Environmentalists are elitist.

Normally, I take a look at the Greenpeace website every now and then so I can get a good laugh out their articles, but now things are just turning sour. As we all know, the Live Earth concerts were this month and as always, they lacked any sort of definitive goal on combating climate change. Then environmentalist lifestyle pushed by Greenpeace goes beyond simply wanting to care for the environment, it seeks to push its militant ideas onto countries who are reliant on old methods of farming and industrialisation. The only real objective that they have is to mobilise mass amounts of ignorant people to lobby for the passing of legislation that inhibits developing countries.

There are so many issues to criticise Greenpeace on, but I’ll just stick to one about rainforest destruction in the Congo.

It’s not too late to prevent the destruction of this incredible rainforest, and by putting pressure on the World Bank, that’s exactly what we intend to do.

Rather than suggesting any sort of reason as to why the rainforest is being chopped down, Greenpeace leaps to the plan of attack by telling its readers to contact their government and put and end to this. Read the article for yourself and you will see that they offer no plausible alternative for a country that’s ridden by poverty and war. Third world countries don’t cut down rainforests because they’re terrible people who want to rid our world of diverse fauna, they do it because they can’t afford to import wood from other countries. I’m not for the destruction of the rainforest, but I don’t believe that picketing, emailing government officials, or writing pointless articles about it helps the situation.

After looking at a list of main issues that Greenpeace’s US section wants to fight, all they suggest as their plan of action is to send a generic email to your congressperson. The international site asks for volunteers and skilled people to work for them, but for what? To produce films, “push envelopes”, and to write their articles. Nowhere do they suggest that people should volunteer to live in these communities and help them rely on “green” ways of doing things. They jump to antagonise countries who are only guilty of not being able to afford to run using environmentally-friendly methods. It’s so easy for those of us in developed countries to sit back and become vegetarians and environmentalists because we’re comfortable enough to do that. We’re not starving or poor, we’re able to make decisions about what we want to eat and how we want to live our lives. Others don’t. The answer isn’t to criticise others when we can’t even imagine what their situation is like.