Coast Guard cut us off at Akutan Harbor and made us turn back. We survived that first voyage, but we never made it to the test site. We sang protest songs, drank beer, smoked pot and had a generally good time. We believed the revolution should be a celebration. We realized all-out nuclear war would be the end of both civilization and the environment - hence the name we soon adopted, Greenpeace, as in 'let it be a green peace.' We chartered an old fishing boat to sail to ground zero to focus public attention on the nuclear tests. I became radicalized and joined the group of anti-nuclear activists. D in ecology at the University of British Columbia over the objections of a few industry-backed professors who had forced their way onto my thesis committee. I was in a bitter battle to obtain my Ph. It was 1971 and the height of the hippy era. The early days of Greenpeace were heady indeed. I wrote the organizers and was invited to join the weekly meetings of the small group that would soon become Greenpeace. I immediately realized this was something real I could do, way beyond taking ecology classes and studying at a desk.

In April 1971, I saw a small article in The Vancouver Sun about a group planning to sail a boat from Vancouver across the North Pacific to protest U.S. The Don't Make a Wave Committee was meeting weekly in the basement of the Unitarian church in Vancouver. I joined Greenpeace before it was even called by that name. In the process, we won the hearts and minds of people around the world. We campaigned against the bomb-makers, whale-killers, polluters and anyone else who threatened civilization or the environment. Still, the sense of duty and purpose of mission we had at the beginning was as acute as any assault on a common enemy. My boot camp had no screaming sergeant or rifle drills. I've had the good fortune to be a general in that war. Spurred by more than 30 years of ever-present fear that global nuclear holocaust would wipe out humanity and much of the living world, we led a new war - a war to save the earth. Beatniks, hippies, eco-freaks and greens in their turn fashioned a new philosophy that embraced peace and ecology as the overarching principles of a civilized world. The last half of the 20th century was marked by a revulsion for war and a new awareness of the environment. This is the story of our transformations. I became a sensible environmentalist Greenpeace became increasingly senseless as it adopted an agenda that is anti-science, anti-business, and downright anti-human. The truth is Greenpeace and I had divergent evolutions. I'd like to think Greenpeace left me, rather than the other way around, but that too is not entirely correct. You could call me a Greenpeace dropout, but that is not an entirely accurate description of how or why I left the organization 15 years after I helped create it. New book describes environmental group's descent into extremism, author's conversion to reasonД«y Patrick Moore, Special To The Sun, January 7, 2011

Confessions of a greenpeace dropout