Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist (22 page)

We set out from Vancouver in early October, driving 24 hours over two days and then chartering Beaver floatplanes into a public camp at Coldfish Lake. It is a beautiful spot with log cabins and a backdrop across the lake of snow-capped mountains that extend well above the tree line. We had our own film crew as well as a reporter from the CBC national radio network.

It wasn’t long before we were able to disrupt a hunt by spooking the intended target, while blocking the trail with our bodies. The guides and their clients were not amused. Thus began a three-year campaign that saw us return each hunting season to dog the trophy hunters. It turned out to be a difficult fight.

On the eve of our date in a San Francisco courtroom, David McTaggart arrived in Vancouver, met with his allies, and asked for a meeting with the Vancouver board. It was agreed we would meet in David Gibbons’s office: he had been our senior legal counsel for many years and was trusted by all sides. On Sunday morning, October 14, a group of people who had invested a good part of their lives in this thing called Greenpeace sat down to see if we could reach a settlement. By this time I was resigned to the fact that the Greenpeace Foundation would lose control.

We had prided ourselves from the beginning on being transnational in our philosophy because ecology doesn’t recognize political borders. So it was difficult to accept an organizational structure that was based on national lines of “one-country, one-vote.” But in the final analysis, no one, including myself, could come up with a better idea for the basis of an international constitution. It was agreed that the Greenpeace Foundation did have the legal right to the word Greenpeace. In turn, the Greenpeace Foundation agreed to hand those rights over to a new organization, Greenpeace International, which would be based in Amsterdam. The Greenpeace Foundation would become Greenpeace Canada and would, along with all other national Greenpeace organizations, sign the Greenpeace International Accord, recognizing the supreme authority of Greenpeace International. Each of the five main national organizations would have one vote on the Greenpeace International Council. The lesser national groups such as New Zealand, Australia, and Denmark would be members of Greenpeace International but would not have a vote until the voting members agreed. Finally, the Vancouver office’s debt would be paid off with some of the cash that had piled up in the U.S. and European branches.

In retrospect it was something of a shame McTaggart gained control. He may have been a brilliant political strategist and a Machiavellian thinker, but he had no education in the sciences. Over the years he would allow our organization to drift away from science and logic, eventually adopting policies that were based more on fear and sensation than on facts and reason. But he did help to hold the group together for many years and for that I respect him.

Thus was created the first truly internationally constituted environmental activist organization. Unlike groups such as the World Wildlife Fund and Friends of the Earth, which are loose federations of national groups with a common name, Greenpeace International is a single entity. When the International Council meets, all the money and all the policy are on the same table. This has proved to be a very powerful political formula, allowing for coordinated action around the globe.

I was now the head of Greenpeace Canada and one of five international directors on the International Council. It was good to have the politics behind us, even though control shifted to McTaggart’s European base. The important thing was that we had managed to prevent disintegration and we were one organization again. And even more important, we could get back to the reason for our involvement in the first place, campaigning for the environment.

Before returning to the campaign trial, I witnessed the birth of our first child. Jonathan was born to Eileen early on October 20, 1979. I quit smoking for good that very day. Maybe I wasn’t smart enough to quit for my own sake, but I wasn’t going to blow smoke in a baby’s face. Thanks for that, Jon.

Chapter 9 -
Greenpeace Goes Global

On November 9, 1979, Bob Hunter and I boarded a 747 for London, where we had arranged to join the
Rainbow Warrior
for the passage across the North Sea to Amsterdam. We would be attending the first meeting of Greenpeace International with representatives from all the offices that had sprung up in the wake of our adventures. We both felt quite excited that we had created a truly international organization and could see the power it might wield.

During the overnight flight, Bob and I talked incessantly while he chain-smoked (I had quit two weeks before), and we both enjoyed more than a few drinks. After all, the
Rainbow Warrior
would not sail until eight the next evening, so we could get a good nap before leaving the dock. Not having slept a wink, we arrived in London three sheets to the wind and phoned our London contact to find out the best way to get to the
Warrior
. Whoops, the ship was scheduled to leave the East London Docks at 8 a.m., not p.m., and it was already nearly 7 a.m. “Get on the Underground for Aldgate Station, go up and take a cab to the docks,” we were told. We set off at a quick jog. It was easy enough to find the Underground and we were beginning to think we might actually make it when the train stopped one station short of our destination. “This train is reversing, all passengers please get off and wait for the next eastbound train,” the speaker droned. So we stepped out and waited on the platform for the next train as time ticked away.

Just as the next train was approaching, I looked down and realized that I had left my leather briefcase on the reversing train. In it were both our return air tickets and our passports. I panicked as I realized we could not get on board the
Warrior
without our passports and that our return tickets would also be useful for a successful journey (This was long before the advent of electronic tickets). Bob was so wasted that he slumped over his baggage in defeat while I raced up the escalator to see if I could find help. Halfway to the surface, I came to a small platform where there was a narrow door on the wall. I knocked and was amazed to hear a loud “come in” from the other side. Entering, I found a small man sitting in a chair in a room about six feet square with a tiny table in the middle on which sat a single black telephone. I rattled off my story. He said it might be four or five days before my briefcase ended up in the Lost and Found if it was ever turned in. I said, “Please, we are on our way to an important meeting,” and he offered me a cigarette. I took it. As it turned out, that was to be the last cigarette that ever touched my lips.

The small man picked up the telephone and dialed a number. He asked a few questions and hung up. We waited in deathly silence, puffing on our “fags,” for what seemed an eternity and were startled when the phone came to life with a loud ring. “Get down to the platform and wait for the next train,” my nicotine-enabling new friend advised. Careening down the escalator, I found Bob in such a deep sleep he was hard to wake. As the train approached, I saw a man leaning out an open window with my briefcase in his hand. Of course Bob was now overbearingly certain of miracles, even though he had been unconscious during my mission-saving effort. We thanked the man profusely and jumped on the next train. Racing off the platform to the surface at the next stop, we were confronted with London morning rush hour. It took a few long minutes to hail a cab. As we approached the East London Docks, we watched for the
Rainbow Warrior
, but she wasn’t at the berth we’d been directed to. The cab driver told us a ship leaving from there would have to go through two locks before entering the main stream of the Thames. Our only hope was to intercept the
Warrior
before she left the locks.

As we approached the last lock, we could see the
Warrior
was there. The cab driver pulled up as close as he could, this sort of delivery not being a normal stop on his route. We paid hurriedly and had to leap over various obstacles and train tracks. As we clambered over the gunnels of the
Warrior
, the lock doors opened and within minutes the ship was out into the Thames. Bob and I cheered as we passed by the cranes and derricks along the river. We were on board the flagship of the eco-navy that we had helped to create; we had realized a dream, or was it a miracle?

The meeting in David Gibbons’s office, where the structure of Greenpeace International was determined. From the back left are Michael M’Gonigle, David Garrick, and Bob Hunter. From the front left are Rex Weyler, David McTaggart, lawyers Peter Ballem and David Gibbons, myself, and Rod Marining.

The voyage across the channel gave Bob and me a chance to meet some of the key campaigners from the European Greenpeace organizations. In some ways they seemed more hard-core than us hippies from Vancouver and San Francisco. They didn’t sing about whales and they were very serious about environmental issues. Maybe the movement needed to get past the “revolution is a celebration” stage and get down to real political business. I wasn’t particularly convinced of this, but that didn’t seem to matter any more.

In Amsterdam the meetings went well: we adopted all the motions that had been agreed to in Vancouver. Some of David McTaggart’s loyalists tried to drive a stake through my heart by arguing that Greenpeace Canada should move its headquarters to Toronto. This could have eliminated me from the International Council. Somehow the Vancouver contingent managed to beat this idea back and I would spend the next six years as a director of Greenpeace International.

The creation of Greenpeace International marked the point at which no one person could be directly involved in everything going on in the Greenpeace world. With so many countries and offices, there were now often three or four campaigns occurring simultaneously. From hereon in, I will focus on my own role in the campaigns I was directly involved in.

The Greenpeace Council now met at least twice a year, sometimes three times. For me this was a very enjoyable and productive experience; there were so many issues, and new countries continued to become involved. The structure really worked and even though there were often differences of opinion we tended to sort them out and compromise on funding. The Marine Division was created as a separate budget and management group to operate the
Rainbow Warrior
and a growing fleet of other campaign ships.

Other than returning to Spatsizi to oppose the trophy hunters in the fall, I spent all of 1980 getting with the new international program. We voted via Telex, often after long and convoluted debates, but at least we were making decisions. There was an explosion of new proposals for campaigns in new areas. Acid rain, nuclear energy, uranium mining, whales in captivity, supertanker traffic, driftnet fishing, toxic dumping into rivers and the sea, and kangaroo killing all became targets in the Greenpeace crosshairs. We had not experienced such a burst of energy and growth since we confronted the Soviet whalers in 1975.

Once I had settled into my new role as one of the directors of Greenpeace International, I could turn my attention back to campaigning. Nineteen eighty-one was a very busy year. It began with Greenpeace’s first campaign against fossil fuels, a subject that would become increasingly important when concern over climate change emerged later in the decade. In 1981, though, our primary concern was the possibility of a catastrophic oil spill along the coasts of Alaska and British Columbia.

Because we had helped derail the plan to put an oil port in Kitimat to receive tankers from Prudhoe Bay at the end of the Alaskan oil pipeline, oil tankers were now plying the west coast from Alaska to Long Beach, California, and points in between. (It did cross my mind that perhaps a pipeline from Kitimat to points south would have been safer than tankers.) One of those in between points was the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the international waterway between Canada and the United States that separates southern Vancouver Island from the Olympic Peninsula. Tankers delivered crude oil to two refineries on the U.S. side and navigated the notoriously treacherous waters that lead from the open Pacific to these inland ports. By mutual consent, it had been agreed that tankers on this route would be limited to 125,000 tons of oil. These tankers were about half the size of the really big ones.