The History of Greenpeace

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Waves of Compassion

Web Specials Archives

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Rex Weyler

I arrived in Vancouver, on the westcoast of Canada, in the spring

of 1972 as a fugitive of American justice, a draft-dodger with the

FBI on my trail and intimidating my family to give me up. I faced

25 years in prison had they caught me. My wife of 6 months,

Glenn, and I slept by the furnace in the cellar of a Vancouver

shelter set up for war objectors on 7th Avenue near Fir Street.

We had our sleeping bags, a change of clothes, forty-seven

dollars, and a wrinkled piece of paper with the names of

Canadian peace activists who might help us.

Unitarian minister and University librarian Mac Elrod and his wife

Norma took us in and introduced us to local pacifist crowd. I

found a job as reporter and photographer at the North Shore

News community newspaper. While covering a local story, I met

Bree Drummond who was sitting in a platform, high in a

cottonwood tree to save it from being felled for a parking lot by

North Vancouver maintenance crews. Her boyfriend, Rod

Marining, was a wild Yippie environmentalist who had helped

stop the construction of a Four Seasons Hotel at the entrance to

Vancouver's magnificent Stanley Park by declaring the land 'All

Season Park' and camping out on the site until the developers

gave up. He also had sailed for the Aleutian Island of Amchitka to

protest a U.S. atomic bomb test there as a member of the Don't



Make A Wave Committee that had changed its name to the

'Greenpeace Foundation' that spring.

Discuss Ecology in Caf? Utne's: cafe.utne.com

Rod introduced me to Bob Hunter from Winnipeg, clearly the

hippest young journalist in the city, writing a daily column in the

Vancouver Sun in which he explained Gestalt Therapy, described

peyote ceremonies, introduced edgy psychologists like R. D.

Laing, and quoted famed ecologist Rachel Carson. Hunter had

written a brilliant novel, Erebus, and a profound, post-McLuhan

analysis of media and social consciousness, Storming of the

Mind. He had also sailed on the protest boat with the Don't Make

a Wave Committee. He had a beard, long hair, and a large

leather bag over his shoulder, filled with newspaper clippings,

books, and his own journal in which he wrote incessantly. I liked

him right away, traveled in similar media circles, and began

sharing beer and philosophy with him at the Cecil Hotel pub.

Now, three decades later, the Cecil is a glitzy strip bar, but in the

early 1970s it was a pool hall and hangout for Vancouver radicals

and intelligencia. Greenpeace had no public office at this time.

We sat near the pay-phone to conduct both our journalist and

activist business.

It was here in the Cecil pub that I first met Bob Cummings, writer

for the counterculture underground newspaper Georgia Straight,

and another crew member from the bomb protest. Cummings

would rail against injustice to the free press. 'The straight media

ignore the real stories,' he complained, 'and if you write for an

underground paper you should expect to be arrested.' Hunter



would admonish Cummings about 'leftist rhetoric and posturing'

in the Georgia Strait. 'The ideal newspaper,' he said 'will praise

the radicals when they're right, and critique them mercilessly

when they're wrong.' These debates were never resolved, but

rolled on endlessly, washed down with rounds of beer.

It was here in the pub that Dr. Paul Spong, a scientist at the

Vancouver Aquarium, appeared in 1974 promoting his radical

idea that we should put our lives on the line to save the whales.

The anti-war activists were skeptical at first, but Spong's idea

would soon change the face of this little band of radicals.

On an Ocean Named for Peace

In 1969 in Vancouver hippies and revolutionaries mixed gleefully

in the redbrick coffee houses of Gastown, and in the rainbow-

painted organic juice bars of tree-lined Kitsilano near the

University of British Columbia. 'Revolutions,' says Hunter, 'start

at the outer fringes of the empire, in this case the American

Empire.' When the U.S. announced that summer that they were

going to test a 1.2 megaton nuclear bomb on the Aleutian Island

of Amchitka, Vancouver peaceniks, love children, American draft

dodgers, and Marxist revolutionaries began to agitate. In

September 1969 Hunter warned in his newspaper column of 'a

distinct danger that the tests might set in motion earthquakes

and tidal waves which could sweep from one end of the Pacific to

the other.' This image of the tidal wave captured the imagination

of Canadians opposed to the U.S. bomb test.

Three decades later Hunter recalls 'In Vancouver at that time

there was a convergence of hippies, draft dodgers, Tibetan



monks, seadogs, artists, radical ecologists, rebel journalists,

Quakers, and expatriate Yanks in the one major city that

happened to be closest to Amchitka Island, where the U.S.

wanted to explode a bomb. Greenpeace was born of all of this.'

Vancouver lawyer Hamish Bruce read Hunter's columns and

called the reporter. Bruce wanted to start an organization called

the 'Green Panthers.' Hunter and Bruce became fast friends.

They plotted to establish the Green Panthers as the ecological

equivalent of the Black Panthers, whose leader, Fred Hampton,

Hunter had interviewed in Chicago. 'Our idea,' says Bruce today,'was that ecology was the sleeping giant, the issue that was

ultimately going to rock the world.'

At that time, Hunter was writing his third book, Storming of the

Mind, about the 'new holistic consciousness,' in which he

declares 'In ecology we see the new consciousness finding its

roots.' Hunter predicted that continued environmental

deterioration would lead to the rise of 'the Green Panthers or

their equivalent,' and he advocated 'the hoisting of the green

flag.'

On October 2, when the U.S. detonated the bomb at Amchitka, a

mob from Vancouver stormed the U.S. border, closing it to traffic

for two hours. A banner placed at the border crossing read:

'Don't Make a Wave' in reference to the potential tidal wave. In

January 1970 the protestors moved to the U.S. Embassy and

'liberated' Granville Street in downtown Vancouver. The seeds of

Greenpeace were in these crowds. Hippies on bicycles milled

among the anti-bomb protestors, stopping cars and delivering

speeches about ecology.



Among the protestors was freelance journalist Ben Metcalfe, who

had a radio program on the CBC. Metcalfe, on his own initiative,

had placed 12 billboard signs in Vancouver that read:

Ecology

Look it up. You're involved.

'It's hard to imagine now, ' says Metcalfe, 'but in those days most

people had no idea what the word ecology meant. I was doing

environmental stories on my radio program and I started a

campaign to stop the Skagit River Dam. In the winter of 1969 and

1970, the U.S. bomb tests were the hot story. The night we

closed the U.S. border, Hunter and Hamish Bruce were there, and

Jim and Marie Bohlen.'

The Bohlens had fled to Canada from the U.S. to keep their sons

out of Vietnam. Jim, a World War II naval veteran and plastics

engineer, started a Canadian chapter of the Sierra Club and

formed the Canadian Assistance to War Objectors, providing

shelter for draft dodgers. 'Our first Sierra Club action,' recallsBohlen, 'was to save a seagull nesting habitat in Nanaimo

Harbour. It was during this campaign that I discovered the power

of the press. Later, I met Irving and Dorothy Stowe at an End the

Arms Race demonstration.'



Irving Stowe was a lawyer from Providence, Rhode Island who

had adopted Quakerism. He and Dorothy had participated in a

protest against the nuclear Polaris submarines in Connecticut

during which the Committee for Nonviolent Direct Action placed

boats in front of the launching subs. Later, the Stowes moved

their family to Canada to keep their son out of the U.S. military.

When the U.S. announced a new, 5-megaton nuclear bomb test

on Amchitka Island, the Bohlens and Stowes wanted to do

something dramatic to protest. Exploiting the popular tidal wave

image, they formed a spin-off of the Sierra Club called The Don't

Make a Wave Committee, which met in the basement of the

Vancouver Unitarian Church.

Don't Make a Wave was an ad hoc committee, endorsed by the

Sierra Club, the United Church of Canada, the B.C. Federation of

Labour, the Canadian Voice of Women, and other peace and

ecology organizations.

Hunter, Metcalfe, Cummings, Bruce, and Marining attended the

Don't Make a Wave meetings, chaired by Irving Stowe. 'These

meetings were marathons,' recalls Hunter, 'lasting 6 or 7 hours,

featuring long, philosophical diatribes, and often going nowhere.

We wanted to do something significant, but we were trying to

operate by consensus. We went around in circles for months.'

Marie Bohlen, inspired by the Quaker boat the Golden Rule,

suggested to Jim one morning over coffee that someone should

'just sail a boat up there and confront the bomb.' Moments later,

in one of the synchronous events that would characterize the

evolution of Greenpeace, a Vancouver Sun reporter phoned for

an update on the Sierra Club's plans to protest the bomb. 'Before



I knew it,' recalls Jim Bohlen, 'I was telling them we were sailing a

boat into the test zone.'

The next day, the Sun ran the story, but the Sierra Club had not

officially ratified the action, so at the next Don't Make a Wave

meeting, the ad hoc group adopted the plan. Typical of those

days, the anti-war crowd parted with the V-sign, saying 'peace.' A

quiet 23-year-old Canadian carpenter, union organizer, and

ecologist, Bill Darnell, who rarely spoke at the meetings, added

sheepishly 'Make it a green peace.'

'The term had a nice ring to it,' Hunter recalls. 'It worked better

in a headline than The Don't Make a Wave Committee. We

decided to find a boat and call it Greenpeace.'

Marie's son Paul Nonnast designed a button with the ecology

symbol above, the peace symbol below, and the word

GREENPEACE in the middle. The figures were in green (for

ecology) on a background of yellow (for sunlight). The buttons

sold for $2.00. Stowe managed the money, raising additional

funds from U.S. Quaker groups and the Sierra Club. He organized

a benefit concert with Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, anti-war folk

singer Phil Ochs, and B.C. rock band Chilliwack. The event netted

$17,000.

Bohlen and lawyer Paul Cote searched the Vancouver docks for

almost a year until one day on a Fraser River wharf they met one

of the more rugged fisherman on the west coast, Captain John C.



Cormack. Other skippers had laughed them off, but Cormack was

intrigued by the challenge. Don't Make a Wave chartered

Cormack's 80-foot halibut seiner, the Phyllis Cormack, and on

September 15, 1971 the Phyllis Cormack, renamed Greenpeace,

set out from Vancouver. 'It was an all-male crew,' Hunter recalls,

'which would never happen in Greenpeace today, but Captain

Cormack did not allow 'fraternizing' on board. Marie Bohlen could

have gone because she was married to Jim but she declined.

Irving Stowe also declined, which surprised me because he was

supposedly our leader.' The crew vowed to make policy decisions

by consensus although Bohlen was the purser and official

representative of Don't Make a Wave.

Dr. Lyle Thurston was the crew medic. Thurston had met Hunter

when they served together on the board of the Window Pane

Society, providing medical services for Vancouver young people

who had overdosed on drugs. Thurston lived in a North

Vancouver commune with lawyer Davie Gibbons, Dr. Myron

McDonald, and his wife Bobbie, all of whom supported the

voyage and would play key roles in the evolution of Greenpeace.

Captain Cormack and engineer Dave Birmingham ran the ship.

Hunter, Metcalfe, Cummings, and photographer Robert Keziere

were the on-board media. Keziere, a chemistry student, wrote an

exhaustive analysis of the reasons Canadians should be

concerned about the bomb, covering the tidal wave threat,

ecological impact in the Aleutians, and the problem of containing

radioactivity. Terry Simmons and Bill Darnell represented the

Sierra Club. Patrick Moore, graduate student at the University of

British Columbia, was the ecologist. Richard Fineberg was a last



minute addition, suspected by some of being from the CIA. 'He

wasn't CIA,' says Metcalfe. 'He was just a weird academic who

didn't quite fit in.'

These twelve souls headed off across the Gulf of Alaska for

Amchitka Island, making landfall on Akutan Island on September

26. The Greenpeace was immediately seized by the U.S. Coast

Guard for landing without permission and escorted back to Sand

Point, Alaska, where they paid a fine and were released. The

bomb test was then postponed until November, but the boat

charter with Captain Cormack ran out at the end of October.

'We found out in Sand Point,' recalls Metcalfe, 'that the voyage

was getting media attention in Canada and the U.S.

Demonstrations had occurred in every major Canadian city.'

Twenty members of the Coast Guard vessel Confidence, which

seized the Greenpeace boat, signed a letter saying '? what you

are doing is for the good of all mankind.' The protestors sensed

that they were having an impact, but there was a fierce battle

among the crew. Hunter wanted to continue on to Amchitka,

while Bohlen and Metcalfe felt they had done their job and should

head home. Bohlen took charge and instructed Cormack to head

for Vancouver. At Kodiak Fineberg left the boat and Rod Marining

joined. In the meantime, the Don't Make A Wave Committee

chartered a larger, faster Canadian minesweeper, renamed

Greenpeace Too. The two boats met in Union Bay, B.C. where,

Simmons, Cummings, Marining, and Birmingham joined the

second boat, headed for Amchitka.



'During the voyage,' Hunter remembers, 'Metcalfe, Bohlen, and I

discussed replacing Irving Stowe as the leader. But Stowe had

control of Don't Make a Wave, so I suggested we start a new

organization called Greenpeace.' When they returned, Hunter,

Moore, and Bruce founded The Whole Earth Church, using the

Greenpeace emblem and Moore's now famous line from the

voyage, 'A flower is your brother.' The Whole Earth Church

espoused that 'all forms of life are inter-related. Any form of life

which goes against the natural laws of interdependency has

fallen from the State of Grace known as ecological harmony.'

Members of the Church were asked to 'assume their rightful role

as Custodians of the Earth.'

It was during this voyage that Hunter read Warriors of the

Rainbow by William Willoya and Vinson Brown, which recounts

the Cree Indian prophecy that one day, when the earth was

poisoned by humans, a group of people from all nations would

band together to defend nature. 'Well, this is us, I thought right

away,' Hunter remembers. 'We're the Warriors of the Rainbow.'

Bohlen convinced Cote to vote with him to remove Irving Stowe

as chairman of Don't Make a Wave. The organization officially

became the 'Greenpeace Foundation' on May 4, 1972.

'Foundation' was suggested by Hunter in reference to Issac

Assimov's futuristic Foundation Trilogy, in which a 'Foundation'

takes responsibility for ushering the galaxy through the dark

ages into an enlightened age. Greenpeace installed Metcalfe as

the first chairman.



Metcalfe recalls, 'In the spring of 1972 the group scattered. I was

battling with Canadian Minister for External Affairs Mitchell Sharp

to get the bomb on the UN agenda in Stockholm when France

announced a nuclear test for Mururoa Atoll in the South Pacific. I

woke up at 3am and couldn't stop thinking about it. I turned to

my wife Dorothy, and said, 'We're going.' Rather than release the

news in Vancouver, where it would have died, I used a simple

media trick. I released the story in Australia and New Zealand

where the French tests were big news. I sent a telegram that

Greenpeace was coming down to protest the French nuclear-

bomb test. By that afternoon all the Vancouver media had picked

it up off the wire services. The gauntlet was down, but we still

had to find a boat.'

Metcalfe placed newspaper ads in Australia and New Zealand,

seeking a sailor with a boat, who would sail to Mururoa. He

received over 150 offers, including a phone call from 40-year-old

Canadian David McTaggart, in Auckland. McTaggart's 38-foot

ketch, Vega, would become 'Greenpeace III.' In April, Metcalfe

flew to Auckland and he and McTaggart set out for Mururoa with

navigator Nigel Ingram, British seaman Roger Haddleton, and

Australian Grant Davidson.

McTaggart, the tenacious seaman, and Metcalfe, the master of

media, soon clashed over leadership of the campaign. McTaggart

put into Rarotonga where Metcalfe and Haddleton left the boat.

Metcalfe met his wife, Dorothy, and went to Paris, where they

were met by Greenpeace campaigners Patrick Moore, Lyle

Thurston, and Rod Marining. They organized media coverage and

demonstrations until the Metcalfes were arrested and deported.



Ben and Dorothy traveled to Rome, where the Pope blessed the

Greenpeace flag. In France Marining issued a press release

saying, 'France is behaving like invaders from Mars, shooting

nuclear missiles at Spaceship Earth!' He was grabbed off the

street and beaten by French agents who accused him of being 'a

Red.'

'No,' said Marining pleading for his life, 'I'm a Green!' Marining's

pronouncement, picked up later by Canadian media, was

perhaps the first public usage of 'Green' as a political

constituency. The 'Ecology Party' was formed in the United

Kingdom shortly thereafter, but the world's first 'Green Party,'

Die Grunen, was born in Germany a decade later, in 1982.

Marining's statement was the first strong kick of the green fetus,

struggling to be born in European politics.

McTaggart sailed the Vega into the nuclear bomb test zone and

maintained a position 3 miles downwind from Mururoa. The

frustrated French navy rammed the Vega, towed her into

Mururoa, made minimal repairs, and towed her back out to sea.

The Vega hobbled back to Rarotonga for repairs and the French

set off their bombs. McTaggart accused the French of high seas

piracy and went to France to pursue his case in the courts. When

he arrived, he found that his voyage had inspired a groundswell

of support.

The War Resisters International and Peace News groups from

London organized a London to Paris peace march, which was

stopped at the French border by French Riot police. A few of the



activists, some of them carrying a 'Greenpeace' banner, slipped

into Paris and held demonstrations at the Eiffel Tower and at

Notre Dame cathedral. McTaggart received a letter of support

from Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. He returned to

Mururoa the following year and was severely beaten by French

sailors.

McTaggart was killed in an automobile accident in Italy on March

23, 2001. Two months before he died, he commented on his

campaign against the bomb: 'At first, the issue for me was that

France had the nerve to cordon off 100,000 square miles of

ocean. That was an affront to every freedom-loving sailor. The

bomb was, of course, an affront to the entire planet. But when

the French rammed the Vega, boarded the Vega and beat me up

the following year, then blew up the Rainbow Warrior killing

Fernando [Pereira, July 1985], well I made a personal vow each

time that they would not get away with it. They didn't.'

McTaggart had grown up in the wealthy, Southwest Marine Drive

neighborhood of Vancouver, was a Canadian badminton

champion at 17, and a successful entrepreneur. He brought an

athlete's toughness and a businessman's determination to the

peace movement. 'Greenpeace matured with McTaggart,' says

Hunter, 'because he gave Greenpeace a hard edge that balanced

the soft, cuddly stuff.'

We Are Whales



As McTaggart fought France in their own courts, Dr. Paul Spong

started appearing among the Greenpeace crowd at the Cecil pub

in Vancouver, talking about the intelligence of whales and why

they should be saved. Some of the anti-war activists thought this

was a distraction from more important matters.

Spong, a brain scientist from New Zealand, had been hired in

1967 by Dr. Patrick McGeer of the Neurological Laboratory at the

University of British Columbia. Part of his assignment was to

perform behavioral research on the Vancouver Aquarium's first

captive Orcinus orca, or killer whale, Skana. Spong's subsequent

experiences with Skana convinced him that whales were highly

intelligent beings that should not be held in captivity nor hunted

by whalers. 'It took a lot to push me out of my comfortable,

scientific corner,' recalls Spong, 'and it was Skana who did it.'

Spong was testing Skana's visual acuity when the whale

suddenly failed all the tests she had already easily learned. Her

scores dropped from nearly 100% to zero. Paul concluded that

she was failing on purpose, as a sort of protest. This convinced

him that she was an intelligent and self-aware creature. He got

into the habit of playing flute to her late at night. Skana tested

Paul's trust by raking her 3-inch teeth across his feet as he

dangled them in the water. Once he learned to trust her and

keep his feet in the water she stopped. Paul almost felt that she

was the trainer and he was the student.

When he told McGeer and Aquarium Director Dr. Murray Newman

that Skana should be set free, he was fired. He then moved to



Hanson Island, 200-kilometers north of Vancouver, and

established an orca observation post in the wild, where he lives

and studies whales to this day. 'I later met Farley Mowat,' recalls

Spong, 'and he convinced me to get involved in the whaling

issue. When Greenpeace started to have an impact on nuclear

weapons, I called Hunter.'

Spong took Hunter to the Aquarium to meet Skana and he

convinced Hunter that he could safely place his head inside

Skana's mouth. 'I could feel her teeth on the back of my neck,'

Hunter recalls. 'I was totally at her mercy. She could have

snapped my neck like a matchstick but her touch was as gentle

as a kiss. I had the feeling that Skana found out more about me

than I did about her. It was as if she looked inside my mind and

played with my courage and my fear. I was convinced that Paul

was right about her, and about whales in general.'

In November, 1974 Hunter brought Spong to my rented suite on

1st Avenue in Kitsilano, saying they needed a photograph. Spong

carried a large cardboard box. While Hunter and I talked, Spong

lifted two damp, grey brains from the box and set them

triumphantly on my kitchen table. The human brain I recognized,

the other brain was twice the size. 'I want a picture of these for

the Whale Show,' Spong said. As I set up the photograph, Paul

explained to me that the Orca brain was not only twice the size

of the human brain, but the cerebral cortex was four-times as big

and had many more convolutions, or folds. 'This brain evolved for

a reason,' he argued. 'The portion of the brain that drives the

motor functions of the body is about the same size in a monkey,

a human, or a whale. All the rest of this,' said Spong, passing his



hand over the cerebral cortex, 'is for thinking, data processing,

and communicating. These creatures have more analytical brain

power than we have!'

Spong still had to prevail on the rest of Greenpeace. 'My role in

Greenpeace was conspiratorial from the beginning,' he recalls. 'I

had to convince them that whales were worth getting involved

with. Then we had to create a sense of public outrage over what

was happening to whales, and finally figure out how to make this

plan of shielding the whales with our bodies work. It was pretty

much all stealth and subterfuge, most of it in our heads

lubricated by 25-cent beers at the Cecil.'

'What a brilliant idea it was,' recalls Dr. Myron Macdonald, who

had been involved with Greenpeace from the beginning. 'I

remember when it first came up at a meeting at Hamish's home.

Hunter laid out the entire plan of placing humans between the

whalers and the whales and capturing this on film in real time for

the media. Many of us thought that since the French were still

conducting atmospheric nuclear explosions and there was a

global oil crisis, we had more important things to worry about.

But Hunter insisted that this would make Greenpeace a truly

ecological organization. He carried the day.'

John Cormack made the Phyllis Cormack available for the

campaign. I took a leave of absence from my job at the North

Shore News to be the photographer. Our plan was to use high-

speed rubber Zodiacs to place ourselves between the whales and

the whaling boats. Hunter got the idea to use Zodiacs from



seeing pictures of French sailors boarding the Vega near Mururoa

on McTaggart's second Voyage in 1973. McTaggart had been

savagely beaten and partially blinded by the French, but the

incident had been captured on film by Ann-Marie Horne. 'When I

saw the photographs of the French Zodiacs,' Hunter remembers,

'I knew what we needed to confront the whalers.'

Paul Watson was the leftists radical of the group, known for his

red headband and Maoist sympathies. He had been to Wounded

Knee to help the Lakota Indians and had been at the Douglas

Border closing in 1969. He was seditious and fearless. Watson

helped bridge the gap between the hardcore political activists

and ecologists when he joined the whale campaign. 'I met with

Bob [Hunter] in the Alkazar Pub in November of '74,' recalls

Watson. 'He told me the plan, and I agreed to pilot a Zodiac in

front of the whaling ships.'

In his book Storming of the Mind, Hunter had introduced the

concept of a 'mind bomb,' an electronic image sent around the

world to 'explode in the collective consciousness.' Our Mind

Bomb in this case was to reverse the Moby Dick image of brave

little men in tiny boats hunting leviathan and replace it with the

reality of modern whaling: huge mechanical factory ships and

exploding harpoons hunting down the last remnants of the

peaceful, intelligent whales. Our mission was to plant this image

into the collective consciousness. We never doubted that we

could do it, but the logistics were daunting. We had to figure out

how to find the whaling fleets, not an island, but a moving target

on a huge ocean. It was Spong who came up with a plan.



The defining characteristic of Greenpeace in the 1970s was that

underneath the radicalism and wild street theater, each membercontributed an essential skill or experience. Bohlen and Stowe

were accomplished political organizers. John Cormack and David

McTaggart were consummate sea captains, and McTaggart was a

tenacious political advocate. Hamish had the lawyer's grasp of

the big picture, and could express it in few words. Patrick Moore

understood ecology and could debate anyone the governments

or companies threw at us. The lawyers and the medics were allprofessionals. Hunter, Metcalfe, and Cummings were inspired

journalists. 'Simply speaking,' says Metcalfe, 'We knew how to

give a story pizzazz and keep it alive in the media. We were the

media!'

Bobbie Innes, who later married Bob Hunter and who ran the

Greenpeace office after 1974, was a Project Manager for Rogers

Cable television company. 'Every day I was directing hundreds of

people in their job flow,' she says now, 'so organizing a bunch of

hippies was no big deal.'

Bill Gannon, chief accountant for Daon Development Corporation,

the largest developer in Vancouver, was consulting with the

North Shore News, when I met him. In addition to being an expert

accountant, Gannon was an accomplished bass player. We had

formed a band that rehearsed once a week. When I explained to

Gannon the financial problems that Greenpeace faced, he began

advising us. Gannon later fashioned a credible financial plan and

reporting system for the fledgling organization.



And there were stalwart soldiers willing to risk it all, Bill Darnell,

Terry Simmons, Bree Drummond, Rod Marining, Carlie Trueman,Paul Watson, and Walrus Oakenbough. 'Today we would say it

was right-brain/left-brain balanced,' says Marining. 'In those days

we referred to the Mystics and the Mechanics. But in fact, there

was a little of the mystic and mechanic in everyone.'

Spong was a serious scientist and with all his quixotic ideas and

mystic communications with whales, he was rigorous and

observant. His mind had simply been opened by Skana to accept

a much bigger picture of consciousness. 'Change,' Spong says,

and this from experience, 'can happen at the speed of thought.'

Spong inspired us to put our ecology on the line. Did we believe

in the rights of a whale to live in peace? Then we would risk our

lives for them. Spong was cautious with his language, but his

enthusiasm was contagious. He implied that Skana had imparted

to him a message for us. There were doubters, but we all

listened, and the message was this: Consciousness is bigger than

you, bigger than the human race. Consciousness is a quality of

nature. Spong inspired us to look beyond the purely human

realm, to see ecology from a new perspective.

Spong's plan for finding the whalers was to visit the International

Whaling Commission records office in Sandefjord, Norway, to

pose as himself, a respected research scientist looking for data

on whale populations. That data, he correctly surmised would be



collected by whaling boats. In January Spong, his wife Linda, and

their son Yashi, departed for Iceland and Norway to find records

of previous whaling routes. The IWC at that time was controlled

by the whaling nations of Japan, Soviet Union, Norway, and

Iceland, and backed by Canada and the U.S. Spong was entering

the lair of our adversary to steal the map that would spell their

downfall.

In the meantime, we had to secure the Zodiacs and get the

Phyllis Cormack, now Greenpeace V, off the dock in Vancouver,

but we were broke. Then one night at a Greenpeace meeting,

local mystic poet, Henry Payne, showed up, recited a long,

shamanistic ode about our spiritual kinship with 'every creeping,

crawling thing' and then donated to the cause five acres of land

in Langley. Eyes widened and heads twisted. Is this vagabond

poet with an eagle feather for real? Indeed, our lawyers

confirmed the land transfer and Bobbie Innes came up with the

idea of having a lottery for the land rather than selling it outright.

We raised twice the land value in lottery ticket sales, 20,000

tickets at $2 each, and the voyage was on.

Hunter was the great attracter and includer. He led the meetings

and encouraged everyone to contribute. People showed up at

meetings to tell us about a space alien connection with whales or

warn us about CIA infiltration. Hunter was always gracious, but

he also moved the discussion along toward the tasks at hand. He

was a master of delegation, and the numbers swelled in what we

called 'The Great Whale Conspiracy.'



In March of 1975, Greenpeace rented its first public office at

2007 West Fourth Avenue, right in the middle of Vancouver's

Hippie Row. It was not much of an office, no filing cabinets or

desks, just a few shelves and tables, and two phones. Julie

McMaster, an older woman with clerical experience showed up to

offer her services as our office manager. She set up some basic

office systems to help us keep track of our phone messages and

meetings. More than that, she became our surrogate mother,

reminding us to clean up after ourselves and keep our

appointments. Our gear began to collect in the corners: outboard

motors, sound equipment, radios, and provisions for the voyage.

The old Cecil hangout was transformed into a strip bar, so we

moved our beer-inspired strategy meetings to the Bimini pub

across the street from the new office. At an upstairs table near

the window we hatched our plans to find and confront the

whalers. From the window, we could look across the street to the

Greenpeace office window. Julie would come to the window and

yell across the street when an important phone call came

through. The corner of the pub became a center of activity, with

activists, journalists, and sailors coming and going constantly.

In the meantime, Spong was in Norway at the Bureau of

International Whaling Statistics, where he'd convinced the

director to let him peruse the files. Ostensibly, he was

researching the habits of sperm whales, but once he found what

he was looking for, his heart skipped a beat. There in a file before

him were the dates, longitudes, latitudes, and kill numbers for

the entire Soviet and Japanese whaling fleets. He copied it all

down in his notebook, went back to his hotel, and called Hunter.



'We believed then, and I still believe,' says Hunter, 'that we were

blessed by higher powers. The Pope, the Buddhist Karmapa, andthe Kwakuitl Indians had all blessed our flag. We fully believed by

then that we were fulfilling the Warriors of the Rainbow

prophecy.' The Catholics prayed, the Buddhists meditated, the

pagans chanted, but we all believed we were on a spiritual

mission. We expected miracles, and we watched for signs. One

day a bearded street musician showed up claiming to be 'an

animal affinity expert.' His name was Melville Gregory. Huntergasped. Herman Melville, of course, had written Moby Dick and

Gregory Peck played Captain Ahab in the movie! 'Hunter figured

it was a sign,' remembers Gregory, 'so I became the crew

musician. We got some underwater speakers and microphones to

communicate with the whales.' Gregory wrote an anthem for the

group, 'We Are Whales,' which was sung at every opportunity.

'It was magic,' recalls Hunter. 'Everything and everyone we

needed to pull this off just appeared, like Mel, out of the ether. I

was literally sitting in my office trying to figure out how to make

a film of the voyage when Michael Chechik phoned.' The young

film producer, who now runs Omni Films in Vancouver, arranged

for cameramen Fred Easton and Ron Precious to document the

voyage.

Lawyer Hamish Bruce abandoned his law practice to work full

time as he witnessed the manifestation of his Green Panthers

vision. Bruce was the spiritual leader, chief of the 'Mystics.' He

rarely spoke, but when he did, everyone shut up and listened.



The head 'Mechanic' was electrician Al Hewitt, engineer and radio

operator for the voyage, who fashioned a homemade radio-

directional finder for tracking Soviet ships. Environmentalist

writer and researcher Walrus Oakenbough was crew cook. In

anticipation of contact with the whalers, Taeko Miwa and George

Korotva were our Japanese and Russian interpreters. Dr. Myron

MacDonald was our medic. Now a Ph.D. in ecology, Patrick Moore

was our scientist. Carlie Trueman was the Zodiac expert, and

Paul Watson was a Zodiac operator. Experimental musician Will

Jackson came up from San Francisco with his Moog synthesizer to

support the whale communications. Hunter was our campaign

leader, and Cormack was our captain.

Bobbie Innes and Rod Marining stayed in Vancouver to run the

office and media relations. On April 27, 1975 The Great Whale

Conspiracy headed out of Vancouver's English Bay, flying the UN

and Canadian flags, a Kwakiutl image of a whale on our sail, and

a flag of the earth snapping in the breeze at the top of the mast.

'We Are Whales' blared from the speakers with Mel playing guitar

on the hatch cover, 23,000 people waving goodbye from the

shoreline, and Hamish Bruce standing at the bow, long golden

hair whirling in the gusts of wind. We headed up the west coast

of Vancouver Island to Winter Harbour, and then out to sea to

find whales and whalers.

We tested our Zodiac skills when we came across wild orcas near

Bella Bella in the inside passage. In mid-May we met migrating

grey whales in Wickininish Bay near the remote fishing village of

Ucleulet. Jazz musician Paul Winter joined us as we stayed with

the whales, played music to them, and listened for their



response. They seemed less interested in us than we were in

them, but the whales were clearly curious, bobbing about our

little inflatable boats, gazing at us with enormous eyes. The

experience inspired us and provided a story for the media. The

information from Spong in Norway suggested that the whalers

would be at the Mendocino Ridge sea mounts in June, some 40

miles off the coast of California. The time had come, and we

headed south, listening for Russian or Japanese voices on the

marine radio.

On the morning of midsummer's day the Phyllis Cormack, rocked

pacifically over the Mendocino sea mounts, where the ocean floor

rises and sperm whales feed. We twice heard Russian voices on

the radio and fixed their position with Hewitt's crude RDF only to

discover that they were Soviet draggers. The ocean seemed

unspeakably vast. The sea mounts run for hundreds of miles. We

drifted to save fuel, listened, and watched for whales from high

in the rigging.

Halfway around the world, Spong was in London for the

International Whaling Commission meetings, working with

Friends of the Earth to pressure the Commission for a ban on

pelagic whaling. Our plan was to confront the whalers during the

meetings and thereby shine an international spotlight on the

whale hunt. But by June 25, two days before the end of the

meetings, Spong was frantic because he had not heard from us

in days.



Out in the Pacific our radio had mysteriously died. We could hear,

but could not transmit. We could not reach Marining in

Vancouver nor Spong in London. No one knew where we were or

what we were doing. Unless we actually confronted the whalers

as we had vowed, we had little hope of making the London

newspapers and influencing the IWC vote. The whole campaign

was looking like a failure. We were frustrated, tired, and low on

food and water. Hewitt had wired a speaker into the galley where

we sat for hours, monitoring the radio. On the evening of June 26

we distinctly heard Russian voices. Korotva thought he could

hear the word 'Vostok,' the name of one of the Soviet ships on

Spong's list. Hewitt fixed the direction, and we headed southeast

after them.

Cormack slept about 4 hours each night. His usual routine was to

go to bed at midnight and rise at 4:00am. At midnight, Cormack

turned the wheel over to Mel Gregory with instructions to keep

our heading at SSE. When Gregory took the wheel the moon was

dead ahead and the moon's reflection was a yellow trail before

him. Disregarding the compass, Gregory simply headed into the

moonbeam. The moon, of course, moves across the sky, so when

Cormack rose to check on him, we were heading 90-degrees

west of our intended course. An enraged Cormack threw Gregory

out of the wheelhouse, calling him a 'hippie farmer.'

Russian transmissions continued throughout the morning until, at

about 10:00, they went silent. Cormack ordered a steady course

toward the last RDF reading. An unrepentant Gregory awoke

around noon as a brilliant rainbow appeared off the starboard

bow. Figuring this was another sign, Mel made his way to the



wheelhouse, calmly relieved Fred Easton of the wheel, and made

for the rainbow. Whether it was magic, good karma, or just good

luck, thirty minutes later Soviet whaling boats dotted the horizon.

To add to the miracle, our radio suddenly began to work and Bob

was able to call Marining in Vancouver, who called Spong in

London on the final day of the IWC meeting. The chase was on.

Moore and cameraman Easton sped off in one Zodiac, while

Watson and I jumped in the second. As we approached the

colossal factory ship Vostok, we gagged at the stench. Harpoon

boats trailed behind off-loading sperm whale carcasses. High on

the main deck of the 700-foot behemoth, huge cranes ripped

massive strips of blubber from the whales. Just above the water

line, a red torrent of blood pour from a six-inch pipe. Sharks cut

through the red water that trailed behind the factory ship. We

were horrified.

The Soviet whalers seemed completely confused by this colorful

boatload of hippies flying a flag with the earth on it, playing rock

music, and zipping around them in little Zodiacs. The workers

waved and smiled from decks and the officers glared from the

bridge. The first time we got close enough to the whalers to talk

to them, a deckhand leaned over the railing and shouted in

English, 'Do you have LSD?'

We picked out a departing harpoon boat, the Vlastny, and

followed it. It was soon pursuing a pod of sperm whales. Hunter

leapt into a Zodiac with Watson, Korotva took Fred Easton, and I

went with Patrick Moore. Hunter and Watson tried to position



themselves between the harpoon boat and the frantic whales,

but Watson's outboard sputtered to a stop and they were thrown

aside by the bow of the killer boat. Korotva pulled up, traded

passengers with Watson, and sped off with Hunter. They

positioned themselves directly in front of the massive cannon,

shielding the whales. When they dropped into a trough, however,

the cannon fired and the harpoon flew over their heads and

exploded in the side of a whale. 'The harpoon cable slashed down

beside us,' recalls Hunter, 'nearly ripping us in two.' Easton

turned to me with thumbs up. He had captured the entire

episode on film.

The story was carried in every London newspaper on the final

day of the IWC. Reporters swarmed the Soviet and Japanese

delegates, who were completely caught off guard. 'The fight to

save the whales changed on that day,' remembers Spong. 'They

could no longer ignore us.'

'It was the ultimate Mind Bomb,' says Hunter now. 'The

mythology about Moby Dick had dominated the public perception

of whales. That perception changed forever.'

'Old Greenpeacers still argue,' says Marining, 'about whether the

Mystics or the Mechanics found the whalers. Was it Mel following

the rainbow, Hewitt's RDF, or Spong's spy work? It was

everything, the Mystics and the Mechanics, divine intervention,

good planning, good seamanship, and good karma all rolled into

one.'



We followed the Soviet ships for two days, but they stopped

hunting whales and ran south faster than we could follow. Weturned northeast for the coast. In San Francisco, I was picked up

from the boat by two AP photographers and we had the

photographs on the wire services within an hour. The film

footage was shown on Walter Cronkite's evening news broadcast.

The local bars gave us free drinks. Environmentalists, school

children, rock stars, and movie agents came to the boat. 'Ben

Metcalfe had warned me: 'Fear success,'' recalls Hunter. 'Now Iknew what he meant. We had planned to make a global media

hit for the whales, and we had succeeded, but we had not

planned what to do afterwards.'

The Eco Navy

With McTaggart in France, Spong in London, and the media

frenzy in San Francisco, Greenpeace had emerged onto the world

stage. Back in Vancouver, the two phones in the little office rang

incessantly. Upon our returned, we were $40,000 in debt and half

the calls were from local suppliers, camera stores and marine

supply shops, wondering when they were going to get paid.

Bill Gannon left his job at Daon Development, opened a private

practice, and became our accountant. Gannon guided us in

creating a cash-flow projection based on all the campaign and

fundraising ideas we had. 'Do the right thing,' he encouraged us,

'and the money will come. It's the first law of money.' Gannon,



who still has a private accounting practice in Vancouver, recalls,

'We drafted a budget of $300,000 for the year, to do everything

we wanted to do. We put 20,000 names from the first lottery

onto a mailing list, then walked into the Royal Bank in Vancouver

with a cash-flow plan. The bank gave us a $75,000 line of credit,

and another $75,000 secured by personal guarantees. People

may not realize that the Royal Bank of Canada helped finance

the environmental revolution!'

Watson, Walrus, Hunter, and I published the first issue of the

Greenpeace Chronicles newspaper out of the old Georgia Straight

office in the fall of 1975, covering our voyage and other

environmental stories. Watson organized a campaign to protest

the Canadian Harp seal hunt in Labrador. We were sending

money to McTaggart in Paris and we were making plans for a

second voyage in the summer of 1976 to confront the Japanese

whalers, this time with a converted mine sweeper ('Mind

Sweeper' we called it) the James Bay.

The money was spent faster than it came in, but magic, it

seemed, was still with us. Gannon recalls, 'At one point our

bookkeeper stopped keeping the bank balance, and started

handing out blank checks to Watson for his seal campaign. By

the time we launched the James Bay in June we were overdrawn

at the bank.' Gannon oversaw ticket sales for a send-off benefit

concert with Country Joe MacDonald at the Jericho Beach site of

the UN Habitat Forum Conference, held in Vancouver that

summer. 'After the boat left, I went back to the office and took a

call from our bank manager who informed me we were $27,000

overdrawn. 'It's okay,' I told him, there was a Brinks truck on the



way with a cash deposit from the concert. The deposit was for

$27,200.'

The following year, 1977, there were some 15 to 20 Greenpeace

groups around the world. Watson led a second seal campaign to

Labrador, this time accompanied by actress Bridget Bardot. We

were still sending money to McTaggart in France and we

prepared the James Bay, Greenpeace VII, for another voyage

against the whalers. Spong went to Hawaii to launch a second

anti-whaling boat from there. We were broke again and needed

money for diesel fuel and for a direct mail funding drive.

'I asked the bank for a $15,000 extension on our line but they

refused,' Gannon recalls. 'I went into the office to get some

graphs I had prepared, and Julie McMaster handed me a brown

paper bag that had arrived in the mail. It was filled with U.S.

dollars.' Inside the bag was a note from a hermit in a mountain

cabin in Washington. 'I'm dying of cancer,' the note said. 'This is

all the money I have. I know you can use it. Thanks for what you

are doing.' Gannon took the bag into the bank. 'When I walked in,

the manager just shook his head and said 'No way.' I emptied the

brown bag out on his desk and asked if he could have a teller

count it. It came to $15,500.'

The French finally backed down from their atmospheric nuclear

tests in the South Pacific as the Americans had done at

Amchitka. Japan and the Soviet Union were isolated at the IWC,

and we eventually won a moratorium on pelagic whaling. The

Canadian seal hunt was halted. We launched campaigns against



supertankers and trophy hunting in BC, against nuclear power

plants in Canada and the U.S., and against Trident nuclear

submarines in Washington State. A fellow we'd never heard of,

Joe Healy, climbed the Chicago Sears Tower and hung a

'Greenpeace' banner protesting the whale hunt. The Greenpeace

office in London went after the Icelandic whalers with a boat

named Rainbow Warrior, and we were working with the Lakota

and Hopi Indians in the U.S. in their land claims struggles.

Greenpeace groups were forming everywhere, in England,

France, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, and throughout the

U.S. and Canada. By 1979 the consolidated groups were raising

over $12 million, and rivalries, splinter groups, and outright

frauds were fracturing the loosely-knit organization. Gannon and

our lawyers put together an affiliation contract, which some

groups signed and some groups refused to sign. Internal tensions

were high.

'In 1978 and early 1979 there were two meetings in Vancouver to

try to develop a constitution for GP internationally,' recalls

Patrick Moore, who was Greenpeace Foundation president at the

time. 'The second meeting ended with the San Francisco group

walking out. We had to file a lawsuit against them to protect the

Greenpeace trademark.

McTaggart came to Vancouver in the summer of 1979 with a

proposal to settle the turmoil. I spoke with him one night at my

home in Kitsilano. 'Look,' he said, 'this thing can't be run out of

Vancouver anymore. The headquarters should be in Europe. The



European groups are well organized. There's a million dollars

sitting in a bank account in Amsterdam. You know the scams that

hucksters are perpetrating under the name. The U.S. wants

autonomy from the Canadian group. The only solution is a

Greenpeace International, with each country getting a vote.'

There was some resistance in Vancouver, particularly with

dividing Greenpeace along national boundaries, but in the end,

Hunter backed the McTaggart plan, appealed to reason, and

swung the vote.

'McTaggart was the only one who could pull all the groups

together,' Hunter recalls, 'because he was just a smarter

politician than anyone else, he had campaign credibility, and

business savvy.' On October 14, 1979 we signed an agreement in

lawyer Davie Gibbons' Vancouver office establishing Greenpeace

International. In November we met in Amsterdam with

Greenpeace representatives from Canada, the U.S., France,

Germany, Denmark, U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and the

Netherlands. McTaggart was elected as the Executive Director.

Throughout the meetings, The Rainbow Warrior sat majestically

in Amsterdam Harbour, rainbow flags flying.

The Eco-Navy we had dreamed of came to pass. The Dalai Lama,

visited the Rainbow Warrior at the Earth summit in Rio. 'It’s a

small boat,' he said, 'a little untidy. But it is a very powerful

symbol, and the spirit on board made my spirit stronger too.'

From Vancouver, we watched with some pride as the Warriors of

the Rainbow mythology manifested around the world. Through all

the craziness and wild visions, something profound had been



seeded into the culture and was now blossoming on every

continent.

Irving Stowe had passed away early, in 1974, of cancer. Then

Bob Cummings passed away in 1987, Bree Drummond in 1997,

and David McTaggart was killed in the car accident in Italy on

March 23, 2001. Although retired from Greenpeace, it is typical

of McTaggart that two weeks before he died he was in

Amsterdam lobbying Greenpeace to join his campaign to

establish a marine protection zone in the Caribbean. A few

months before he died, McTaggart warned, 'It's an eternal

struggle. We haven't really won anything. Every victory we've

achieved could be rolled back in the blink of an eye. The

environmental movement isn't something that can ever rest.'

Captain John Cormack died peacefully on November 17, 1988, at

the age of 76 in Vancouver. 'Captain John,' recalls Hunter 'was

the only fisherman on the westcoast who was willing to take a

motley group of protestors up to the Aleutian Islands in 1971 to

protest the American nuclear test at Amchitka Island. He

skippered the first two whale voyages. Without Cormack, there's

no Greenpeace.'

Jim and Marie Bohlen left the group in 1972 when Metcalfe took

over. In 1974, they moved to Denman Island, and founded an

energy-efficient, organic farm they called 'Greenpeace Farm.' Jim

wrote The New Pioneer's Handbook about low-energy living. In

1983 Patrick Moore, then president of Greenpeace Canada,

brought Bohlen back onto the board of directors to head the



group's anti-nuclear campaigns. Bohlen joined the board of the

Green Party of Canada, and in 1992 attended the UN

Environment Conference in Rio. 'As the natural environment

inexorably deteriorates,' Bohlen says today, 'perhaps that will

prompt nation-state governments to relinquish some of their

sovereignty and accept global green governance.'

Patrick Moore is now a private environmental consultant for

forestry and other resource companies. He has been critical of

some Greenpeace positions, and was seen by some

environmentalists as a turncoat. Hunter once called him 'The

eco-Judas' in his newspaper column, but has since softened and

even apologized. In April 2000, on the 25th Anniversary of the

first Greenpeace whale campaign, Hunter and Moore hugged in

the kitchen of Pat and Eileen Moore's Vancouver home, all

grievances forgiven. Gaia Hypothesis author James Lovelock has

praised Moore's 'scientific environmentalism.'

'By the mid-1980's,' says Moore, 'we had won over a majority of

the public in the industrialized democracies. Presidents and

Prime Ministers were talking about the environment on a daily

basis. At that time, I made the transition from confrontation to

building consensus. After all, when a majority of people agree

with you it is probably time to stop hitting them over the head

and sit down and talk to them about solutions.' Moore now tours

the world, speaking with governments and companies about

environmental policy. 'The key points to a global environmental

policy,' he says, 'are renewable energy and material resources,

humans learning to control our population and urban sprawl

voluntarily, and the protection of forests, primarily from



inefficient agricultural production, by far the biggest cause of

deforestation.'

Ben Metcalfe lives a reclusive life on Vancouver Island. He

spends his days, he says, 'looking after my dogs, fishing, reading,

and writing.' His advice to Greenpeace today is 'Be creative.

Never argue the numbers. Do your homework, yes, but don't get

drawn into debates that only benefit the perpetrators. Go after

the owners of the companies. Make them visible. Find out who's

profiting from the destruction of the earth and name them. Take

their picture. Set up outside their house. Believe me, their own

children will reform them faster than any deal you could cut.

Remember, don't imitate what went before. An image only works

once.'

Dr. Lyle Thurston is retired, lives in Vancouver, and spends time

on Wickininish Island near the site of our first encounter with

grey whales. 'It just seemed natural to us at the time,' recalls

Thurston. 'We weren't trying to be pioneers. The earth needed a

constituency and defenders.' Dr. Myron MacDonald lives in

Vancouver and has a practice in North Vancouver. 'I'm involved

in the medical battle against osteoporosis and I'm active in

preventing this disorder globally.' Carlie Trueman is a British

Columbia magistrate. Fred Easton practices law in Nelson, B.C.

Michael Chechik and Ron Precious still make environmental films.

Mel Gregory runs an organization called the Jonah Project,

monitoring whaling activity, fighting for the release of captive

orcas, and experimenting with human/orca communication. Dr.



Paul Spong continues the work with live orcas that he started

thirty years go on Hanson Island. 'The best thing I can do for

whales,' says Spong now, 'is to learn things about them that will

take humans to a new level of relationship. We're still not there,

and whales are up against the wall again. I was upset with

Greenpeace for years because they abandoned whales while still

making money off them. Nevertheless, the world needs

Greenpeace and I'm encouraged by most of what I see.'

Hamish Bruce, the original Green Panther, left his law practice to

homestead with his family on remote Murrelle Island in Northern

British Columbia. Recently he's moved back to Vancouver and

runs a nursery and gardening business. 'The vision came to

pass,' he says. 'It doesn't matter who gets credit for it. There

were a lot of people who contributed from day-one who never

worried about getting credit.'

Linda Spong and Bill Gannon are married and live in Vancouver.

Linda is a ceramics artist and has produced a commercial

recording of orca sounds. Gannon helped McTaggart set up the

financial systems for Greenpeace International, founded a music

software company, and continues his private accounting

practice.

Walrus Oakenbough , a.k.a. David Garrick, was an environmental

consultant for Canadian Member of Parliament Jim Fulton and

now works with First Nations to document cultural claims to

forest lands. He produced a book on culturally modified cedar



trees for the Western Canada Wilderness Committee, helping

preserve thousands of acres of old growth forest from logging.

Paul Watson left Greenpeace in 1977 to start his own group, The

Sea Shepherd Society, and has had bitter conflict with

Greenpeace ever since. In 1994 Watson was confronted by

Greenpeace in Norway after he rammed a Norwegian whaling

boat. 'Greenpeace is not opposed to whaling,' said Greenpeace

Norway Chairman Leif Ryvarden. 'One must be allowed to

harvest a renewable resource.'

'That infuriated me,' says Watson today. 'That was a denial of

everything Greenpeace stood for. However, there are many

campaigners within Greenpeace who are sympathetic to our Sea

Shepherd campaigns, and we receive useful information from

them all the time. I don't want to see the destruction of

Greenpeace but I have to kick the monster in the ass now and

then to remind them where they came from.'

Rod Marining is still active in forestry and other environmental

protests in British Columbia. In April 2001 he returned to the

U.S./Canada border with anti-globalization activists protesting the

FTTA Quebec City Summit. 'The young protesters were all milling

around with signs, and one of them asked me what they should

do. 'Close the border,' I told him. They were concerned about the

police. 'Relax,' I said. 'We closed this border for two hours in

1969 to stop the atomic bomb tests. Let's see what you can do.'

They all huddled together to talk, then they walked out on the



road and sat down. They closed the border for six hours. Broke

our record.'

Bob and Bobbie Hunter moved to Toronto in 1988. Bobbie is a

Project Coordinator for Rogers Cablevision, designing and

overseeing construction projects. 'When we opened the first

Greenpeace office in Vancouver,' Bobbie recalls, 'no one was

paid. Our entire overhead was the $50 rent and the phone bill.

Other than that, every penny we raised went toward getting the

Phyllis Cormack out to confront the Russians. Greenpeace

Germany just built a US$35 million office building. More power to

them, but times have changed.'

Bob Hunter was hired by Toronto's Citytv as an Ecology

Specialist. He has remained active with Greenpeace as well as

with Watson's Sea Shepherd Society. His Storming of the Mind is

considered a media-activist's classic. After four books about

Greenpeace, he wrote Occupied Canada, Cry Wolf, On The Sky,

and Red Blood: One (Mostly) White Guy's Encounters with the

Native World, in which he recounts his discovery at his mother's

deathbed that her great grandfather had married a Huron

woman.

'If anything,' says Hunter now, 'the ecology crisis is more urgent

and I would advocate even tougher environmental law. Let's see

the CIA, Mossad, M-I5, and UN Security Council put to work in

defense of biosphere diversity. I want to see the Coast Guard and

Navy out there saving whales and halting over-fishing at the

point of a cannon, if necessary. I want to see Mounties throwing



loggers in jail instead of treehuggers and wildlife being defended

instead of hunted, with heavy sentences and staggering fines

and zero-tolerance for eco-crimes. Greenpeace helped put

ecology on the consciousness map, but we have work still to do.'

Frank Zelko, a historian writing his doctoral dissertation on

Greenpeace at the University of Kansas, says 'Unlike Friends of

the Earth, for example, which sprung fully formed from the

forehead of David Brower, Greenpeace developed in a more

evolutionary manner. There was no single founder, but Hunter

was significant because he had the vision and the guts to take

the organization in a new direction once the anti-nuclear aspects

wore thin. He made plenty of mistakes along the way, but he also

got many things right. He was the archetypal hippie

intellectual/activist but with a knowledge of media and a

commitment to ecology. People took a liking to Bob and were

willing to put their trust in him.'

'Greenpeace captured the public imagination because it

resonated with their own instinctive fears of extinction and hopes

for survival,' says Hunter. 'It was reality mythology.'

In the summer of 2000 Thilo Bode, then president of Greenpeace

International, invited Hunter to Europe to speak to the young

activists. 'They're just like we once were,' he observes proudly,

'sincere and dedicated. But the bureaucracy of Greenpeace is a

whole other matter. They showed me their 'Media Protocol

Manual.' My god! It was thicker than the Toronto phone book.'

Hunter took the media representatives out for a beer and shared



with them some of the media secrets of early Greenpeace.

'Chuck out the manuals,' he told them. 'Think for yourselves. The

media is not interested in yesterday's hashed-over stories.' And

he reminded them:

'In the beginning, there was no protocol.'

Rex Weyler was a director of the Greenpeace Foundation and

campaign photographer from 1974-1979. He was publisher of the

Greenpeace Chronicles magazine from 1975 to 1979, a

cofounder of Greenpeace International, and a director of

Greenpeace Canada until 1982. In 1980s he helped draft

legislation for BC's new pulp mill effluent regulations, limiting

dioxin releases into the Georgia Strait. He is currently the

publisher and editor of Shared Vision magazine. He lives in

Vancouver with his wife Lisa Gibbons, and has 3 sons.

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The History of Greenpeace

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