Greenpeace & Similar Organizations - The Fundamental Flaw

Greenpeace - Rant.
What is it with individuals of the American youth who are happy to dance to drumbeats, wear lurid clothing and costumes, shout, chant and sit in trees when they (or at least the great majority of them) have no idea why they are there?

These young people, although passionate and ambitious, have very little exposure to what conservation, preservation and sustainable development really is. They are quick to throw figures around, yet they cannot substantiate the figures with references or concrete data at all. They have several favourite topics to fuel their purely emotive campaigns. Logging, industrial progress and globalization are first on their list of things to blame.

How do these representatives of an environmental movement group battle against logging when their catchy phrases of doom are written on paper or some derivative of wood palp? How can you write anti-logging slogans on cardboard? Does cardboard not come from trees? In December of 1997, Julia Hill, a Greenpeace activist, spent two years living in a treehouse in a Redwood to save the tree from a local Californian logging company. The tree was old, large, and magnificent. It still stands today and has been protected - which is fantastic. However, Julia was quoted in 2003 saying that she loves trees and will never damage one for gain. Does nailing planks into a tree not count as damage? Will someone tell this joiner that planks are made from trees!! The boards and endless flyers these activists throw around could well have been used for far more constructive purposes, medical textbooks to allow for more doctors, or sheets of paper upon which proper, scientific environmental research could be printed. Far from helping to stop logging, the Greenpeace fools are promoting it.

Industrial progress is something we've all heard about, and at this stage, our high-energy carbon fuels, the so-called fossil fuels, are indeed causing more problems than they solve. Coal, oil and natural gas are contributing to the heating of the planet, and will continue degrading the environmental standards
of our home until action is taken. Greenpeace sees it differently. Whilst the learned, rational scientific community agrees that there should be a movement towards a sustainable industrial progress, Greenpeace activists are screaming blue murder and want to stop ALL industrial progress. This is as pointless as telling the sun not to shine. Industrial progress will happen; it's synonymous to human existence. Their focus should be to shift from current resource utilization to a new way of harnessing renewable power, not stopping all industry related growth and expansion.

According to many of the activists, globalization is the greatest catalyst to environmental destruction. I have several points of question here. Firstly, the global economy is governed by a select few corporate entities, we all agree on that. These units have the money, capacity and influence to ignore a group of hopping hooligans in tie-dyed t-shirts. These units and the people governing them didn’t reach their position in the global economic food-chain by being stupid and ill-informed, no, quite the contrary, They are rational, intelligent, thinking people who can be convinced to support a sustainable future, but they must be convinced with fact, logic, science and competence. The environmental community should work alongside the corporate giants, strength of knowledge adding to the strength of money. What Greenpeace and similar organizations do is make the corporate world see conservation in a bad light - the impression of ignorance and incompetence that's portrayed by youthful American activists. Stop trying to overthrow corporate giants and governments by waving banners in front of their buildings, get ecologists and people who know what they're talking about to approach the corporate entities and thereby let the environmental community work WITH the economic drivers instead of against them in a constructive way that's based on substantial foundations.

Globalization is the process by which international relations and interdependence of the world's markets bring about what's known as the global village. Two of the greatest factors contributing to globalization are undeniably the advances and progression of the telecommunications network and the evolution of the internet and the significant rise of these factors over the past two to three decades. Technological advances allow people to do business, travel and communicate with greater efficacy and ease across the globe. The
Greenpeace activists seem to think that they don't contribute to this. Now, if that's so, every individual who joins Greenpeace or organizations with similar views should be banned from having a cell phone, driving a car, getting on a plane, owning a computer or having access to the internet. How Greenpeace proclaims the damages of globalization while they have a website and a network of offices across the world will remain a mystery to anyone with more brains than bad hairstyles, something apparently absent in Greenpeace activists.
The more you look into it, Greenpeace and several organizations with a similar mission started out right - governed and brought to life by individuals who saw the need to have a global representing entity, one that was not affiliated to any company or government. The origins of Greenpeace are well intended, but as Canadian ecologist Dr. Patrick Moore says, "Greenpeace and the environmental movement was basically hijacked by political and social activists who came in and very cleverly learned how to use green rhetoric or green language to cloak agendas which had more to do with anti-corporatism, anti-globalisation, anti-business and in fact had very little to do with science and ecology." Incidentally, Dr. Moore was a founding member and former president of Greenpeace in the early 1970's, but left the organization when it became a platform for rebellious young Americans with nothing better to do with their time and are essentially against anything to do with economic and social structures.

In a nutshell, far from doing any good for the environment, organizations like Greenpeace actually do significantly more damage than good. Leave it to the scientists.