead_Parrot]

1. He sounds pissed.

I noticed on thier 2005 report that Greenpeace spent more on head office costs & salaries than they did on marine operations: For an organisation famous for volunteers in zodiacs, that's piss-poor.

[megatherium]

2. Not long ago I read Gus Speth's book, Red Skies at Dawn.

He has a cogent analysis as to why the environmentalist groups have had less success in recent years. Two primary reasons: The dramatic successes of the late 1960s and early 1970s were the result of enormous public pressure, that rose up too quickly for the corporations to fight effectively. And the environmental problems of that era (air pollution, water pollution, pesticides) were obvious and atrocious. But today, the corporations are more experienced at countering public pressure (by manipulating the media and buying the politicians), and the present environmental threats are paradoxically more ominous and less obvious (global warming, rain forest destruction, etc).

Perhaps another bad hurricane season, or the increasing drought in the midwest, will concentrate the public's mind. It will get increasingly difficult for the energy companies to pull off their tobacco institute strategy, denying global warming. I hope the public will get the picture soon enough. The energy industry and the Republican Party that they control has done a damn good job using wedge issues (gay marriage, etc) to get people to vote against their own interests.

[Odin2005]

3. Good post.

Mr. Watson is right. Greenpeace, as well as too many of my fellow Greens, seem to be too concerned with idealisitc nonsense that turns off the average Joe and opens them to be attacked as "Eco-Crazies" by Rush, et. al., instead of doing pragmmatic solutions. The anti-nuclear brigade is an example, all the old-school enviormentalists, like Lovelock, are pro-nuclear. I somethimes wonder if the enviromentalist movement has been hijacked by idealistic college students and naive suburbanites who know more about Earth Mother mysticism and other religious hijacking of the Gaia hypothesis than they know ecology and Lovelock's actual scientific ideas.