Charles Margulis
Key Player

Genetic Engineering Campaign manager, Greenpeace USA; Former director, Westchester (NY) People’s Action CoalitionWhile Charles Margulis is billed an “issue expert,” he is essentially a public relations spokesman for Greenpeace’s anti-biotech smear campaigns. Margulis waged a PR blitz that tried to show Kellogg’s Corn Flakes to be unsafe, without any supporting scientific evidence (the campaign’s materials are still up on Greenpeace USA’s web site). When Greenpeace activists held an organized shouting session outside Kellogg’s corporate headquarters in March 2000, Margulis personally led a costumed activist dressed as “FrankenTony” (Greenpeace’s version of Tony the Tiger), into the executive suite.

As part of an interview for the public-television special “Harvest of Fear,” a PBS reporter asked Margulis about his organization’s position regarding biotech foods. “You’re not interested in better regulation?” PBS inquired. “You’d like to just eliminate [all genetically improved foods]?” Margulis responded, “That’s absolutely correct.”

Curiously, in the same interview he insisted that Greenpeace “doesn’t have an objection to the technology of genetic engineering.” Typical of modern environmental double-talk, however, Margulis went on to say that Greenpeace opposes any and all proposed field testing of such technologies intended to prove that they’re safe, saying: “a field test is a release into the environment.”