Michael Sowle

Climbing trainer, the Ruckus Society; Director of Finance, Operations, and Human Resources, Youth ALIVE! (CA); former campaign officer, Greenpeace USA; independent filmmaker

Lawrence ‘Butch’ Turk

Ship’s nurse and anti-Star-Wars campaigner, Greenpeace; First-aid trainer, the Ruckus Society

Bill Walker

Media trainer, the Ruckus Society; Vice President (West Coast), Environmental Working Group; former communications dir., Greenpeace USA and the California League of Conservation Voters; former reporter, The Denver Post

Mateo Williford

Ruckus Society climbing trainer; member, Greenpeace arctic ship-based action team; long-time activist with Rainforest Action Network, Earth First!, and the Forest Action Network; professional solar power system installer

Jim Goodman

Wonewoc, Wisconsin dairy farmer; activist, Greenpeace & the National Family Farm Coalition

Center for Food Safety

The Center for Food Safety (CFS) is a project of the International Center for Technology Assessment (ICTA). CFS is headed by Andrew Kimbrell, who was mentored by Jeremy Rifkin at the Foundation on Economic Trends. Next to the Unabomber, Rifkin is perhaps America’s most notable anti-technologist. CFS’s current focus is large-scale agriculture — specifically, food technology. It is a major partner in the “Keep Nature Natural” campaign, which receives funding from the organic food industry. CFS often participates in food scare projects managed by Fenton Communications, a Washington, D.C. public relations firm often used by anti-industry activists.

CFS has four stated goals, which promote organic agriculture by restricting traditional farming methods: “Ensuring the testing, labeling and regulation of genetically engineered (GE) foods; Preserving strict national organic food standards; Preventing potential animal and human health crises caused by food borne illness — including ‘mad cow’ disease; Educating the public on the hazards of industrial agriculture.” In 2004, CFS was the single largest financial contributor to a campaign to ban biotech crops in Mendocino County, CA. The ban (known as “Measure H”) passed, and is the only law of its kind in the country.

CFS sponsors the “Keep Nature Natural” campaign, a national initiative to flood the Food and Drug Administration with comments asking for stricter regulation of GE foods. Other sponsors of this project include Chefs Collaborative, Friends of the Earth, the Organic Consumers Association, and organic marketers Whole Foods Market and Eden Foods. At the heart of the campaign is a legal petition filed by CFS demanding mandatory warning labeling for genetically improved foods. Its ultimate goal was summed up by Craig Winters (who runs The Campaign to Label Genetically Engineered Foods) when he acknowledged that “labeling has nearly the same effect as a ban.”

CFS is also a member of the Fenton Communications–run “GE Food Alert” coalition, the organization responsible for the fall 2000 StarLink biotech corn scare. Other members include National Environmental Trust, Friends of the Earth, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, Organic Consumers Association, and the Pesticide Action Network. CFS co-sponsors (along with Greenpeace) the anti-food-technology web site www.cropchoice.com.

CFS’s relationship with its parent group (ICTA) is a curious one. Although CFS has its own tax ID number and files its own IRS returns, ICTA continues to solicit, receive, and spend grant monies on behalf of its smaller “project.” For this reason, our financial profile shows financial support and budget numbers for the two entities combined.

Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy

The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) was founded in 1986 with funds from the Unitarian Universalist Church’s Veatch Foundation (which was, at the time, run by a former Greenpeace director). Its apparent mission is to criticize industrial agriculture in general and food technology in particular.

In addition to its constant rant against genetically improved foods, IATP works behind the scenes in international bodies like the World Trade Organization to increase regulatory and trade burdens for countries that don’t practice enough “sustainable” agriculture. The Foundation for Deep Ecology gave IATP $75,000 in 1999 for this exact purpose. “Sustainable” agriculture refers to the move away from new technologies and toward more “natural” (read: organic) ways of producing food.

Here in the United States, IATP uses its activist network to strong-arm American corporations into endorsing its politically-correct trading model, which includes importing more food from “sustainable” growers in other countries. The group’s most successful push has been in the area of so-called “fair-trade” coffee, which is more expensive to buy because its growers claim to pay their workers drastically above-market wages.

Mothers for Natural Law

Mothers for Natural Law (M4NL) is an offshoot of the Natural Law Party (NLP), formed in 1996 with the goal of delivering the quasi-religious ideas of the NLP through seemingly ordinary, “family friendly” moms. Although the group’s charter mentions a host of issues including crime and public education, within a year of its founding M4NL’s programs were focused solely on one target: genetically improved foods. Under the leadership of husband-and-wife team Laura and Robin Ticciati, the group’s work has evolved into a first-rate scare campaign.

So what is “Natural Law”? It is essentially Hindu Vedic Law (an offshoot of Hindu folk medicine), as interpreted in the United States by cult leader Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. He came to the United States in the 1960s to teach his method of Transcendental Meditation (TM) — you may recall his brief association with the Beatles — and since then has established teaching centers in 80 countries. In 1988 The Illustrated Weekly of India estimated his net worth at $3.5 billion. According to former Maharishi follower Anthony DeNaro, TM itself is a fundamentalist Hindu religious movement masquerading as “alternative” health care. DeNaro has written that the Maharishi himself once snapped: “When America is ready for Hinduism, I will tell them!”

This cult leader chose the sleepy town of Fairfield, Iowa, as his American base of operations, and poured millions of dollars into founding the Maharishi International University, later renamed the Maharishi University of Management (MUM). This is a college that teaches TM as the key to personal success and harmony. Members of its faculty, along with NLP supporters, have tried to export TM to public school districts and both public and private universities, promising feats of flying and invisibility as well as a drop in the local crime rate. Not coincidentally, Fairfield, Iowa, is also the home base for M4NL, the Natural Law Party, and dozens of for-profit businesses whose incomes depend on Ayurvedic medicine, as well as the “organic foods” and “sustainability” movements.

American Corn Growers Association

With its all-American name, the American Corn Growers Association (ACGA) brings to mind visions of Heartland cornfields and a simple farm life straight out of Grant Wood’s “American Gothic.” But in reality, ACGA represents a farming style more Cuban than American.

Founded in 1987, ACGA masquerades as a representative of the United States’s many traditional corn growers. But the ACGA is really an organization that promotes a radically anti-business view of agriculture. ACGA’s president Keith Dittrich summarized the group’s views well in September 1999, when he said, “The fact is that an unregulated free market does not work for — nor does it exist — in agriculture … The only beneficiaries are the greedy multinational corporations.”

ACGA hopes farmers and consumers will confuse it with the National Corn Growers Association (NCGA), the much larger mainstream organization that really represents corn growers. Unlike the ACGA, which has a Politburo-style structure in which the group’s leaders issue position statements by fiat, the NCGA actually promotes policies set by its rank and file.

ACGA’s real purpose is to promote organic corn and its producers, and to trash-talk genetically improved foods. Rather than concentrate on issues important to family farmers, ACGA’s leaders and spokespeople travel around the world to work with Greenpeace, the fringe Natural Law Party (NLP), and other anti-food-technology organizations on activist campaigns targeting “corporate agriculture.”

A group with a name similar to ACGA, the American Corn Growers Foundation, is also attached to the Association. While ACGA denies an official connection to the Foundation, the two groups share board members and a mailing address, and work together on a variety of projects. Money flows back and forth between the two groups as well.

ACGA and the Foundation are tied to most of the usual anti-capitalist suspects in the anti-genetic improvement movement (including the Campaign to Label GE Foods, the Center for Food Safety, Consumers Union, Environmental Media Services, Food First, Jeremy Rifkin’s Foundation on Economic Trends, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, Maharishi University of Management, the Natural Law Party, the Organic Farming Research Organization, the Pesticide Action Network, the Sierra Club, and Union of Concerned Scientists) through the Bolinas Group, an informal consortium of environmental and anti-biotech organizations that helps fund ACGA.

But unlike Greenpeace and some of the other large Bolinas Group players in the anti-biotech movement, ACGA and the Foundation have carved out a unique niche: They take on genetic improvement from an economic perspective.

Their game plan is simple. First they convince as many farmers as possible that growing biotech corn will cut off a huge sector of the international market and that organic corn can be sold at a premium price. Then ACGA’s leaders catch a flight to Europe to join Greenpeace, the NLP, and other activists in trying to convince farmers and governments there that biotech has failed in the U.S. and should be rejected on the Continent.

The groups do this through farmer “education.” Through the “Farmer Choice-Customer First” project, paid for by environmental and anti-biotech groups, ACGA and the Foundation teach farmers how non-biotech corn can be marketed.

In December 2001, they conducted a survey as part of the project that claimed one-half of U.S. grain elevators required GMO and non-GMO grains be separated. This “representative” survey consisted entirely of ACGA members, and was obviously biased — kind of like asking members of a politician’s family who they plan to vote for.

Both ACGA and the Foundation stay in the news by issuing press releases and booking interviews whenever any story even remotely related to biotech breaks. Many of these releases appear on CropChoice.com, a “news” site created by “organizations [that] have expressed disdain for genetically modified crops, and many have worked actively to implement legislation to ban or regulate the technologies,” as The Bangor Daily News reported in May 2000.

Along with ACGA, the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, the Organic Farmers Marketing Association, the Sierra Club, Greenpeace USA, Food First, Environmental Media Services, Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York, and the organic marketer-funded Center for Food Safety were among CropChoice.com’s charter sponsors.

ACGA and the Foundation have blamed genetic improvement technology for everything from public health problems to trade imbalances. In December 2001, ACGA praised a report on Bt corn by Charles Benbrook published by the activist Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy and Genetically Engineered Food Alert. ACGA said Benbrook had shown biotech to be a “triple negative for farmers — lost corn exports, lower corn prices and less profit from Bt corn.”

But the NCGA, which represents mainstream farmers, blasted the Benbrook report — and ACGA. Said NCGA executive vice president and CEO Rick Tolman: “The IATP report immediately lacks credibility because they use as their farmer organization spokesperson a representative of the American Corn Growers Association (ACGA). ACGA has much stronger ties to and support from the environmental extremists than they do from actual corn producers in the U.S. They are not credible representatives for U.S. corn growers.”

And what if the media and the public mistake ACGA’s position for that of the far more reputable and representative NCGA? Well, these things happen.

Sea Shepherd Conservation Society

“We’re not a protest organization, we’re a policing organization,” Paul Watson has said of his Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (SSCS). A pirate organization is more like it. Sporting the skull and crossbones, his black or battleship-gray ships sail menacingly through the waves. They are painted with the names of the boats Watson has rammed and sunk.

The ships are fitted with water cannons, a concrete-filled bow made for ramming, and an attachment dubbed the “can opener” that can tear open a boat’s hull. In his book Earth Warrior, David Morris writes that Watson wears a long bowie knife at his side and carries AK-47s on board. He blasts Richard Wagner’s rousing “Ride of the Valkyries” to herald his arrival and terrify his victims.

SSCS’s mission is to stop fishing of which it disapproves. Its preferred methods? Ramming and sinking fishing ships, throwing butyric acid on their decks, and firing machine guns. Watson argues that United Nations resolutions authorize him to commit violent acts. But he regularly interferes with fisherman and hunters who are committing no crime. He serves as judge, jury, and executioner — while enjoying the same tax-exempt status as universities and churches.

Some of the animal-rights movement’s most notorious terrorists got their start with SSCS. One of them, convicted arsonist Rodney Coronado, had Watson’s approval to plan and execute an attack on Iceland’s whaling industry. He and a colleague sank two of the fleet’s four ships and destroyed a processing facility.

The Birth of Violence

SSCS is run with an iron fist by its founder, “Captain” Paul Watson. “When this ship becomes a democracy,” he likes to say to his crew, “you’ll be the first to know.” Watson is a dyslexic who “progressed from deckhand to able seaman without knowing how to tie a knot” with the Canadian Coast Guard and Norwegian and Swedish merchant marines.

In Vancouver, Watson joined a group of anti-war activists who attempted to forcibly shut down American nuclear tests. These radicals branched out into environmental activism and became Greenpeace, of which Watson was a founder. But Watson’s violent tactics became too much for Greenpeace, which kicked him out in 1977, after he assaulted seal hunters. Watson now assails his old comrades for being too wimpy, calling Greenpeace “the Avon ladies of the environmental movement.”

Soon after Watson’s eviction from Greenpeace, Sea Shepherd and its ship-ramming philosophy were born. SSCS’s band of pirates have disrupted the legal Canadian seal hunt, attacked whaling ships and fishing boats using driftnets, and taken credit for spiking (inserting large nails into) thousands of trees. The group has sunk at least ten ships in Iceland, Norway, Spain, Portugal, South Africa, and the Canary Islands. Watson has even sunk his own ships rather than let the authorities take them. And he has spent time in the jails of Canada and the Netherlands. “Any whaling ship on the ocean is a target for the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society,” he has said.

Watson’s love for marine life doesn’t stop him from eating fish. “Paul, who likes hamburgers and grilled cheese sandwiches equally, interprets veganism as a form of philosophical lunacy,” David Morris writes in Earth Warrior. Morris’s book details often-hilarious disputes between Watson and the vegan crewmembers. One standoff ensued when Watson ordered the vegans to retrieve a driftnet left by an escaped fishing vessel. The crew took an agonizingly long time, trying to free every squid caught in the net, about which Watson couldn’t care less. He didn’t even mind profiting from the work of the ship he threatened — Morris reports that he later sent his chef over to the net to “requisition a few squid for dinner.”

On the Fringe

Paul Watson has used his aggressive and illegal tactics to further other political causes. In 1992, replicas of the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria retraced Columbus’ voyage on its 500th anniversary. Watson, with Canadian Indians aboard his ship, confronted the Spanish fleet and demanded a written apology — threatening to sink the Santa Maria if the Spaniards didn’t comply. Watson received his written apology from the terrified captain.

Watson also controls two covert groups under the SSCS umbrella. He established the Oceanic Research and Conservation Action Force (O.R.C.A. FORCE) with his ex-wife Lisa DiStefano (a former Playboy model). This shadowy undercover group damages and destroys ships at dock. Their agents have scuttled ships in Taiwan and Norway.

Watson’s second group, the Coeur du Bois (Heart of the Wood), is an underground group of tree-spikers. Watson claims to have invented tree spiking, whereby activists hammer large nails into trees about to be logged in an effort to hurt lumberjacks. Watson claims the group has spiked over 20,000 trees. In 1987, a California mill worker was horribly disfigured after his blade struck two spikes in a tree, almost severing his jugular vein. But Watson is unrepentant. “Those loggers don’t give a damn for future generations,” he said. “And if they don’t have any compassion for the future, I don’t have any compassion for them.”

Watson claims his group was the first to produce videotaped evidence that U.S. tuna seiners were killing dolphins, and he argues that commercial fisheries are callously emptying the seas. He recently called for governments to prohibit the catch of fish to feed livestock and pets. And he is collaborating with Indian groups in British Columbia to oppose all salmon farming.

Ultimately, he advocates the total shutdown of the global fishery industry. “There is only one solution to the problem of over-fishing and the collapse of the fisheries worldwide,” reads one Sea Shepherd press release. “The answer is simply to say ‘no to fish.’”

One of Watson’s latest escapades has landed him in some serious trouble. According to The Tico Times, Central America’s foremost English-language newspaper, Costa Rica is investigating him for attempted murder after Costa Rican fishermen said he attacked them when he tried to force their boat into a Guatemalan port in April 2002. A judge ordered him to stay in Costa Rican territory. A defiant Watson instead fled the country.

Questionable Donors

Where does Watson get the funds for his exploits? In part, from an eclectic cadre of shadowy personalities.

That includes Susan Bloom, a long-time donor to the most extreme factions of the environmental and animal-rights movement. Bloom was the founder and main financier of the British Columbia animal-rights group Bear Watch, which employed David Barbarash, a former “spokesman” for the terrorist Animal Liberation Front (ALF). Paul Watson has hosted at least one Bear Watch fundraiser.

Ann Johnston gave SSCS almost $2.7 million in stock in 1997. Her husband, Pritam Singh, is a real estate developer and a member of SSCS’ financial and management advisory board. According to the Key News Journal, he’s under investigation by the FBI for his questionable business dealings. One Key West attorney has also filed a civil lawsuit against Singh, alleging almost 20 years of criminal activity — including racketeering and fraud. Singh was fined $1.2 million by the federal Office of Thrift Supervision in 1995. And he quietly settled a lawsuit filed by members of his sales staff who said he illegally withheld their commissions.

Johnston’s 1997 stock donation included shares of a company named Northern Development Associates, a for-profit business which is now 100-percent owned by Sea Shepherd.

Corporate records show that the company’s officers include Watson’s ex-wife Lisa DiStefano and longtime associate Michael Kundu. Northern Development’s mailing address is the same as Pritam Singh’s Key West Golf Club. Watson and DiStefano also serve, with Singh, on the board of something called the Sea Trek 2000 Foundation. The mailing address for that group is the same as one of Singh’s Miami lawyers.