A Wild Idea

by Jonathan Franklin

  The distance between the Steve Irwin and the Nisshin Maru was 100 miles. In the open ocean, at an average speed of fifteen miles per hour, it would take the ship roughly seven hours to bridge this gap. This ocean, however, was not navigable in straight lines, which doubled the time and made crossing that distance more arduous. Entire bays were frozen over. In the Antarctic summer, cracks opened up through ice sheets, creating tempting shortcuts. The same fissures could also squeeze shut as ocean currents swirled giant ice blocks. The Japanese were using the ice sheet as a shield against the Sea Shepherds ship. When spotted by the helicopter, the Nisshin Maru headed further into the ice pack.

  On his way back to the Steve Irwin, the helicopter pilot found an open route into the ice, but squeezing through the passage would be tricky. Motoring at top speed, hot on the trail of the Japanese ships, the bridge crew missed a turn into open water. In order to have any chance of catching the whalers, Captain Watson decided to continue; they would navigate the ice field.

  The ice became so dense around them that the radar operator could not distinguish ice from open water. The crew had to rely on volunteers with binoculars to avoid icebergs, many of which lurked beneath the surface of the water. “This is a very dangerous game that we’re playing,” said crew member Jeff Hansen to the TV crew. “We hit an iceberg we don’t see, get a breach in this hull, and we’re going down in seconds. There is every chance that we will not come back.”

  Within hours, Hansen’s fears were realized—a screeching metallic wail vibrated throughout the ship. The Steve Irwin slid into an iceberg and took a punch to the aft section of the hull. The hull was not designed for ice-breaking and bent inward. As the winds topped forty knots, Captain Watson took the wheel from the second officer. Using a giant iceberg as shield, Watson steered the Steve Irwin to shelter in the lee. By morning the conditions worsened, ice sheets blew in, and they were trapped next to the iceberg. Watson steered the ship in circles, clearing a hole of ice-free water that despite his maneuvers continued to shrink. If the ice sealed, they would be surrounded by 100 miles of ice pack. Their only route out was behind them, but running the Steve Irwin in reverse ran the risk that the prop would shear off or become damaged by blocks of ice. Watson threw the ship into reverse anyway. But as the ice built up, he issued a drastic order: prepare the life rafts.

  “We could sink right here,” the second officer said, looking into the lens of the harried camera crew. Ordered to film down inside the hold, they refused. Instead they prepared to board a flotilla of Zodiac escape boats. Two volunteers lowered themselves into the bowels of the ship so they could inspect the hull. What they saw was terrifying. The ice was so hard it popped the steel hull back and forth, setting off a shriek. The paint cracked and walls and beams swelled as if they might explode. The volunteers scurried back on deck, while the engine crew was told “if the water starts to come in, stay here and stop it.”

  Watson ordered the helicopter aloft. He told the pilot to find an escape route—any direction, any possibility. As the tension mounted, Tompkins worked on the bridge. He scanned the horizon, reviewed the radar and the charts. As massive chunks of icebergs raked the hull, Captain Watson again took the wheel. “You’ve got to move slowly into the ice, keep the engine pressure to push the ice, and push through it,” he said, speaking directly to the camera crew. “You just have to be patient.”

  Hovering above the cracked ice and slowly advancing, the helicopter pilot guided the Steve Irwin back to the open ocean. The chase was on and the crew prepared their arsenal: stink bombs, water cannons, and a pair of Zodiacs to buzz around and try to foul the props of the Japanese ships.

  The Sea Shepherds launched the first Zodiac into the rough waters to get close enough to the Japanese, but by the time the boat was launched, the Japanese were miles away. As the Zodiac set out, fog reduced visibility and the boat zoomed away—in the wrong direction, losing radio contact with the Steve Irwin. “It’s a volunteer crew, first time in the boat in two hundred meters of visibility,” said one of the volunteers, Jane Taylor, a US Navy veteran. With the help of the helicopter the Zodiac was guided back to the mother ship and the mission postponed until the following day. Taylor worked with the Zodiac team to prepare them for the next time the Japanese were within range.

  For a full week the conflicts escalated. As one Japanese whaler attempted to transfer a whale carcass to another ship, the Steve Irwin plowed into the middle. The two ships crashed in what the Japanese called “a deliberate ramming” and Watson dubbed an “unavoidable collision.” He told the Associated Press that the situation was turning “very, very chaotic and very aggressive.”

  After each skirmish Watson led the Sea Shepherds in chasing the faster Japanese whaling fleet. The helicopter became more effective at helping the Steve Irwin find the Japanese whalers, and a route to them. The volunteers improved their launching of the Zodiacs, and on a later attack they managed to foul the propeller of one of the harpoon ships, but they were never able to catch up to the factory ship, the Nisshin Maru, to try to foul its prop and end the Japanese hunt for the season. The Japanese whalers were also ready with countermeasures. Every time the Steve Irwin managed to catch up, they hung netting over their entire decks, making it difficult for the Sea Shepherd’s stink bomb attacks. They had their own water cannons ready.

  Captain Watson kept chasing the Japanese until the Steve Irwin ran dangerously low on fuel. When he couldn’t maintain the pursuit any longer, he ordered the ship to turn north, and begin the long and still-dangerous journey back to Australia.

  By now, Doug had met all of the crew, and had even gone around with his camera and taken pictures of all the activists on board the Steve Irwin. Conversations in the mess soon spread, and several of the crew figured out that Tompkins was a conservation rock star in his own right.

  Tompkins identified with the young activists aboard the Steve Irwin because they were committed activists. Determined to slow the destruction of nature and the slaughter of whales, they risked jail time and massive fines to take on the mission of sabotaging the Japanese whale hunt. It was adrenaline-infused work.

  Tompkins continued to avoid the TV crew, which was searching for juicy soundbites, emotional drama, and scenes of tension among the crew on the bridge. He kept a low profile as he chatted with his watch mates. Sometimes there would be hours of silence, with Doug gazing at the whales, watching seals escape the orcas. Slowly the word spread around the ship that the old guy in the wool cap, the one up on the bridge, was “Doug Tompkins, the guy who started The North Face.”

  Mal Holland saw an opportunity and asked Doug to share his thoughts. Would he speak to the crew after his shift ended? Tompkins agreed. For over an hour he described the challenges of environmental activism, slowly letting on that he was not only the founder of The North Face and Esprit but also a leading figure in the field of wildlands philanthropy. “I had been on the ship for over a year. When Doug was on board, it was the first time that people sat down and had a discussion about what we were doing. He was very much a deep thinker. He had a methodical way of approaching business and projects,” said Wietse Van Der Werf, a Dutch environmental activist. “We spent weeks and weeks at sea, so there was a lot to talk about. He had an artistic notion. He showed a lot of photos of the work he had done on farms, which was beautiful! So, besides being a thinker, and very much a doer, he was also an artist.”

  “The revolution starts with a first step,” Tompkins explained to his growing green team. “How else would it work? We got to get started. If you look at all the big social revolutions in the world, it usually started with one person having the idea.” Protecting nature, Tompkins passionately insisted, was an exercise in aesthetic revitalization. “Living in a beautiful world brings joy, it brings pleasure to have a healthy world. Personally, I don’t see anything else that’s as interesting to do.”

  Doug’s lectures became a hit. The crew eagerly awaited the next meeting and he warmed to his audience, making joke
s, telling stories as he often did at campfires with his own friends. “He would do an hour and a half lecture in the back of the bridge, and we would sit there and record it and listen,” Taylor remarked. “He was teaching all of us, the younger ones, the greenhorns that wanted to know. What could we do more? What was it like in the past? What was the forum when you got together in San Francisco with all of your friends? What are you trying to do now?”

  Tompkins was insistent that environmentalists would always be underdogs. “We have to be good, because we’re up against a monster,” he said. “We’re the David-and-Goliath story. Our movement is small. But it has the right spirit, and we have a righteous cause on our side. But we’re outnumbered, outmaneuvered, outmanned, and outfunded by the forces of development. The Japanese whalers are investing $70 million this season; we’re investing $1 million. They’ve got the financial power, and we’re a bunch of scrappy environmentalists down here. So, we have to be a lot smarter than they are. They have to spend 70:1 because they have to prop up their morally bankrupt position.”

  The 2008–2009 whale hunt was not stopped, but the Steve Irwin campaign slowed the slaughter. The Japanese didn’t reach their quota of 985 whales, and were only able to kill 325. More than 600 whales were saved. The investment Doug made in Watson’s Sea Shepherd direct action would be paying dividends to the Antarctic ecosystem beyond his life span.

  When Tompkins disembarked from the Steve Irwin in Hobart, Australia, he carried with him the contact information for all the activist volunteers on board. He planned to keep in touch with these eco-warriors. A month after the trip, each received a poster in the mail from Doug, with a collage of photos of all the activists on Operation Musashi. Several of the crew asked Doug for donations for their own pet conservation projects, and Mal Holland journeyed all the way to Iberá to follow up with Doug, to interview him and pick his brain.

  Wietse Van Der Werf saw Doug again in Amsterdam a few months after Operation Musashi. In that short time Wietse had founded his own direct-action organization, which he called the Sea Rangers Service. Using refurbished sailing ships and professional crews, his plan was to offer low-cost ocean monitoring services to the Dutch government, and even to some private enterprises.

  “Doug had come to the Netherlands to visit the Queen. But something was wrong with his passport; it was going to expire in a few months, or something. They wouldn’t let him into the country,” remembered Van Der Werf. Tompkins told the Dutch immigration officials that he was there to meet the Queen, but they didn’t believe him. It took one of the Queen’s personal assistants calling to allow him into the Netherlands. After meeting with the royalty, Doug lunched with the young activist. “I had gotten an award for 50,000 euros, and I thought that if I could get another 30,000 euros we could have a budget to start this new organization,” Van Der Werf recalled. “About halfway through lunch, I decided to put an ‘ask’ to him. ‘Are you willing to make some kind of contribution?’”

  Doug apologized, said he was very sorry, and told Van Der Werf he had really overshot his budget for the year, and couldn’t invest much. But he could give the Sea Rangers Service 50,000 euros—would that help? “He made that contribution, and that along with the prize money kickstarted this whole Sea Rangers Service,” recalled Van Der Werf. “It was him trusting our pragmatic approach, and that we were doing it for the right reasons. He was willing to take some risk, and he just said, ‘Go do it!’”

  Chapter 17

  River Keepers

  The further and further we go down the path of embracing the technosphere and perpetuating the dangerous worldview of human supremacy over the rest of life, the longer it will be until we return to what will eventually have to be an eco-local model of development. The model that we have now is a massive failure since it has produced the biggest environmental crisis in the last 65 million years (!) and ruined the climate. The facts are relentless and pitiless.

  —DOUG TOMPKINS

  Following the exhilaration of his front-row combat against Japanese whalers, Tompkins landed back in Chile, where he was immediately engulfed in the latest attempt by HidroAysén to sell the public on its increasingly controversial $3 billion hydroelectric dam complex.

  HidroAysén insisted that Chile was running out of electricity. Soaring consumption meant blackouts were just around the corner. TV ads showed an entire football stadium going dark as part of a false-rumor campaign alleging that Chile faced an existential electricity crisis. To stab home the point, power supplies to the nation were being interrupted in ways that many Chileans considered not only suspicious but devious. To make the populace suffer just enough to align them behind the HidroAysén project, had the blackouts been deliberate?

  Tompkins laughed at their logic, calling them industrial age dinosaurs. He argued that GDP growth and electricity consumption no longer marched in step. Renewable energies were emerging as an alternative. A booming economy could also sport stable if not shrinking electrical consumption. “Hydro power?” Tompkins scoffed. “That’s last century.”

  The electricity consumption projections ginned up by ENDESA were gutted by the 2008 financial crisis in the United States. The financial downturn, following wild speculations on the ability of US real estate to sell at ever-more-inflated prices, slammed the Chilean economy. Commodity prices for copper, cellulose, and fishmeal tanked. Chile’s key exports were pummeled. HidroAysén executives nimbly exploited the economic downturn. What better way to combat sluggish GDP growth, they argued, than having a fresh infusion of several billion dollars? Thousands of construction jobs were dangled as the carrot to overcome the constant jabs from Chilean environmental activists.

  When HidroAysén officials realized how successful Doug had become in organizing the media messaging for Patagonia Without Dams, they jumped at the opportunity to portray him as a radical environmentalist and even as anti-Chilean. They tried to make him the poster boy for the anti-dam campaign, ignoring the Chilean environmental activists. Tompkins rarely moderated his positions, making him an easy target for the pro-dam consortium.

  ENDESA redefined its position not as pro-dam but as pro-Chile. Shouldn’t the country have the sovereign right to develop? It painted Tompkins as a capricious foreigner who zipped around in airplanes while denying locals the right to watch TV or use washing machines. To finish off the job (and the river), HidroAysén turned to Burson-Marsteller, a consulting firm nicknamed the “Darth Vader of Advertising” for its willingness to defend polluters.

  Burson-Marsteller’s infamous client list included Three Mile Island, the leaky nuclear power plant, and the chemical company Union Carbide, whose factory in Bhopal leaked gas that poisoned an entire city and left 3,800 Indian civilians dead, plus thousands more with permanent lung damage. In South America, Burson-Marsteller ran image campaigns for Jorge Videla, the Argentine dictator accused of overseeing the murder of as many as 30,000 civilians in the mid-’70s. For $1.2 million a year, Burson-Marsteller prepared pro-regime copy, including a thirty-one-page advertising supplement in BusinessWeek promoting the economic opportunities being created by Argentine’s iron-fisted ruler. The ad copy cheerily declared that “few governments in history have been as encouraging to private investment. . . . We are in a true social revolution and we seek partners. We are unburdening ourselves of statism, and believe firmly in the all-important role of the private sector.”

  The pro-dam forces created a new slogan: “HidroAysén: The Nation’s Project.” The response from Patagonia Without Dams was full-page ads mocking the “obsolete and destructive” idea that billions of dollars in corporate profits were necessarily good for the nation.

  Tompkins launched his counterattack with a scathing review of HidroAysén’s association with Burson-Marsteller. “If HidroAysén is so great, why don’t they sell it on its own merits?” He lambasted the PR firm as the patron of lost causes. “Why do they have to hire agencies known for defending the indefensible?”

  With presidential elections coming
up, the Patagonia Without Dams coalition wanted to put HidroAysén on the agenda: every candidate would have to stake a position. HidroAysén’s fortunes were boosted by the rising political power of a Chilean billionaire—Sebastian Piñera, number #765 on the Forbes 2009 list of the world’s wealthiest individuals.

  Tompkins saw Piñera as a wildcard. On one hand he was just the kind of wealthy businessman whom Tompkins specialized in publicly spearing and goring. Socially awkward and prone to colossal verbal blunders on live TV, Piñera also sported an independent streak far more modern than was typical of Chile’s ossified political parties. He spoke excellent English, had studied in Boston, taught in the Chilean university system for years, and was an avid bookworm. He was also an adventure junkie. Piñera was a pilot and, like Tompkins, landed on beaches, backyards, or freeways when gas ran low.

  After a day in Reñihue listening to Doug lecture on conservation opportunities, Piñera began his own search for wildlands to preserve. Doug and Kris tipped him off—the bottom third of Chiloé island was for sale. It was ideal for a park and, at 285,000 acres, large enough to ensure a conservation legacy. Piñera flew in, bought the land and announced the creation of “Tantauco Park”—a wildlands that would be open to the public and administered and owned by his own foundation. Tantauco was a mirror image of Pumalín Park, and Piñera even hired Carlos Cuevas, a key ally of Tompkins’s, to shepherd the project forward.