One example is the Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore, who left Greenpeace a few years after its founding, and more recently disavowed many of the issues the group stands for in a 2010 book entitled Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout. Environmentalism of the rich does little to bring about the sweeping institutional change necessary to make progress toward global sustainability. Dauvergne reveals why a global political economy of ever more-more growth, more sales, more consumption-is swamping environmental gains. Dauvergne examines extraction booms that leave developing countries poor and environmentally devastated-with the ruination of the South Pacific island of Nauru a case in point the struggles against consumption inequities of courageous activists like Bruno Manser, who worked with indigenous people to try to save the rainforests of Borneo and the manufacturing of vast markets for nondurable goods-for example, convincing parents in China that disposable diapers made for healthier and smarter babies. More eco-products can just mean more corporate profits, consumption, and waste. While it's good that, for example, Barbie dolls' packaging no longer depletes Indonesian rainforest, and that Toyota Highlanders are available as hybrids, none of this gets at the source of the current sustainability crisis. Meanwhile, as Peter Dauvergne points out in this provocative book, the environmental movement is increasingly dominated by the environmentalism of the rich-diverted into eco-business, eco-consumption, wilderness preservation, energy efficiency, and recycling. But has the environmental movement actually brought about meaningful progress toward global sustainability? Signs of global “unsustainability” are everywhere, from decreasing biodiversity to scarcity of fresh water to steadily rising greenhouse gas emissions. Activists and policymakers have fought hard to make the earth a better place to live. Over the last fifty years, environmentalism has emerged as a clear counterforce to the environmental destruction caused by industrialization, colonialism, and globalization. What it means for global sustainability when environmentalism is dominated by the concerns of the affluent-eco-business, eco-consumption, wilderness preservation. his " antiscience " comment is in Patrick Moore, Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout : The Making of a Sensible . The quotes and a summary of the San Francisco meeting of Greenpeace are in Frank Zelko, Make It a Green Peace !. Narrating the key campaigns and arguments among the group's early members, Make It a Green Peace! vividly captures all the drama, pathos, and occasional moments of absurd comic relief of Greenpeace's tumultuous first decade.
And while it may not have achieved its most revolutionary goals, Greenpeace inarguably created a heightened awareness of environmental issues that endures to this day. Unlike the more strait-laced, less confrontational Sierra Club and Audubon Society, early Greenpeacers smoked dope, dropped acid, wore their hair long, and put their bodies on the line-interposing themselves between the harpoons of whalers and the clubs of seal-hunters-to save the animals and achieve what they hoped would be a lasting transformation in the way humans regarded the natural world.
Zelko traces the complex intellectual and cultural roots of Greenpeace to the various protest movements of the 1950s and 1960s, highlighting the influence of Quakerism-with its practice of bearing witness-Native American spirituality, and the non-violent resistance of Gandhi. Situating Greenpeace within the peace movement and counterculture of the 1960s, Frank Zelko provides a much deeper treatment of the group's groundbreaking brand of radical, media-savvy, direct-action environmentalism than has been previously attempted.
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Make It a Green Peace! draws upon meeting minutes, internal correspondence, manifestos, philosophical writings, and interviews with former members to offer the first full account of the origins of what has become the most recognizable environmental non-governmental organization in the world. And yet there has been no comprehensive objective history of Greenpeace's origins-until now. The emergence of Greenpeace in the late 1960s from a loose-knit group of anti-nuclear and anti-whaling activists fundamentally changed the nature of environmentalism-its purpose, philosophy, and tactics-around the world.
For a summary of Moore's ties to various industry front groups, see “Patrick Moore,” n.d., . Moore, Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout, 5. The Rise of a Countercultural Environmentalism Frank Zelko.