Sustainable Forestry: Patrick Moore & The Future of Things

Patrick Moore & The Future of Things
Certification Watch LEADERSHIP INTERVIEW WITH PATRICK MOORE

Part 1 – August 8, 2004

You have witnessed the evolution of forest practices in North America and particularly in Canada and B.C. over the past 30 years or so: how do you describe the evolution of those practices and what have been the main positive trends from your perspective?

Patrick Moore: I believe the main positive trend has been that from only putting value on timber and on certain wildlife species that have either certain economic or sports value to today’s trend where the full range of biodiversity is recognised as having value.

I’ve always thought of that as being a transition from sustained yield forestry to sustainable forestry.

To me that is the key of what happened in that transition.

We went from just growing trees for wood and only being concerned with the inventory of timber on site and maybe some deer and some salmon (although when I started in the woods forty or so years ago, even the salmon were not being taken into consideration adequately and salmon streams were being damaged by logging as if it didn’t matter).

And that has all completely changed of course to today, where the theory is that biodiversity conservation is the over-arching principle in forest management.

According to your Trees are the Answer petition, “the most effective way to increase wood production is to increase the productivity and area of forested land in the world. What would your recommendation for Canada be; would you recommend establishing fast-growing plantations? If so, where?

Patrick Moore: The best place to establish fast-growing plantations is on good land with high productivity, so we would focus on bottom lands and lands that are more southern, for example, the Niagara Peninsula.

There’s a tremendous amount of people that are stationed there for agriculture.

It would be very positive if 20% of that area could be put back to hardwood forest using the native Carolingian species that were there in the first place. Some of those could be grown as high yield plantations, some could be grown as mixed hardwood forest.

This all goes hand-in-hand with the need to continue to increase our yield in agriculture.

One of the things that people need to understand is that the productivity or the increase in yield of agriculture allows more land to be in a forested condition.

There’s a balance between the amount of land that is being used for producing food and the amount of land that is being used to produce wood.

I’m leaving aside the wilderness and parks as a separate category. But on land that is being used for production and land where there’s enough rainfall to grow forests, there’s a choice between growing trees and growing annual farm crops.

And the higher the productivity of our farming, the more of the land can be in trees.

The more of the land that is in trees in high-yield forestry, the more land can be maintained in low-yield forestry and semi-wilderness condition.

So I think people have to understand that the balance of those different land uses are all interrelated with each other. The more land you use for agriculture, the less land you have for forests.

It’s fairly simple when you think about it, but most people don’t.

We understand that nearly 3,500 people signed the ’Trees are the Answer’ petition.

How do you explain this high level of endorsement? Do you feel that there is a movement in Canada and the US, for increasing the productivity of production forests and the areas under full protection? What are the next steps?

Patrick Moore: There certainly is a very strong awareness these days about the importance of forests, and I think one of the key messages in the petition is that the more wood we use, the more forests we will have to grow.

One of the key facts that we have uncovered in our research is that if you look at the global forest situation on a continental basis and compare where the people are using the most wood with where people are using the least wood, and where people are wealthy enough to buy wood with where they are poor, you find that where people are wealthy and use a lot of wood, forests are either stable or growing in their area.

In areas where people are poor and use less wood, the forests are shrinking. And so contrary to the idea that by using wood we cause the forests to be diminished, the fact is that by using wood we send the signal for more trees to be planted and more forests to be grown.

It’s very clear in both China and India, for example. As they have industrialised and developed a middle class, the forests of India have doubled in area in the last 25 years.

In the 1990s, China added more new forest land than any other country in the world; I think it was 10 million hectares of new forest land, reforested land.

So there’s no doubt about that relationship.

I really do think that the next step is to have people more aware of this, especially in the developing countries where there is the problem of low-intensive agriculture and a lot of forest is being cleared to produce not that much food.

If we could help the developing countries to adopt intensive agriculture using modern technology and fertilisers, pesticides, and genetic advances, they could have a lot more land available to grow trees and develop a sustainable forest industry.

The real problem for forests is not whether the forestry is sustainable or not, it’s got more to do with agriculture than with forestry.

In other words, the deforestation and the loss of the forest in the tropics are due to conversion from forest to farm.

And that’s why it would be a good thing for intensive agriculture to be introduced, especially in Africa but also in Asia and many of the Latin-American countries.

You have been involved several years with the Forest Alliance of BC, now dissolved. What experience can you draw from your time as sustainable forestry director with the Forest Alliance of BC?

Patrick Moore: I guess I learned more about forests and forestry during that time than at any other time in my life.

I was already fairly well versed in the issues when I joined Forest Alliance in 1991, as I had grown up in a forest industry family and studied forestry and forest ecology in university; but it was during my time with the Forest Alliance that I really achieved 10-12 years of hands-on experience.

It was a wonderful time because we helped take the forest industry in British Columbia from the old model and from being a little bit too self-centred [to a new model].

It was the biggest industry and it felt that it could do anything it wanted; for many, many decades the forest industry was simply the most powerful industry in the province and whoever was the minister of forests was the second most powerful politician after the premier.

Leading up to and during the 90s all of that changed, and the forest industry took its place as just one of the major sectors.

And with the majority of the urban public coming to dislike the impact that the forest industry was having on the environment, we were able to take the forest industry from a very low level of public acceptance in the early 90s, down in the 30 percents up into the 77 percent level by the end of the 90s.

The Forest Alliance was a big part of that in helping the industry adopt sustainable forestry practices and accept the idea that it had to.

We did two things early on in the Forest Alliance.

The first one was that we convinced the industry that they should accept the plan to double the parks and wilderness areas from 6 to 12% even though there was a short-term pain and they would lose some cuts. We said that 1) in general, it’s good for the province, and 2) if you agree with the idea, you might have some say into which areas get made into parks and which don’t, instead of always being against everything.

And so that brought the industry into a more active and progressive position on the issue of parks and wilderness. And we have actually achieved more than 12%. The forest industry has survived this change and now we have a parks and wilderness system that is second to none in the world.

The second thing we did is that we convinced industry there needed to be a legislated forest practices code.

Whereas in the early 90s the forest industry was in favour of a voluntary code, we convinced them that the public wouldn’t see that as sufficient.

And now, Tom Tevlin, who was the president of the Forest Alliance, Alliance staffer Trevor Figueiredo, and I have moved on from the Forest Alliance and formed Greenspirit Strategies Ltd.

Greenspirit Strategies now has a very solid base for working with the forest industry on a continental level which we are doing with the Wood Promotion Network and other agencies and companies around North America.

You have voiced support in the past for SFI, CSA, and FSC. What is your current take on those programmes?

Patrick Moore: To some extent, I think certification is a bit of an old story in that it’s become mainstream, which is good.

At the beginning, it was so controversial. FSC was the first one out of the gate; it was interesting that the environmental movement should end up leading the effort to bring in third-party certification, and I think that really shook the forest industry up.

A lot of people were very upset about it. Some people were immediately opposed to the idea, others realized its time had come. I was involved all throughout with what was then the Montreal-based CPPA.

The CPPA made the decision to instigate the creation of a separate certification, and American Forest and Paper had actually started pretty early, but pretty quietly.

The main thing that I supported all along and helped support among buyers is the concept of an inclusive rather than an exclusive approach to certification.

In other words, a monopoly is bad and FSC should not have a monopoly.

But that doesn’t mean you should reject the FSC; they’re a legitimate player in all of this.

There’s a lot of politics in it of course, but there’s politics in all of the systems.

Perhaps the CSA has the least politics in it, and I believe that if you take a totally objective look at the systems, the CSA system is the most technically profound and has some of the best public participation aspects to it, and to my estimation meets the criteria of sustainable development in addressing social, economic and environmental priorities with equal weight, the three legs of the stool.

I think it’s the best system. But it’s not necessarily the most user-friendly system.

They all have their merits. The Pan-European initiative is also a very good system.
Home Depot had to learn this the hard way because they got blackmailed into accepting the FSC-only approach to certification and it’s taken them three, four years to work themselves out of the corner that they put themselves in when they did that [agreed to FSC-only certification], and now they’re accepting the labels of CSA and SFI in their stores.

So they have come full circle in recognising that the inclusive approach is the right approach to certification.

The other point about certification that I always make is summed up by saying: “Where’s the green steel? Where’s the green concrete?”

How come wood, which is by nature the most sustainable and renewable of all building materials, has to jump over a higher bar for sustainability than the non-renewable building materials.

Why isn’t there some kind of requirement for steel to reduce its energy consumption by 25% or something like that?

The forest industry and the wood-products industry have gone through a revolution in self-audit and third-party audits for sustainability and certification and all the rest, but the steel and concrete industries get away with doing virtually nothing.

I think that’s an uneven playing field and unfortunately it has the effect of being discriminating against wood.

When you look at the LEED green building standard you see that being put into practice in spades.

Do you have concrete evidence concerning the availability of SFI and CSA labelled wood products at Home Depot?

Patrick Moore: Yes, the head of the program at Home Depot, Ron Jarvis, has told me that Home Depot will accept those labels.

In a 2002 Los Angeles Times article you said that “Anti-forestry groups such as the Sierra Club and Greenpeace make endless and unreasonable demands restricting forestry practices.

This is mainly why the FSC has certified less than 2% of the wood and paper produced in North America.”

Do you think environmental groups exert too much control over the FSC? What do you think about the decision by Tembec, Domtar and Potlatch to seek FSC?

Patrick Moore: There are a number of nested issues in this whole subject.

First, I don’t have an opinion about whether or not the environmental groups have too much influence in the FSC because in fact the FSC is the product of the environmental movement, in particular the World Wildlife Fund International, but Greenpeace and the Sierra Club were in there from the beginning.

Actually, over the years the FSC has moderated, has become less extreme.

But there are still a bunch of problems for FSC gaining more ground, and the number one is that the owners of private forestlands, with few exceptions, reject FSC as being too political and wanting too much control and say into their private land decisions, and costing too much.

Many of the places where the FSC has been successful are where they’ve been able to get grants in order to subsidise the certification work, and so the forest [owners] being certified didn’t have to pay for it.

FSC has been accepted more on public lands in Canada than it has on private lands in the US.

The exception to that, of course, is British Columbia, where even on the public lands the FSC process that took place in BC ended up with a completely unacceptable FSC model, because, again, the more extreme anti-forestry wing of the environmental movement was in there very strongly.

It’s different in different places. The FSC has actually certified forests in developing countries in too lax a way without enough stringency.

On one hand the FSC will certify exotic eucalyptus, high-yield, 7-year rotation plantations for pulp and paper in Brazil and yet they can’t figure out how to certify forestry in British Columbia which is being done with native species in a semi-natural forest condition.

It’s beyond me why it’s more difficult for them to certify forests that are being managed almost in their natural state with mixed species, conifers and hardwood and long-time rotations, as compared with high-yield exotic pulp plantations which they seem to be able to certify very easily.

So to me that’s the big weakness with the FSC; it’s not that logically based in many ways and the politics of extreme anti-forestry are a big problem in it.

As far as Tembec and Domtar go: there you have CEOs and management that are trying to get out in front, trying to be progressive and trying to do their best to have negotiations with the FSC in order to get a marketing advantage, because the FSC has such an environmental cachet around it.

I don’t blame them for doing that. I sat with Frank Dottori just a month or so ago at one of his big management meetings and watched how he worked. And I really support him because he’s hard-core. He doesn’t let anyone put him in a corner like they did with Home Depot, he doesn’t let that happen.

And at the same time he wants to do the right thing and he sees that through FSC he might be able to have an advantage in the marketplace and at the same time build bridges with people in the environmental movement, and he’s always been very good at that.

So I applaud him for his ability to do that in the same way that I applaud the participants in the Boreal Forest Initiative for trying to reach agreements on things where there have been a lot of disagreements and rancour in the past.

It’s great to see people working positively towards agreement. It’s interesting to see which groups won’t participate and which groups will, on both sides.

To get back to BC, what do you think about Tembec’s involvement in testing and seeking certification against the preliminary FSC standard?

Patrick Moore: More power to them, good luck!

It would be great if someone could break through that log-jam and show that it can be done.

The only problem is that often what happens is that when a company like Tembec makes a move like this, the environmental movement cuts them out and puts them up on a pedestal and uses them to smash all the other guys, in the same way that they do with Abitibi in the east.

Tembec and Domtar are the angels and Abitibi is the devil. It gives the environmental groups an opportunity to divide and conquer the industry and some people feel that if you take the Churchill-Chamberlain metaphor, the people who are trying to deal with what seems to be fairly unreasonable rules are selling out the rest of the industry.

But we will see. If Tembec succeeds in BC and creates an environment that works for other members of the industry that could only be a positive development.

LEADERSHIP INTERVIEW WITH PATRICK MOORE

Part 2 – August 13, 2004

You are very much involved with the Wood Promotion Network, the industry network to promote wood in North America. Could you explain how your involvement in the Network from your perspective promotes sustainable forestry? More generally, what influence do you feel that you are having through your involvement? How would you respond to those who would suggest that you have become too close to the forest products industry?

Patrick Moore: The good thing about my relationship with the Wood Promotion Network is that it’s at semi-arm’s length.

Basically, the Wood Promotion Network supports me in getting my message out to the public, and a big part of my message has to do with wood, so we simply have an alignment of interest there.

For example, on Earth Day, the Wood Promotion Network people organized for me to be in Central Park, New York, to broadcast to over 20 million people who watched me on newscasts as we did one market after another, live.

I talk about lots of environmental issues when I’m working with the WPN, not just wood.

I don’t believe that wood is the only answer to the future of the human race; it’s part of it, a big part of it, because it’s the most abundant renewable material on earth which gives it a very important role, but there are many other technologies and materials and energy sources and ideas that need to be part of a sustainable future. I focus on all of them.

Basically the Wood Promotion Network is giving me a platform to be the Sensible Environmentalist in public and I’m very grateful to them for that.

And they can count on me to focus on wood every time I speak because, as I said, it has a pretty special place in the sustainability formula for the future of civilisation.

There has been some controversy regarding the LEED programme and the forthcoming Vancouver Olympics, where all the Olympic venues are to be constructed to the LEED standard. What is your take on the LEED programme and the fact that it only recognises FSC as a valid certification programme?

Patrick Moore: I think that it had the potential to be a bit of a Trojan horse.

In the bid containing LEED, it’s important to remember that it doesn’t just say LEED, it says LEED or equivalent standard in the language.

The LEED standard is not a rigorous set of prescriptions; people don’t understand that.

You don’t have to use FSC wood in a LEED building, you can use any wood you want; you just don’t get a point for certification, which I believe is ridiculous, but that is the case with LEED so you have to get your points some other way.

The truth of the matter is that in order to get the Silver level of LEED, it’s very easy if you just pay attention; you don’t need to use FSC wood, you don’t need to do a lot of things.

I think that the people in charge have recognised that the inclusion of LEED in the bid is not an obstacle in any way to maximizing the use of British Columbia-produced wood in particular.

Another thing that is unfortunate about LEED is that it does not include hydro-electric energy of the kind which British Columbia produces as being a renewable or green energy, and that’s another weakness of LEED.

We make 95% of our electricity from renewable hydro power here in British Columbia, which we think is environmentally better than using coal or nuclear power.

We’re doing it with hydro and producing many tens of thousands of megawatts. And it’s too bad that this isn’t getting the credit, for example, if we were using that hydro in the Olympic venues.

But regardless of that, LEED is not an obstacle, and this just gives us one more opportunity to highlight the weaknesses in LEED, to work with the people in LEED to correct these weaknesses.

Again, just like in the FSC, those problems are there because there are activist agendas being inserted into LEED, and the two key ones in this case are anti-wood and anti-vinyl.

Vinyl is now going through a big process within LEED as well, and we hope that comes out favourably.

And we hope that eventually LEED will recognise that they have to include the other certification systems for certified wood.

The other thing which is the craziest of all within LEED is the Rapidly Renewable Resources category that does not include construction lumber because it’s not “rapid” enough in it renewability.

They’re supporting rapid rotations and hippy-dippy products like wheat straw cabinetry and sunflower seed board.

On the other hand you have the environmental movement calling for the forest industry to use longer rotations in order to have more sustainable forestry and have more old growth-dependent species in the forest.

And here’s LEED with their renewable resource criteria that calls for shorter rotations (10 years maximum) thus excluding construction lumber from the renewable category. There’s a real logical disconnect going on there.

Do you think that the Wood Promotion Network has influence on green building standards these days or is it still at the early stage in terms of having more influence on those standards?

Patrick Moore: I think the Wood Promotion Network is having a significant influence on green building standards and is working on a number of fronts, working with the National Home Builder’s Association in the US and with their counterparts in Canada on developing alternative green building standards and systems.

Again, like with the FSC, we need some alternatives to LEED; we need to have a shopping cart of alternatives for people who are in architecture and construction and development to go to and decide which will be the best for them.

Green building, just like sustainable forestry is a very complex multi-faceted situation with lots of apples and oranges being compared with each other, making it so that there is going to be decades of thinking and work and development on green building standards, on life-cycle analysis, on all those aspects.

It’s a huge field that has opened up, and a very important one, of course, because the built infrastructure amounts to a very large percentage of our environmental impact and resource consumption.

Other than that, transportation is probably the other biggest one. It’s an important area, and great strides will be made as we move into the future on reducing our footprint, reducing consumption of energy and materials, using better energy and materials.

One of the things LEED doesn’t address is this: everybody thinks it’s good for things to be renewable and it’s good for things to be biodegradable.

But it’s not good for your roof to be biodegradable.

It’s not good for the walls of your building to be biodegradable. That’s the leaky condo problem [that is so prevalent in Vancouver.]
What we want is durable material, especially on the exterior of buildings.

Greenspririt Strategies is working with a number of industry sectors on the issue of green building and has developed a kind of triumvirate of technologies and materials.

We believe that in residential construction we should work on combining wood and vinyl, and other plastics if they’re suitable, but vinyl seems to be the most suitable for most purposes.

Wood is renewable and vinyl is durable. And if you then focus on geothermal energy, or ground-source heat-pump technology, for your heating, cooling, and hot-water needs, this immediately makes you house at least 50% renewable for energy consumption no matter what the source of the electricity you’re bringing in to run your geothermal system.

If you use wind energy or hydro-electric energy to run your geothermal system, your house is 100% renewable all of a sudden, instead of being 75% non-renewable from the gas being burned to make your heat and hot water.

So we believe that the core of wood, vinyl, and geothermal energy produces the greenest and most environmentally sustainable structure for residential building.

Of course, you have to have some concrete, and hopefully that will have as high a level as possible of fly-ash and other industrial waste materials recycled into the concrete that’s being used.

You also have to have some metal, particularly the nails to hold the wood together and some metal flashing etc. But by-and-large, if you take the three, wood, vinyl, and geothermal, you can have a cost-effective, environmentally sustainable structure.

It’s almost the exact opposite of what the green movement is saying.

And in terms of the LEED commercial building standard, you usually end up with a completely steel and concrete structure, and we believe that from a life-cycle analysis, energy consumption, environmental impact, greenhouse gas emissions, etc, that this just isn’t right.

It does not actually amount to a greener structure than you would have if you focussed on wood and vinyl instead.

What do you think about the current campaigns by Greenpeace and other groups on illegal logging, the boreal forest and endangered forests? Do you consider these campaigns as ’anti-forestry’? How do you see the role of these organisations in the sustainable forest debate?

Patrick Moore: I think the orientation of these groups is still anti-forestry.

Their goal in life is to get as much of the forestlands put into non-forestry use as possible. I don’t think they are in general all that well educated in the area of sustainable forest management.

I think preservation is their key concern. And so be it; if it is, that’s fine.

But I think a lot of the campaigns that they have now are largely fundraising campaigns; they are designed in order to be able to produce the mass mailings in order to raise funds to perpetuate the organisation.

I’m not sure how important the boreal issue is.

It strikes me that there’s probably 50% of the boreal that’s not worth logging anyways.

Not to put it down completely, it’s a good thing that people are working together, but a lot of it is politics and a lot of it is grand-standing.

There’s not as much substance in it as there should be in my estimation.

You present yourself as the ’Sensible Environmentalist’. Can you explain the origin of this term? Does this term distinguish you from mainstream environmentalists such as Sierra Club or Greenpeace campaigners?

Patrick Moore: Yes, it certainly does. The derivation of the terms is partly from my friend Bjørn Lomborg’s the ’Skeptical Environmentalist’ and I thought it was kind of a logical progression to go from the skepticism that he has very carefully put forward to adopting a more sensible approach to environmentalism, one that is based more on logic and science, and less on emotion and politics.

I believe that much of the environmental movement’s policy today is ’unsensible’.

For example, the call to go back to organic farming – it’s just nonsensical.

If we give up the advances in agriculture; fertilizers, chemicals, and genetics, it would mean that we’d have to use and vast amount more land to grow the food for the 6 billion people.

This would mean cutting down more forest to get that additional land.

It just can’t work and would result in damage to the environment and further impoverishment and starvation. Their blanket opposition to genetic modification is also nonsensical.

It would be not only sensible but humanitarian to adopt the genetically modified Golden Rice to that could help prevent blindness in half a million children every year.

I have a very strong critique of the policy of the movement based on policies, not personalities or name-calling, whereas I find that much of the criticism against me is pure name-calling.

I’m the ’eco-Judas’; Paul Watson called me a ’bottom-sucking parasite’, and it turns out actually that if you Google “bottom-sucking parasite”, I’m the only one. There is no other bottom-sucking parasite.

And as you can see that’s just pure name-calling, it has nothing to do with environmental policy. There isn’t even such a thing as a bottom-sucking parasite, except for me that is, because parasites don’t suck the bottom, they attach themselves to other creatures.

I believe that I am putting forward a more logically coherent and consistent framework for global environmental policy in the various writings and speeches that I have produced.

For example, the Rainforest Action Network, Sierra Club, World Wildlife Fund, Greenpeace – they all have orientations and policies that would basically reduce the amount of wood that we use.

The main result of that would be to increase the amount of fossil fuel and steel and concrete that we use. And I think that is extremely counter-productive.

It is obviously a much more sensible approach to grow more trees and use more wood as I have said over and over again.

And thankfully, a bunch of people are figuring that out and listening to it.

I think the sensible environmentalist will eventually have a considerable amount of influence over the public opinion on environmental issues and on opinion leaders.

You are aware of the Alliance that was made by Boise with Rainforest Action Network. Was that a sensible move? What do you think about their policy?

Patrick Moore: That quite surprised me.

Boise has moved heavily into paper, and with the combination of the Staples campaign and the campaign against Boise I think what happened is that the senior management said ’Look, we have to make a deal with these people.’

It’s the same thing that happened to Citibank and Home Depot.

I consider it a form of blackmail, myself, but apparently it’s legal. And so Rainforest Action Network got away with it.

They have a lot of influence and a lot of power, and I perceive them as an extremely negative force from an environmental point of view.

Do you see any problem with the content of the policy and compromise with Boise as it came out of these discussions?

Patrick Moore: I don’t think Boise had to do anything terribly profound in the way of changing their practices.

They just had to bow down and kiss the feet of Rainforest Action Network.

At an ITTO meeting in Indonesia, Jan McAlpine, the head of the US delegation and the current chair of the International Tropical Timber Council, stated in reference to your company Greenspirit that you had a ’mean spirit.’ Today, what are your thoughts on this incident?

Patrick Moore: I think that was an unfortunate bit of name-calling.

It strikes me that part of US policy is to focus the illegal logging issue on the developing countries.

Maybe it’s a way for them to avoid focus being put on their own forest industry.

I’m not sure what their politics are on this, but I do know that the campaign against Asia Pulp and Paper, which was the subject of my presentation at ITTO, and the campaign accusing the pulp industry in general in Indonesia of illegal logging is complete misinformation.

The illegal logging that is occurring in Indonesia is almost entirely for high-value hardwood for veneers and hardwood lumber.

Nobody is going to illegally log pulp chips; it just doesn’t make any sense at all.

I pointed out that the only illegal thing that was happening with APP was that the local people were hijacking their timber off the barges coming up the river and selling it back to the pulp mill.

The pulp mill was letting that happen, they said: “well, let these people who are poor and haven’t anything else to do take 5 percent of our wood and sell it back to us.

It adds a little cost to our pulp wood price, but fine. We’d have to bring in police and arrest them, and that would cause an international incident, so we’re just going to let it continue and call it a social cost.”

I showed that in PowerPoint slides, the pictures of people stealing the wood off the barges of APP, and I demonstrated clearly that APP was not involved in illegal logging, and that’s why she called me ’mean spirit’.

I really don’t understand it. It was sort of as if I was bursting her bubble, I guess.

The fact is that most of the illegal logging in Indonesia is being done by the police and the military, or at least in collusion with them, and is totally corrupt right up to the top.

I’m certainly not in favour of that but I don’t think that it’s fair to blame the pulp and paper industry.

They are converting the land to high-yield Acacia plantations but that’s the same thing that the FSC is certifying in Brazil, so why should it be any different in Indonesia? I was really quite annoyed with that.

McAlpine, I thought, behaved in a very high-handed manner and was actually quite rude.

You are probably one of the most controversial figures in world forestry today, with leading detractors such as Monte Hummel from WWF and David Suzuki from his foundation. Despite antagonism between you and these gentlemen, would you be interested in debating them in public?

Patrick Moore: Actually, I have a lot of respect for Monte Hummel and always have had.

We had our little set-to a couple of times but I’m very supportive of his orientation.

I think there was a period where WWF seemed to find it necessary to close ranks with some of the more extremist positions, but I think WWF is moderating and realising that there is a more sensible middle ground that needs to be carved out.

So I’ll support Monte. I wouldn’t only debate him; I would like to have a conversation with him about these things.

Now Suzuki is a totally different matter. David Suzuki refuses to debate with me, and won’t allow any of his people to debate with me, and that is the actual policy of the Suzuki Foundation from my understanding.

I find David Suzuki to be extremely disingenuous.

Just yesterday, I found myself in conflict with him because he issued a media release about a new report they’ve commissioned about the sea-lice issue and the salmon in British Columbia.

The headline of the release stated: “New Analysis Links Salmon Farms, Sea Lice, and Broughton Pink Salmon Crash.” But if you actually read the report and the conclusion of the report, it states clearly that “we have not seen any direct evidence to date linking transmission of sea lice from sea farms in the study area to wild pinks.

This is complete misinformation, lies in fact, and it drives me a bit crazy.

I personally consider the Suzuki campaign against salmon aquaculture in British Columbia to be a criminal act against the economic aspirations of the First Nations people in coastal BC.

And yet, they are pretending that they have the First Nations people on their side and they’re using them mercilessly for this fundraising campaign to damage the reputation of our most important agricultural export, which is farmed salmon.

I have no time for David Suzuki. He was my genetics professor at UBC for two years, he taught me well, he was a very good instructor, but I think he’s gone completely wonky.

Would you enjoy having a programme like he has “The Nature of Things” on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation?

Patrick Moore: Yes, I would actually. I’ve even begun to develop it. It would be called ’The Future of Things’.

As you are certainly aware, there has been significant reduction in the enrolment to forestry related professions in universities and so forth, what do you tell the young generation? Would you recommend that they pursue a career in forestry or a related discipline? How do you go about developing a greater interest in the forestry profession among young people?

Patrick Moore: That is a really big problem. In the final analysis, the demand for those skills will result in people going into them.

There’s a bit of a lull now and it is a cyclical sort of thing.

I think also a lot more people are focussing on wood science now. We have this big new wood science facility here at the University of British Columbia, and I think more and more emphasis will be placed on the science of forestry and in particular on wood science and product science on high-tech aspects of wood, engineered wood, and all of that.

I’m not worried about it because the demand for the skills will pull people in.

The stage of anti-forestry we’ve gone through will also end. People will become better educated, and the anti-forestry people will move on to being anti-something else, and we will in the end get a more balanced and more sensible understanding of the issues.

Have you any interest in getting involved in teaching and so forth?

Patrick Moore: Well actually I consider what I do to be partly teaching, only not in the Ivory Tower.

My senior professor at UBC who was a systems ecologist and my mentor for a number of years there reminded me of what Marshall McLuhan, the great Canadian communicator, had said, “If you want to have influence in this world, get out of the Ivory Tower and get into the control tower.”

I’ve always taken that as a byword that I relate to.

I’d rather be out here in the real world, in the trenches, where it’s really going on, than in an Ivory Tower.

I may decide to teach one day but I rather doubt that I’ll get into a career teaching position.

I do a lot of guest lectures and a lot of speaking, and I think I’m doing more to educate people there than I would be if I was teaching in an educational institution.

In relation to a Monty Python quote that you’ve added as a signature to your emails, “You’re not arguing with me, you’re just disagreeing with everything I say!” and the response, “No, I’m not” – could you elaborate on the application of this quote in the forest sustainability debate?

Patrick Moore: I’m just trying to be funny by using an amusing quote from Monty Python which I think is brilliant.

The full text of that quote is from the Argument Room, where the purpose of going in that room there is to argue with the person in the room.

The person in the room won’t agree with anything you say.

That’s the basis of that line at the bottom of my email. I think it highlights the fact that a lot of time this debate is going on at real cross-purposes.

It’s as if you’re talking to the wall, and I’m sure the people on the other side feel the same thing.

It’s very difficult to engage in meaningful dialogue with the sort of extremists, as I see them, on the other side of the debate.

You get into a discussion about, say, sustainable forestry or genetic engineering or about aquaculture and fish farming, and you start off with a topic and you try to deal with that topic.

Just when you think you’re barely making your point on that topic, they change the subject to another topic.

I find that to be one of the key strategies of the anti-everything movement: they just keep changing the subject.

You can never actually come to any kind of conclusion on any given point. They never agree with you, and you can never agree with them, and it goes around and around forever.

And as the quote says, “you’re not arguing with me, you’re just disagreeing with everything I say.”

Are there any other topics you would like to comment on?

Patrick Moore: Yes, I’d like to comment on the fact that the group I’m with now, Greenspirit Strategies, is developing its own non-profit; we’re just about to incorporate Greenspirit Foundation International.

It will be an NGO that will seek United Nations status and will work on national and international issues that are philanthropic and humanitarian in nature.

One of my goals is to bring more support for aboriginal aquaculture in Canada.

I think it’s a very good fit for First Nations people to work with aquaculture, and there’s a tremendous potential for it.

It needs NGO and non-profit support.

I want to work in the international field on helping to introduce the new genetically modified crops which reduce pesticide use and fertilizer needs and increases yields and provides better nutrition to the developing countries.

I’m coming full circle myself, in that I’ve been in the private sector for a long time since I left Greenpeace in 1986.

But now Tom, Trevor and I are going to focus a considerable amount of our energy in going back into non-profit NGO-type involvement and hopefully provide an alternative model of the environmental NGO to the one that I believe has gone considerably astray, the Greenpeaces, Sierra Clubs, and Rainforest Action Networks.

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