This Wired article, Eco-Traitor, about Patrick Moore, a founder of Greenpeace who left the organization in 1986, encapsulates some of the problems that plague the "environmental movement".

First of all, Moore argued, total dioxin emissions have dropped 90 percent since 1970, to levels safely below those that cause health problems. Furthermore, dioxins are not some newfangled product of the industrial age. They've been around as long as fire. If the council wanted to make a real difference, he said, it could ban backyard burning, which spews nearly 60 times more dioxins than PVC manufacturing, or residential fireplaces, which emit 10 times more.

Throughout his presentation, Moore made barbed references to the devious forces behind the legislation, the same pack of Luddites who "hijacked a considerable portion of the environmental movement back in the mid-'80s and who have become very clever at using green language to cloak campaigns that have more to do with anti-industrialism, antiglobalization, anticorporate, all of those things which are basically political campaigns."

It was a bravura performance. When Moore returned to his seat, he was greeted with handshakes and backslaps from the folks who had paid his way: the Vinyl Institute.

For Moore, the PVC showdown was part of a larger crusade to reform environmentalism. He derides today's activists as philosophically unmoored and blindly technophobic, and he offers an alternative philosophy that not only accepts but celebrates humankind's growing ability to alter the planet. With a tip of the hat to best-selling "skeptical environmentalist" Bjørn Lomborg (and perhaps Thomas Paine), he has anointed himself the sensible environmentalist and set out to win converts. There haven't been many. So far, Moore has succeeded mostly in making himself a pariah and a cautionary tale.

The author of the article, Drake Bennett, is out of touch. Moore is no pariah, he is increasingly viewed as one of the most effective voices on environmental issues today. The "pack of Luddites who hijacked a considerable portion of the environmental movement" are not among his supporters but an even larger group of people who are sincerely concerned about the environment rather than the anti-industrial, antiglobalization, anticorporate political ideology of the pseudo-environmentalists Moore excoriates do support him.

It is telling that Moore's critics don't speak to the issues he raises and attack his identity and associations instead. Moore is right on the issues but is criticized for accepting fees from corporate interests. In the muddled minds of the pseudo-environmental political movement environmental issues are irrelevant, all that matters is political ideology.

There is a consistency to Moore's life in that he still battles the enemies of the environment. What has changed is that now those enemies call themselves environmentalists. Moore's insight, shared by many others, is that the concept of environmental care is now broadly shared at all levels of society and that the useful work remaining to be done is to develop effective ways to implement sustainable development.

There's no escaping the need to do so as there are 6 billion people on the planet, soon to be 9 billion, who will do their very best to survive and thrive. One out of every six of those people lives a life of desperate want now, a problem that will grow if we fail to deal with it. They won't just lay down and die quietly, they'll ravage the environment and in the end attack civilization itself in their desperation. It is intellectually, morally, aesthetically and environmentally bankrupt to evade this obvious reality and fail to work diligently to develop sustainable development techniques.

In Moore's words: "There's no getting around the fact that 6 billion people wake up every morning with a real need for food, energy, and material. Their idea is that all human activity is negative, while trees are by nature good, that's a religious interpretation, not a scientific or logical interpretation." That's a useful insight, one that has a lot of explanatory power. The "environmental movement" has degenerated into a fundamentalist religion with an anti-humanist creed which prevents them from making rational or effective environmental proposals. They are welcome to their religion but those who are concerned about the environment need to move on without them and develop sustainable development policies that prevent and reverse environmental degradation while feeding humanity in its billions. We might wish for a different task, an easier task, a smaller population or some sort of magic to make it all better, but we must face the task at hand.