terça-feira, 18 de janeiro de 2011

A Greenpeace é que era

Já no passado nos havíamos referido a Patrick Moore, um dos co-fundadores, e ex-líder da Greenpeace. Saiu agora um livro seu, Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout, onde fala um pouco da sua experiência. De um jornal da sua terra, Vancouver, Canadá, recolhemos os seguintes excerptos, sobre os quais qualquer ecologista da treta deve meditar:

I joined Greenpeace before it was even called by that name. The Don't Make a Wave Committee was meeting weekly in the basement of the Unitarian church in Vancouver.

In the early days we debated complex issues openly and often. It was a wonderful group to engage with in wide-ranging environmental policy discussions. The intellectual energy in the organization was infectious. We frequently disagreed about specific issues, yet our ultimate vision was largely shared. Importantly, we strove to be scientifically accurate. (...) Despite my efforts, the movement abandoned science and logic somewhere in the mid-1980s, just as society was adopting the more reasonable items on our environmental agenda.

The collapse of world communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall during the 1980s added to the trend toward extremism. The Cold War was over and the peace movement was largely disbanded. The peace movement had been mainly Western-based and anti-American in its leanings. Many of its members moved into the environmental movement, bringing with them their neo-Marxist, far-left agendas. To a considerable extent the environmental movement was hijacked by political and social activists who learned to use green language to cloak agendas that had more to do with anti-capitalism and anti-globalization than with science or ecology.

A lot of environmentalists are stuck in the 1970s and continue to promote a strain of leftish romanticism about idyllic rural village life powered by windmills and solar panels. They idealize poverty, seeing it as a noble way of life, and oppose all large developments. James Cameron, the multimillionaire producer of the most lucrative movie in history, Avatar, paints his face and joins the disaffected to protest a hydroelectric dam in the Amazon.