With a strong sense of accomplishment, Patrick Moore, who founded Greenpeace in 1971, retired from the environmental movement in the mid-1980s following its many successes. But in later years he has found himself at odds with Greenpeace's increasingly radical stance.

Moore recalls that after deciding to take up salmon farming in his native British Columbia, "Greenpeace came out against salmon farming. That kind of blew my mind." He listened to their objections, but found it an "absolutely ludicrous, anti-science campaign," and told his former colleagues so.

A third-generation forester with doctoral credentials, Moore next found himself opposed to Greenpeace on forestry issues. Moore had come to believe that the best way for parties involved in land use disputes to solve problems is by cooperation and compromise, a view that earned him the reputation of a traitor among his former colleagues. "They refused to join a community-based, consensus-approach, roundtable to seek solutions to land-use problems" in a stance he described as "a childish inability to grow and recognize the basic fact that there are very real social and economic needs that have to be met every day for 5.9 billion people." Moore earned extra ire by joining the Forestry Alliance, an industry-backed group whose aim is to balance environmental and economic needs. He has also written a book, Pacific Spirit: The Forest Reborn, which defends modern forestry techniques.

Radicals argue that logging brings about deforestation with resulting climate change and extinction of species. "Some 50,000 species of plants and animals disappear from the planet each year," said a wire-service story quoting officials at the World Wildlife Fund, adding that "commercial loggers are mainly to blame." But Moore demanded to know of a single species that has become extinct due to logging, a challenge the group failed to meet, though the charge continues to surface. Moore cites U.N. studies that show 95 percent of deforestation is due to slash-and-burn agriculture and exploitive noncommercial fuel gathering for settlements. Moore says this "only makes sense as the whole purpose of forestry is to grow trees, i.e., to keep the land forested."

But Moore's views continue to mark him as a Judas. When Moore testified before a House subcommittee on Forests and Forest Health to counter arguments advocating and end to commercial logging on public lands, the Sierra Club termed Moore's testimony a "multimillion-dollar public-relations hoax." Spokesperson Debbie Sease commented, "The choice of this witness sends a signal that the industry recognizes that it faces a public-relations nightmare."

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