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

honors degree in forestry and biology. This allowed me to study a broad range of life-science subjects: genetics, biochemistry, soil science, plant physiology, and forest science. Then I discovered ecology, the study of how all living things are interrelated, and how we are related to them. Having grown up in an agnostic household I had always viewed science as a purely technical subject, the objective of which was to dispel mystery rather than to foster it. Now I saw that through the science of ecology one could come to appreciate the infinitely complex nature of the universe and gain an insight into the mystery of life. I realized the feeling of tranquility and wonder I had experienced as a child in the rain forest was a kind of prayer or meditation. Ecology gave me a sort of religion, and with it the passion to take on the world. I became a born-again ecologist.
    Upon graduating with honors I was awarded a Ford Foundation Fellowship to enroll in a PhD program at the university of my choice. I picked Washington University in St. Louis, where Dr. David Gates, a leader in research on photosynthesis and food chain energetics, agreed to head my thesis committee. In June of 1969 I drove from Vancouver to St. Louis in my Volkswagen camper microbus, sporting a pretty big Afro, to discover America for the first time. The campus was beautiful but the city center had been burned to the ground the previous summer during the riots following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. A nearby river was so polluted it would regularly catch on fire. It was the height of the Vietnam War and even grad students were being drafted. Fear and loathing darkened the beauty of the campus… I felt like Bilbo the Hobbit witnessing Mordor for the first time. It was certainly no place for a country kid from Canada to study ecology.
    So I traveled on through the South and east to Key West, Florida, and back across Texas to California, where I visited the University of California at Davis, known for excellence in agriculture and ecology. There was no burned-out city there, but the dread of being drafted into an unpopular war was the same as in St Louis. I couldn’t fathom the idea of being among fellow students who lived in fear every day. I turned tail and headed back to my peaceful home in Western Canada, where I convinced my professors to let me do my PhD at the University of British Columbia.
    I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was part of what became known as the “reverse brain drain.” The brain drain referred to the fact that many young Canadians, after benefiting from publicly funded educations, chose to move to the United States where salaries were higher and taxes lower. For a period of a few years during the Vietnam War this trend reversed as Canadians chose to stay home and many of the brightest Americans came to Canada to avoid the war.
    One of my mentors was C.S. (Buzz) Holling, a pioneer in computer modeling of insect population dynamics. He agreed to let me do an interdisciplinary PhD in ecology and environmental science, which allowed me to take courses in any faculty. I studied environmental law, environmental economics, forest ecology, oceanography, marine biology, mineral engineering, and soil science, among other subjects.
    Shortly after I began my studies an announcement was made that would help shape the future of environmental policy and law in my home province. Utah Mining and Smelting of San Francisco was developing a large open pit copper mine near the sea on northern Vancouver Island, not far from my home at Winter Harbour. The company had applied for a permit to dispose of 40,000 tons of mine tailings per day into Rupert Inlet, a deep fjord in Quatsino Sound. Over the next 25 years it would produce $3 billion worth of copper and become the world’s deepest open pit at 1,200 feet below sea level. A number of the fledgling environmental groups, a few university professors, and 150 or so individuals filed