They could improve their lives, simply by planting different, better corn, cotton, or soybean seeds. But because it contains very few vitamins or minerals, rice alone cannot provide sufficient nutritional benefits to prevent the devastating effects of malnutrition, specifically vitamin A deficiency.
The World Health Organization estimates that, around the world, million children under the age of five may have a vitamin A deficiency. Of those, some , to , suffer blindness, and an equal number go on to meet an untimely end in miserable conditions in urban slums.
By recent estimates , providing children and families easy access to vitamin A could save , lives a year in Africa, Asia, and other developing countries. Golden Rice, a genetically engineered strain of rice that produces beta-carotene, which the human body processes into Vitamin A, was developed by German academics Ingo Potrykus and Peter Beyer with strictly humanitarian purposes in mind.
This new, nutritionally fortified grain was created in could have been on market as early as or had Greenpeace not decided to intervene.
Surely the organization was aware of the WHO statistics for vitamin A deficiency, yet they still chose to oppose Golden Rice. To Greenpeace, the unknown risks associated with planting this GE crop were far more serious than the known consequences — the continued death and suffering of children around the world.
After mounting two largely successful campaigns against nuclear proliferation and whaling, Greenpeace turned its attention to what it saw as the next most clear and present danger: the chemical element chlorine.
Considering all chlorine gives us in terms of public heath and medicine using chlorine to purify drinking water was one of the single biggest advances in the history of public health , this sort of hard-line stance must be considered both anti-science and anti-human.
Widely credited with helping launch the environmental movement, Silent Spring documented detrimental effects of pesticides, namely d ichloro d iphenyl t richloroethane DDT on the environment.
As it turns out, however, nowhere in her book did Carson call for the unilateral suspension of chemical insecticides; she simply questioned their arbitrary and unrestricted use. DDT was, and remains to this day, one of the most important tools for fighting the deadly spread of malaria in the developing world.
Surely in these situations, the minor risks associated with the chemical are vastly outweighed by the life-saving benefits. Not until — under immense humanitarian pressure — did Greenpeace finally relent and decide to begrudgingly sanction the use of DDT as an insecticide. While Nokia and Dell received some of the better scores, Greenpeace condemned the entire industry, saying that no company was doing enough to keep toxic chemicals out of consumer electronics.
Apple, generally considered one of the leaders in design and innovation, raked near the bottom, coming in 11th place out of Apple has recently launched its new range of MacBooks, but what you also get with a new MacBook is the highest level of another type of toxic flame retardant, tetrabromobisphenol A. What they fail to mention in the report is that along with preventing hundreds of deaths each year by preventing electronics from bursting into flames tetrabromobisphenol A TBBPA has never been shown to be harmful to humans.
Another chemical that has recently found its way into the Greenpeace crosshairs is bisphenol A, otherwise known as BPA. BPA is a building block of polycarbonate plastics and epoxy resins used in nearly every industry, including in the construction of plastic water bottles and food storage containers. According to the FDA :.
Consumers should know that, based on all available evidence, the present consensus among regulatory agencies in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Japan is that current levels of exposure to BPA through food packaging do not pose an immediate health risk to the general population, including infants and babies. This is hardly surprising news, especially considering that according to a Harris poll of full members of the Society of Toxicology, 96 percent of toxicologists believe that Greenpeace overstates chemical health risks.
Something to consider next time you hear the Greenpeace Chemical Alarm Bells ringing off the hook. The campaign specifically targets single-use plastics — like the gloves, hand sanitizer containers, and sealed packaging that kept people safe during the COVID pandemic. In its how-to-lobby guide , Greenpeace advised that people use their plastic phones to set up a meeting with their representatives, use their plastic printer to print off their talking points, use their plastic computer to email any follow-up documents, and to use their plastic pens to write thank you notes to politicians who cave to their demands for a plastic-free future.
The group claimed that the only way to reduce plastic from the ocean is to reduce or reuse plastics. Many types of plastic are completely recyclable and have been used to create everything from Patagonia sweaters to Ikea kitchen sets.
Recycling prevents waste from turning up in the environment and halts the need for new plastic to be created. But somehow, Greenpeace thinks they are helping reduce plastic waste by calling recycling a lie. When Greenpeace was founded in , the possibility of total nuclear annihilation seemed both real and imminent for citizens across the globe, and the organization spent its fledgling years as a vocal opponent of all things nuclear. While that particular mission failed, the Greenpeace founders felt their mission to Amchitka, and the attention it brought to the debate about nuclear testing, played a critical role in convincing President Nixon to cancel the remaining Hydrogen bomb tests.
Eventually, Greenpeace was successful in getting their anti-nuclear weapons message heard — loud and clear — across the globe. Despite the fact that the early s marked the beginning of the end of the Cold War, and with it the slow dissipation of the anxiety surrounding the likelihood of full-blown nuclear holocaust, Greenpeace clung to their convictions regarding the evils of everything nuclear.
To this day, Greenpeace maintains that nuclear power is neither safe nor clean. And, more than 50 years after splitting the first atom, science has yet to devise a method for adequately handling long lived radioactive wastes. The worst nuclear disaster in history occurred in when the Chernobyl nuclear plant in the Ukraine experienced a full core meltdown. To date, Chernobyl is the only accident in the history of commercial nuclear power where radiation-related fatalities occurred.
Try this statistic on for size: According to the Caithness Windfarm Information Forum , there were 35 fatalities associated with wind turbines in the United States from through Nuclear energy, by contrast, did not kill a single American in that time. Indeed, the nuclear industry in the U.
In , workers in the U. In comparison, the accident rate for all manufacturing industries combined, 3. And as for the storage issue, while the technology to safely store spent nuclear waste and even to recycle it has existed for quite some time, Greenpeace and the culture of fear its policies continually promote continue to stand in the way of viable long term solutions the storage and disposal of nuclear waste.
The saga of the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada is a perfect case in point. For years nuclear plants have been leaking radioactive waste from underground pipes and radioactive waste pools into the ground water at sites across the nation. This is another case of Cold War history being extrapolated to stand-in for the reality of present technology.
Modern storage solutions for used nuclear fuel are both safe and secure. Used nuclear fuel takes the form of solid pellets that are not corrosive and can be safely contained in the steel and concrete casks that have been specifically designed to last for hundreds of years or even longer. What is more, all of this used fuel has the capacity to be recycled :.
A secondary reason is to reduce the volume of material to be disposed of as high-level waste to about one fifth. In addition, the level of radioactivity in the waste from reprocessing is much smaller and after about years falls much more rapidly than in used fuel itself.
Many countries, including France, Japan, the U. Greenpeace holds to the linear no-threshold hypothesis LNT theory of radioactivity. In short, the LNT hypothesis says that there is no safe level of radiation. However, another model, the hormetic dose response RH , posits that low-dose radiation at or somewhat above natural levels is actually beneficial to health, perhaps because of stimulation of natural repair mechanisms in the body. In addition to being extremely dangerous, the continued greenwashing of nuclear power from industry-backed lobbyists diverts investments away from clean, renewable sources of energy.
In contrast to nuclear power, renewable energy is both clean and safe. Technically accessible renewable energy sources are capable of producing six times more energy than current global demand. But in supporting documents released this week, it emerged that the claim was based on a real-terms decline in worldwide energy consumption over the next 40 years — and that the lead author of the section concerned was an employee of Greenpeace. Not only that, but the modeling scenario used was the most optimistic of the investigated by the IPCC.
For every nuclear plant that environmentalists avoided, they ended up causing two coal plants to be built. Most new power plants in this country are coal, because the environmentalists opposed nuclear. By campaigning diligently against our two best hopes for providing energy to our growing world population, Greenpeace is, in essence, sentencing us all to a dark, cold future — one that will be especially hard for those nations and populations who cannot afford the significant investment in wind or solar power.
During the recent Fukushima nuclear power plant failures, which occurred in the aftermath of a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami, Greenpeace published this seemingly sympathetic statement on their website :.
Our thoughts continue to be with the Japanese people as they face the threat of nuclear disaster. Instead of a message of condolence for the thousands who perished in collapsed buildings, under the giant wall of water that rushed across low-lying areas, or from subsequent lack of clean drinking water or access to healthcare, Greenpeace used this human calamity to rack up yet another anti-nuke propaganda point.
But despite claims of radiation contamination reaching as far away as California , contaminating the milk that millions of Americans drink every day with terrifyingly minuscule levels of radiation, no nuclear holocaust ensued. The plant at Fukushima weathered the most intense ordeal Mother Nature could imagine, and yet still managed to avoid becoming another Chernobyl.
As George Monbiot wrote in the U. You will not be surprised to hear that the events in Japan have changed my view of nuclear power. You will be surprised to hear how they have changed it.
As a result of the disaster at Fukushima, I am no longer nuclear-neutral. I now support the technology. A crappy old plant with inadequate safety features was hit by a monster earthquake and a vast tsunami.
The electricity supply failed, knocking out the cooling system. The reactors began to explode and melt down. The disaster exposed a familiar legacy of poor design and corner-cutting.
Yet, as far as we know, no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation. The fact of the matter is that we are all bombarded by radiation from a wide array of sources every day, and even exposure to levels of radiation stemming from Fukushima Daiichi power plant disaster pale in comparison from the radiation from a single head or chest CT scan. This is not the path to a sustainable future for civilization. Through magazines, movies and television, the public was gaining and appreciation for the complexity of whale behavior, social life, and intelligence.
Whales were cool. For years, I have been tolerating their pretense of action and watching them rake in tremendous profits from whaling. In both cases, the whales die and someone profits. Greenpeace, he argues, uses the emotional tug of whales being slaughtered to pull in donations and recruit members.
But while Greenpeace has used this tactic successfully to pull in hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of their more than 40 years in existence, they have not succeeded in stopping Japanese whalers from continuing their harvest.
And according to Watson, Greenpeace does not even fundamentally oppose whaling. Consider these quotes from Greenpeace spokespersons:. John Frizell, Director of Greenpeace International. From the Greenpeace Policy Paper, One must be allowed to harvest a renewable resource. To me, this is an important principle. Leif Ryvarden, former Chairman of Greenpeace Norway. From an interview with Dagbladet, August 2, Ingrid Bertinussen, Greenpeace Norway Director.
Hesstvedt does not rule out the possibility that Greenpeace might accept commercial whaling when catch quotas are allocated by the International Whaling Commission IWC.
Greenpeace crewmembers on the Arctic Sunrise actually towed a slaughtered bowhead whale to shore as a favor for the Inupiat whalers in the Bering Sea. In doing so, he claims they violated both U. The incident was reported widely in the Alaskan media and the whalers used the incident to ridicule Greenpeace at the International Whaling Commission meeting in Monaco. Wood products make up 47 percent of all industrial raw materials manufactured in the United States, yet consume only 4 percent of the total energy needed to manufacture all industrial raw materials.
In addition, just one mature tree absorbs approximately 13 pounds of carbon dioxide a year. For every ton of wood a forest grows, it removes 1. Instead of trying to wean ourselves off wood products, we should be embracing the use of wood and, by extension, growing more trees.
In fact, forest growth in the U. The geographic area that encompasses the United States today has a greater extent of forest cover — one-third of the landmass — than it did in According to Greenpeace, the IPCC shares its own goal of achieving zero deforestation , globally, by In reality, what the IPCC says is this :. In the long term, a sustainable forest management strategy aimed at maintaining or increasing forest carbon stocks, while producing an annual sustained yield of timber, fibre or energy from the forest, will generate the largest sustained mitigation benefit.
Greenpeace wants to blame loggers for deforestation, when in actuality more deforestation is caused by our continuing demand for agricultural products to feed the population. Sustainable forestry creates more trees than it destroys, but clearing virgin forests to grow food is undoubtedly bad for both the environment and the trees. One of the goals of GE crops is to grow more food from a smaller agricultural footprint — and yet Greenpeace wants to ensure that the world never see the benefits of these technologies.
To maintain our full independence as an environmental campaigning organization, Greenpeace does not accept gifts or matching gifts from corporate entities or governmental agencies. This policy is intended to allow our advocacy, education and research projects to operate free from outside influence or suspicion of financial pressure.
Because we accept no corporate or government funding, Greenpeace depends on the generous contributions of individuals as well as grants from approved private and family foundations. Should you have any questions about making a gift to Greenpeace to support our environmental campaign work or our gift acceptance policies, please do not hesitate to contact us at connect greenpeace.
Still unsure? View more giving options or contact Greenpeace's Supporter Care Team to find out how you can contribute to a greener tomorrow. Then the group went searching for volunteers to sail to Alaska to protest another scheduled nuclear test at Amchitka.
On board, Hunter met crewmate Patrick Moore, who had returned to Vancouver after going to college in St. Louis, Missouri. Hunter, Moore and a dozen other activists sailed up the coast on the first voyage of The Greenpeace armed with environmental ideals and public relations savvy. The boat neared Amchitka on September 24, but the blast, scheduled for October 2, was postponed until November.
Moore was convinced the Americans were delaying the test to throw them off their plan. And it worked. The group had little choice but to sail back to Vancouver. We would have been stuck up there, a few hundred miles from the Russian coast, without food and drink. The United States finally detonated the bomb on November 6. There was no resulting tidal wave but the protest group had managed to garner world-wide media attention for its actions. Shortly afterwards, the Canadian government voted to condemn nuclear tests.
Following the Alaska trip, some crew members decided to develop their protest movement. It was based on the use of non-violent direct action to increase public awareness and influence government policy.
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