Free Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist by Patrick Moore Page A

brought a proud man to his knees.
    While dad taught me leadership, my mom, Beverly, taught me how to think. Also well read, she was the daughter of a hard-working West Coast salmon fishing family that struggled through the Great Depression. My granddad, Art, and his three brothers had pioneered the salmon fishing industry in Winter Harbour in the late 1930s. They were involved in the creation of the Kyuquot Fisherman’s Co-op, an effort to get out from under the yoke of the big fish buyers who paid next to nothing for their hard labor. He and Granny Mary were Socialists of a peaceful nature. But like their Russian comrades they were atheists and rejected capitalism. This philosophy strongly influenced Mom, although her education and love of knowledge tempered her political fervor.

    My mom, Beverly, and my dad, Bill, about to go to “town” on a float plane, circa 1960. Our little village by the sea is in the background, the camp cookhouse is above.

    When I was 15 Mom introduced me to the great British philosopher, Bertrand Russell. While I found the first book she recommended, Why I Am Not a Christian , interesting, it was his writing in the social and scientific fields that really turned me on. I raced through Authority and the Individual , a treatise on the conflict between our rights as individuals and our obligations to the greater good of society. Then I discovered Our Knowledge of the External World and Inquiry into Meaning and Truth .I was fascinated by Russell’s grasp of the scientific method but even more impressed with his critical thinking. Thus began my lifelong pursuit of knowledge in the sciences and my near obsession with thinking critically as a way of separating facts and logic from misinformationand propaganda.
    In an era when classroom sex education didn’t exist Mom taught me about the birds and the bees in a nice way. No doubt she was a big part of the reason there were no unwanted pregnancies in my younger years.
    Around the same time I was sent off to boarding school in Vancouver, at age 14, the road came to Winter Harbour, 250 miles of bad gravel from the nearest pavement at Campbell River. We thought the road would bring new settlers to the village. Instead, it prompted an exodus. Today there are 11 full-time residents in my hometown, there were 75 before the road came in. I love it there.
    My four years at St. George’s private school in Vancouver were formative in a number of ways. I excelled in the arts and sciences and I made friends who I count as my best friends today. I found out I disliked contact sports, English rugby being the school’s idea of how real men were made. Give me tennis or skiing over sports that require extreme body contact. So I failed as a jock even though I admired my fellow students who thought nothing of risking life and limb to get a ball across the line.
    After graduating from St. George’s I enrolled in the Faculty of Science at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver in 1965, and soon developed a passion for the life sciences. During those years I really came to appreciate my home village in the wilderness. I had always been mechanically inclined: I was monkey-wrenching engines by the time I was eight and I built my first 12-foot plywood boat when I was 13. I imagined I would become an engineer or architect. Auspiciously, in retrospect, I nearly failed my first year at university after being at the top of my class throughout high school. It was a simple case of going a little wild after the imposed discipline of an English-style boarding school, but it meant I didn’t qualify to enter the School of Engineering. Oscar Sziklai, a forestry professor-friend of my dad’s, encouraged me to apply to the School of Forestry. Soon after I began to study trees and forests I realized I was even more fascinated by biology than by engineering or mechanics.
    After excelling in first-year forestry I was given the opportunity to fashion my own program, a combined