Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist (26 page)

Today it seems like motherhood to be against capturing whales and putting them in zoos, but at the time we managed to bring upon us the wrath of a significant portion of Canadian society. None other than Pierre Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada, was on the board of the Vancouver Aquarium Society, and the other members weren’t exactly working-class either. The local newspapers had openly sided with the aquarium, arguing that captive whales were good for education and acted as ambassadors for their wild counterparts. Greenpeace was publicly ostracized while the papers ran exciting photos of whales leaping in front of appreciative crowds. We felt the whales had been violently stolen from their close-knit family pods and placed in prison, where they were forced to do tricks for food. The practice was unacceptable.

In September 1982 the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans issued a permit to Sealand of the Pacific, based in Victoria, to capture up to four orcas at Pedder Bay on southern Vancouver Island. We announced that Greenpeace would attempt to foil the capture.

We set up a tent base camp near Race Rocks, complete with shore-based marine radios. Fred Easton’s dad loaned us his cabin cruiser, the
Cat’s Meow
. For some reason the base camp’s radio handle became “Crispy Critter,” so it wasn’t long before the boat became know as the “Kitty Litter.” Mel Gregory got a hoot out of hailing us from shore, “Kitty Litter, Kitty Litter, Crispy Critter here. Come in, Kitty Litter.” As usual we found lots to laugh and sing about as we prepared for a showdown with the whale-nappers.

Sealand had perfected a capture method that took advantage of the fact that pods of orcas would chase a school of herring around Race Rocks and then corral them in Pedder Bay, where they would take turns feasting on them. A seine-fishing boat lay in wait on one side of the bay with a huge drum of fishnet on the stern, one end of which was tied to the beach. As soon as the whales entered the bay, the seine boat was to steam across the bay laying out the net to prevent the whales’ escape. As intelligent as they are, orcas will not leap over a net even though they can easily do so. Our job was to make sure the whales didn’t enter the bay in the first place.

We were getting a reasonable amount of coverage in the media, but it wasn’t until one of our crew lost power in his Zodiac that we really hit the press. Mel Gregory was rounding Race Rocks late in the day when his outboard motor failed. The strong currents swept him out into Juan de Fuca Strait and into the shipping lanes. As fate would have it, he was rescued by one of the cruise ships known as the Love Boats and became an instant celebrity on board. The media loved this angle and suddenly our little band of whale-savers was front-page news. We had been at our station for more than a week when this incident occurred, and it was only two days later that we spotted a pod of orcas coming around Race Rocks heading for the bay. By this time a flotilla of smaller volunteer boats had joined the
Cat’s Meow
. We converged on the path of the whales while the seine boat fired up its engines and prepared to pull its net across the bay.

As the whales approached, we came to a stop and began banging oars, bailing cans, and whatever else we could find against the sides of our boats. Whether it was a miracle or predictable, the whales immediately changed course and went back out to sea while the would-be captors watched us foil their efforts. This would be the last time anyone tried to capture an orca in Canadian waters. Sealand of the Pacific voluntarily gave up due to the overwhelming public opposition we had generated.

The statistics for captive orcas are not encouraging. Their life expectancy in captivity is six years, which is about one-fifth what it is in the wild. Of 110 orcas taken from the ocean from 1967 to 2007 only 13 are still alive. The good news is that after years of failure, the aquariums have now learned to successfully breed orcas in captivity, and they now live longer than they did in previous years. Of the 42 whales currently in captivity 29 of them were born in captivity. Unfortunately, a total of 152 captive whales have died, 97 of which were born in the wild and 55 of which were born in captivity. At last it appears live captures in the wild have come to an end—a short but brutish period in our relationship with a magnificent species of marine mammal.

Curtains of Death and the Gulag

In 1983 the
Rainbow Warrior
sailed through the Panama Canal into the Pacific for the first time. We had been campaigning against the use of deep-sea driftnets in the north Pacific by the Japanese for a few years but had never actually confronted them at sea. Greenpeace Hawaii did the research and knew where to find the driftnet fleet—large ships that strung nets 30 miles long and 100 feet deep. This “curtain of death,” as we called it, caught thousands of dolphins, diving seabirds, turtles, and nontarget fish as well as the intended catch. This activity occurred far from land and out of sight of the public and the media. We aimed to change this practice, just as we had with whaling and sealing. It worked. Our underwater footage of dolphins and birds trapped in the nets went around the world on television. This made the public aware of this cruel practice and brought about worldwide support to end the driftnet fishery. David McTaggart briefed Ted Turner on the issue and he gave us funding to produce a documentary on the subject. We took the issue directly to the UN, where a resolution banning the practice was eventually passed in 1989. Once again Greenpeace demonstrated that direct nonviolent action, going to the scene and documenting the subject for all to see, was capable of creating real change.

In what became the common practice of “serial campaigning” the
Rainbow Warrior
proceeded from the driftnet fishery directly to the northern Kamchatka Peninsula, where a Russian whaling station was still operating. The Russians were killing the gray whales that migrate annually from Baja California up the coast of North America and into the Bering Sea. Long since protected in Mexico, the U.S., and Canada, the grays were still being ground up for fertilizer and pet food in Russia.

Bob Cummings joined the crew in Alaska as media coordinator, and I camped out in my living room in Vancouver for the marathon media-relations exercise that ensued. In a bold move, a group of eight Greenpeacers landed Zodiacs on the shore of the Kamchatka whaling station and began to document the operation. They were soon apprehended by Soviet authorities and taken to prison while the
Rainbow Warrior
made for U.S. waters with a huge Soviet warship in hot pursuit.

One of the Zodiacs involved in the landing had managed to escape capture, and the driver had the film footage of the whaling operation and the Soviet soldiers taking the eight Greenpeacers away. He headed for the
Rainbow Warrior
but was knocked out of his boat by a large Soviet helicopter using its prop wash to try to stop him. The Soviets picked him out of the water, but the zodiac was left doing circles without a driver until the
Rainbow Warrior
returned to it. Miraculously, the film canister had remained in the Zodiac and was retrieved.

Just as the warship was gaining, the spunky Greenpeace ship crossed the U.S. territorial border in the Bering Sea and the Soviet ship quit the chase and turned back. As soon as the
Warrior
landed in Alaska, Bob Cummings got on a plane with the footage. I met him in Seattle, where the raw film was fed to all the news networks’ satellites while I narrated it, explaining who was who and what had happened. It hit the global airwaves in true mindbomb fashion and the heat was on the Russians to set our people free. The drama lasted for days as Soviet authorities dithered and only made their dilemma worse. A week later the eight Greenpeacers were released to fanfare and fame. One more victory for the whales.

In 1983 I met Russ George, a free-thinking biologist who turned me on to a book that has influenced me ever since.
Seafarm: The Story of Aquaculture
was written by Elizabeth Mann Borgese, from the Mediterranean island of Malta. She had been a central figure in the negotiations leading to the Law of the Sea Treaty at the United Nations in the 1970s. As she traveled around the world to fishing nations, Elizabeth became impressed by the growing practice of aquaculture, farming lakes, rivers, and the sea for fish and shellfish. She realized this was the future of seafood, that the wild fisheries could provide only so much until they became unsustainable. I agreed with her thesis and realized that just as people had turned to farming the land 10,000 years ago we must learn to tend the seas; to make the transition from hunting and gathering to farming. After a year of mulling over the concept of sustainable development I had found a way to make my transition from problems to solutions. I would start a salmon farm at my childhood home in Winter Harbour.

The farming of fish goes back at least 3,000 years in China, where carp and other freshwater fish are still the main contributor to worldwide aquaculture production. Trout have been farmed for more than a hundred years around the world and catfish have been successfully domesticated in the U.S. South. Marine shellfish such as oysters and mussels, have also been farmed for centuries. But it wasn’t until 35 years ago that scientists and fish farmers cracked the life cycle of marine finfish.

It was the coastal people of Norway who pioneered the art and science of salmon farming in the 1970s in the sheltered fjords along their rugged coast. Decades of overfishing had reduced the Atlantic salmon runs there to mere remnants as fleets from two-dozen European countries ravaged the northern seas. Fishermen had discovered that salmon congregated beneath icebergs near Greenland, so they pulled huge nets beneath the bergs, decimating both European and North American populations. The demand for wild salmon could no longer be satisfied, so necessity became the mother of invention.

Salmon became the first marine fish species to be successfully farmed for a simple reason. Unlike most ocean fish, salmon breed in freshwater, returning to their natal streams to spawn, where the young fry hatch and rear before returning to the sea again. It had been relatively easy to figure out how to build hatcheries beside the streams and rivers, take eggs and sperm from the returning adults, hatch the eggs in incubators and grow the fry in ponds or tanks. This greatly increased the survival rate over the wild and thus returned more fry to the sea. Salmon enhancement of the wild populations became common practice in the Atlantic and the Pacific. But it would ultimately fail in the Atlantic partly because there were just too many fishing boats and not enough fish. By contrast, in the north Pacific there were only four countries—Canada, the U.S., Russia, and Japan—competing for wild salmon. The Pacific Salmon Commission was formed in 1989 to control the catch.

The Norwegians figured out how to take the fry from freshwater salmon hatcheries and transfer them to “netpens” in the sea, where they were given a formulated feed and were grown out to market size. The entire life cycle was now brought into domestication and a new revolution in seafood production began. I am convinced that aquaculture is the future of healthy protein and oils to feed a growing world population.

My mom’s dad, Art North, was a grizzled west coast salmon fisherman, who, with his three brothers, pioneered the salmon trolling fleet out of my home village of Winter Harbour in the 1930s. When I stayed with him and Granny Mary, he would take me out to sea at four in the morning, where among the rolling swells he pulled the silver salmon into his hold. I was always seasick and vowed never to become a fisherman. But I learned a lot from Granddad Art, as he taught me how to carve a toy boat and to gut fish. Later in life I questioned him about the practice of killing sea lions as a way of increasing the amount of fish available to fishermen. In the 1950s the Canadian fisheries authorities mounted machine guns on the bows of their patrol boats. They would visit sea lion colonies on islands and rocks off the coast and “thin” their populations. I asked,

“Granddad, did you catch more salmon after they killed the sea lions?” He scratched his head and replied, “I guess they didn’t kill enough of the bastards.” He was the gentlest, kindest man you could ever meet. How attitudes toward marine mammals have changed with the times!

I told my brother-in-law, Peter Taylor, about the idea of salmon farming. Winter Harbour would be a good location to build a hatchery and netpen operation. A few pioneers had already established small salmon farms farther down the coast. We met them and learned the basics of what we needed to get started. Quatsino Seafarms was born, named after the inlet of which Winter Harbour is a part, and the First Nations people who first settled there. I was involved in a positive effort to farm the sea for the first time in my part of the world. It was as exhilarating as the first voyage to stop the H-bomb tests; maybe a bit more down to earth, but easily as meaningful. It was part of a bold new movement for the sustainable use of the sea. It would prove to be a challenge as great as any campaign to save the planet.