We were made honorary brothers of the Kwakiutl First Nations at Alert Bay on our return from Alaska. This began a long association with aboriginal people around the world. I am in the center with cap in hand. Photo: Robert Keziere
After the voyage to Alaska many of the campaigners who put Greenpeace on the map against U.S. nuclear testing moved back to their former lives or moved on to new ones. But a few of us—Ben and Dorothy Metcalfe, Jim and Marie Bohlen, Bob Hunter, Rod Marining, and myself—had become addicted to making waves and taking on the nuclear establishment. It wasn’t long before we turned our sights on French atmospheric nuclear testing at Mururoa Atoll in the South Pacific.
France had refused to sign the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 banning nuclear tests in the atmosphere. Both France and China continued to detonate nuclear weapons in the air, sending radioactive fallout around the world. New Zealand, in particular, had become a hotbed of opposition against the French nuclear tests.
Before sailing on the first Greenpeace voyage, Ben Metcalfe, a former CBC radio news correspondent, had made a reputation as a creative booster for the emerging environmental movement in Vancouver. Ahead of his time, in 1969 Ben paid for 12 billboards at major Vancouver intersections so commuters could read in simple bold print, “Ecology? Look it Up! You’re Involved.” It is hard to imagine today that the word ecology was not yet mentioned in the popular press, but at the time one only found it in obscure academic journals.
During the winter of 1971-72 Ben and the rest of us met around kitchen tables to plan our next campaign. We knew that French atmospheric nuclear testing, conducted at Mururoa Atoll in French Polynesia, was the logical target. Soviet and Chinese testing would have been great targets too, if they didn’t involve the practical reality of wanting to avoid the prospect of life in the gulag or death in a far-off prison cell. And certainly within the peace movement at the time the West was considered theaggressor. The Vietnam War put an exclamation mark on that perception.
But French Polynesia lay way out in the remote South Pacific. It had been one thing to sail a boat up the coast from my hometown near Vancouver a thousand miles to Alaska; it was quite another to sail from New Zealand, the closest “friendly” country to Mururoa, 2500 miles across the open waters of the South Pacific. There was also the inconvenient fact that our bank account contained only $9000 and we had no boat, no captain, and no crew. But we were not about to let pesky details get in our way.
A depiction of the Warriors of the Rainbow from the book of the same name. Aboriginal people are following the dove of peace to save the environment.
We decided to issue a press release announcing that Greenpeace’s next campaign would be to sail a boat from New Zealand to Mururoa in order to challenge the French nuclear tests. As France was illegally cordoning off thousands of square miles of international waters during the tests (the 200-mile limit was not in force at the time), we planned to position a boat near the atoll in international waters, then only three miles offshore. Any nuclear test would fry the boat and its occupants, something France might want to avoid. It turned out we were a bit overconfident on this point.
Our press release received little notice anywhere but New Zealand, where the major newspapers put it on the front page. Suddenly there was a buzz that this bunch of crazy Canadians were coming down under to raise Cain as they had up north in Alaska. The headlines brought a few phone calls from skippers in the South Pacific but only one call made sense. A certain David McTaggart, an expatriate Canadian from Vancouver, who had been sailing the southern ocean for seven years, telephoned us to volunteer his 36-foot ketch Vega for the mission. David had been a Canadian badminton champion and a successful entrepreneur until he fled for bluer waters. Now he wanted to challenge the right of France to take over international waters for its nuclear tests. Suddenly, we had our skipper, we had our boat, and the publicity surrounding the adventure brought financial support from around the world.
Dorothy Metcalfe coined the slogan Mururoa mon amour (“Mururoa My Love”) after the acclaimed 1959 film Hiroshima mon Amour. This became our campaign slogan and we also used it on lapel buttons that we ordered. Ben Metcalfe took the $6000 or so left in our account to New Zealand and joined McTaggart to outfit the Vega for the voyage. In the spring of 1972 I traveled to New York with Jim and Marie Bohlen, who came from that part of the world, and we spent a week visiting the UN embassies of the Pacific Rim countries to inform them about the French nuclear tests. The first UN Conference on the Environment was about to take place in Stockholm, Sweden, and there was an opportunity to make the tests an issue from an environmental perspective. It is hard to believe today, but the Western superpowers (the United States, Great Britain, and France) took the position that nuclear weapons and nuclear testing were not environmental issues and should therefore not be raised at the UN conference. We took exception to this. If nuclear fallout spreading around the earth wasn’t an environmental issue, what was? And come to think of it, what about the environmental impact of all-out nuclear war?
Yes, that was the “thinkable” reality that gave my generation nightmares for years. I half-jokingly said, “It might rain today, and by the way, total nuclear annihilation is possible on Wednesday.” It is hard to express the singular resolve that emerged to fight this possibility. It expressed itself in many countries, in many publics, in many political debates. But I don’t think it expressed itself anywhere more fully than in our fledgling troupe of Greenpeace button-wearing ecologists, pacifists, anarchists,and revolutionaries.
The spring of 1972 saw Greenpeace coming into its own with a coordinated effort straddling the globe. While David McTaggart and Ben Metcalfe set sail from New Zealand for Mururoa, a small group of us set off to Europe, where we hoped to “send a flaming arrow into the heart of Western civilization, ” to use the hyperbole of that time. Our first stop was Rome, where we had requested an audience with Pope Paul VI in the Vatican. As a man of peace he welcomed us, blessing our flag and sending a message against nuclear testing around the world.
We then proceeded to Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, where we spent the afternoon leafleting visitors with antinuclear pamphlets and telling them, in broken French, about le petit bâteau that was sailing into the test zone as we spoke. As the cathedral closed, we sat in the pews and told the custodians that we were taking refuge in the church and wouldn’t leave until nuclear testing stopped. They politely informed us that Notre Dame was not a church but a national monument and we’d better get out or we would be arrested by the sûreté (the national police).
We left, but not until we were interviewed by Le Monde, France’s main national newspaper. The next day’s story marked the first time the French public had been informed about opposition to their nuclear testing program in French Polynesia.
Our next stop was Stockholm, where in June the sun barely sets. This was the first United Nations Conference on the Environment and budding environmentalists from around the world came to join the legions of national government and UN representatives. Most of the nongovernment folks attended a “counter-conference,” where they had their own agenda composed of spirited rallies complete with full-size whale balloons and a celebration of life.
The big debate at the counter-conference was between Paul Ehrlich, best-selling author of The Population Bomb,[2] and Barry Commoner, author of The Closing Circle.[3] Ehrlich contended that the biggest environmental problem was overpopulation, especially in the developing countries. Commoner disagreed, stating that the worst problem was chemicals and toxins in our food chain, caused primarily by the industrialized countries.
One of the 12 billboards Ben Metcalfe paid for in 1969, long before the word ecology came into popular usage.
The people attending from developing countries and their supporters claimed Ehrlich’s view was racist and genocidal as it targeted people of color in developing countries and let the superpowers off the hook. In contrast, nearly everyone was happy to blame industrialized countri
es for toxic pollution, so Commoner won the debate hands down. The repercussions of this quarrel have affected environmental policy ever since.
Greenpeace, for example, has never addressed population growth or poverty as key environmental issues while it has focused heavily on toxic chemicals through the years. There can be no doubt human population is an important environmental issue, because humans inevitably alter their surroundings and impact ecosystems. The human population rose at an exponential rate through the 20th century, increasing from about 1.6 billion people at the start of the 20th century to more than six billion at the end. But it may well turn out that Ehrlich, and Malthus before him, were wrong in believing that population growth in itself would be the unraveling of civilization or the death knell for a healthy environment.
In The Population Bomb Ehrlich predicted that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the 1970s as a result of massive food shortages, mainly in Asia and Africa. As he pontificated about apocalypse from his ivory tower at Stanford University an unknown agronomist from the U.S. Midwest was doing something to prevent this disaster from occurring. The late Dr. Norman Borlaug would eventually win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for leading the international research effort to create high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice for the developing countries. This ushered in what became known as the Green Revolution. In a matter of years, countries like India and Pakistan that had depended on grain imports to feed their populations became self-sufficient in grain production and even became net food exporters. Needless to say, Ehrlich’s predicted mass starvation never happened.
Ironically Dr. Borlaug, who died in 2009, is relatively unknown in his home country to this day while Paul Ehrlich, who continues to predict doom and gloom, is still held up by activists and the media as a guru.
We three Greenpeacers in Stockholm spent most of our time at the official conference, where we continued to lobby the Pacific Rim countries. We were elated when New Zealand, in defiance of the superpowers, put a resolution against French nuclear testing on the floor. To our delight, the resolution passed by a wide margin, bolstering our cause and putting some wind in the Vega’s sails as David McTaggart approached ground zero at Mururoa.
When we returned to Vancouver, we learned the French had sent a frigate to meet the Greenpeace boat in international waters, rammed and disabled the 36-foot ketch, and forced McTaggart to come ashore on Mururoa. David made the mistake of having lunch on the island with the French general in charge of the nuclear testing program. Photos of McTaggart breaking bread with the enemy were broadcast around the world. It appeared to Greenpeace supporters that David was supping with the devil. In retrospect this was a minor setback.
In 1973 the Vega returned to Mururoa, this time attracting even more public attention. Upping the ante, French commandos boarded the ketch and beat McTaggart with truncheons, damaging his eye, and then claimed he had fallen on the deck. The French liars didn’t know crew member Anne-Marie Horne had photographed the beating, hidden the film canister in her vagina, and sent the film to Vancouver, where we released it to the media. The photos of McTaggart’s beating were published around the world, embarrassing France in the international community. The French showed no remorse and censored the photos in France for “national security” reasons. They continued the series of atmospheric tests. Then suddenly, France announced it would end atmospheric testing after 1974, conducting further tests underground. With a few dedicated people and a couple of small boats, Greenpeace had now chalked up two major victories against nuclear superpowers.
In the aftermath of his voyages, McTaggart moved to Paris, where he began a personal campaign through the French courts, challenging France’s right to cordon off international waters and seeking damages for the loss of his sight and the damage to his boat. It took three yearsof hard work, but in 1976 David won a partial victory when the judges ruled he had been deliberately rammed and was owed compensation, which he received.
[1]. William Willoya and Vinson Brown, Warriors of the Rainbow (Happy Camp, California: Naturegraph Publishers , 1962).
[2]. Paul R. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (Cuthogue, N.Y.: Buccaneer, 1971).
[3]. Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972).
Chapter 5 -
Saving the Whales
Ideas travel at the speed of thought.
—Paul Spong, founder of the Greenpeace Save the Whales Campaign
In early 1973 I met Eileen and we fell in love that same day. We had found ourselves, recently separated from our partners of five years each, in a 13-room hippy boarding house, which was named Fowler’s Rest Home after the owner, my old school chum Ron Fowler. I had arrived a couple of months earlier, a refugee from a relationship that had begun when I was too young and had never really worked. I was busy writing my PhD thesis in a basement room at Fowler’s when Eileen moved in. Vancouver born, Eileen and her first husband, Jim, a jazz drummer, had moved back to Toronto in the hope of finding more work there. That plan fizzled and their marriage didn’t make it either, so Eileen came home to Vancouver and found a bed at the home of her old friend Karen’s. She got a job serving cocktails at a local nightclub, The Garage, and Karen soon found her a room at Fowler’s place. Other notables who called the Rest Home their home were Frankie Allison, the lead guitarist of Wildroot, and Ian Berry, who played sax and keyboards. The band had a steady gig at the Garage. The party at Fowler’s began when the band arrived home at two in the morning and we assembled for a communal dinner, loud music, and various intoxicants. We were one big happy hippy family.
It was at one of these gatherings that Eileen appeared, newly arrived, and we struck up a conversation that quickly excluded all others. We both loved plants, trees, and the country. She had followed the story of the Greenpeace voyage to Amchitka because she knew two of the other crew members, Dr. Lyle Thurston, who had become my good friend, and Bob Keziere, the photographer and PhD chemistry student. Eileen looked nice in a tight red sweater with no bra. It was her night off. How about heading down to the Garage to hear the band? I suggested. After all the Rest Home crowd always got in free. So off we went with half the house in my Volkswagen microbus camper. Eileen and I danced, held hands, embraced, and then went home to my room at Fowler’s Rest Home. And we have never left each other since.
In May, with McTaggart’s second voyage to protest the French nuclear tests at Mururoa under way and my PhD thesis handed in, Eileen and I set off for Mexico in the microbus. After 20 years of schooling it was the first time I had really “escaped.” By this time I wasn’t really interested in getting a job with industry or government after I graduated. On our return from eight weeks of exploring pre-Columbian ruins, snorkeling, and generally discovering Mexico from Mazatlan to Puerto Escondido, Eileen and I went to my childhood home in the rain forest at Winter Harbor; we wanted to get back to the land. I went to work in my dad’s logging camp as a “bullbucker.” A bullbucker looks after a half-dozen tree-fallers, helps them pack their gear into the woods, and fixes their chainsaws. The pay was good and we soon saved enough to start building a house.
By now you can see that I had a very different, and more up close, experience with logging and forestry than the average environmentalist. I understood from the beginning that trees are renewable and what really mattered was that the land was reforested after the trees were cut to make our homes, furniture, and paper products. I knew wood was the most abundant renewable material on the planet. I had no idea at this time that the movement I was helping to build would eventually adopt an anti-forestry campaign.
Dad had a small sawmill with a 54-inch circular blade that could cut timber from a log up to 28 inches in diameter. Eileen and I collected cedar logs from here and there on the weekends and cut all the lumber for a 750-square-foot cabin, and then we built it ourselves over the winter of 1973 and into the summer of 1974. I cut shake blocks from a huge red cedar tree, and Eileen split all the shakes for the roof while I was at work. We had th
e place roofed and closed in by the fall. It is amazing how much two people can accomplish during evenings and weekends when they set their minds to it. We moved into something of a shell in early 1975, and ever since we have been finishing our beautiful cedar cabin by the sea.
Albert Lee, long-time employee at the logging camp, sharpening the 54-inch circular saw in the sawmill where Eileen and I cut all the cedar and spruce lumber for our cabin in Winter Harbour. Photo: Bill Moore
Our idyllic country life was not to last. During our infrequent visits to Vancouver, which lay 12 hours away by road and ferry from Winter Harbour, we maintained contact with Bob Hunter and the others who kept Greenpeace alive through the lull in campaign activity. In the fall of 1974 Bob invited me over to his place to meet a whale scientist who had a new idea for Greenpeace. Paul Spong told us his fascinating story and I was instantly in on the program. Bob and Paul and I, with our partners Bobby, Linda, and Eileen, would spend the next five years together living out a dream—to save the great whales from extinction at the hands of factory whaling ships.
Paul was a native of New Zealand with a PhD in developmental psychology. His arrival in Canada coincided with the first live capture of an orca whale in 1967. At the time orcas were commonly called killer whales because of their predatory nature. The 15-foot orca had been caught in a fisherman’s net and had then been transferred to a large pool at the Vancouver Public Aquarium. The whale was named Skana, meaning “supernatural one.” Dr. Murray Newman, the aquarium’s curator, was interested in studying the whale to determine its intelligence and behavior. Paul Spong was hired for the job.
Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist Page 8