Greenpeace and Sierra Club: Unreasonable Measures

Greenpeace and the Sierra Club are two of the most well-known environmental organizations in the world and United States today, respectively. Greenpeace has been active for the last two or three decades, conducting campaigns to help the potential damage that the environment may have to endure due to new laws or business ventures.

However, there is always the looming thought that makes us want to question whether these efforts benefit everyone concerned. Pure logic tells us that whenever someone has to take, something has to give.

Greenpeace, for instance, has been the recipient of a lot of awards for their regular campaigns on the preservation of aquatic life. They have been constantly on the hunt for poachers and illegal fishers and have been successful in turning them over to the concerned authorities. However, one thing that personally bothers me is the possibility that Greenpeace might become indiscriminate in their campaigns and start targeting legitimate harvesters of the sea just to make their cause more prominent and recognized worldwide. In this regard, Greenpeace becomes very sensitive to the environment's needs and becomes totally dense to the need of people to make a living.

The group is also thought by many to be too mainstream. There is also the Brent Spar oil platform issue in 1995, where Greenpeace got their facts wrong. Though the campaign was successful, the group's claims that the Spar contained 5,000 tons of oil were found incorrect. Some also find their campaign for genetically modified foods as lacking in scientific research and basis. Others argue that their regulations on GM brought about by Greenpeace campaigns are too restrictive, while others dispute that their concerns over modified crops have already been widely discredited. While some find Greenpeace's campaigns ridiculous, others question why they don't advocate for certain issues like population control, said to affect the environment and cause damage to wildlife habitations.

Another example of environmental groups causing problems they mean to solve would be the Sierra Club's constant lobbying. In a nutshell, the Sierra Club aims to ensure that national parks and other lands of significant environmental value will not be easily taken by anyone who would need it. This is all good, but the problem lies when such lands will be used for the improvement of transportation or the installation of any facility that would help the community from an economic perspective. Over the years, the Sierra Club has prevented operations in some areas that could have provided several hundred people with jobs. Again, the same thing with Greenpeace happens with the Sierra Club: that for them the environment is far more valuable than a man's way of earning a living.

Some find the group's over-concern for nature (and lack of concern for man) as irrational, and their unwavering commitment to wilderness as leaning towards Paganism. There is also the long-standing criticism of Sierra Club's ideology of wilderness being free from the presence of humans. Many find this conclusive separation inappropriate and impractical. Often, communities and cultures are forcibly separated from their land, leading to cultural degradation. Sierra Club has begun to implement community-based wilderness campaigns, however.

While I personally appreciate the efforts (and the impressive results) of the Sierra Club and Greenpeace, I also find the need to be critical in choosing and executing preservation campaigns. These two groups must consciously make an effort to do balanced studies of the effects of any campaign that they roll out and take the side of action - or non-action - whenever necessary.