Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist

by Patrick Moore

  Paul began to conduct routine psychological tests. For example, one test was designed to determine if the whale could learn to select a single line on one card from a double line on another card to get the reward of a herring snack. He was soon amazed to see Skana learned which card to select a lot faster than the average chicken did. Just as the whale was getting 90 percent on the test it suddenly reversed its behavior, pushing the wrong button nearly 100 percent of the time. Paul was shocked into the realization that the whale was toying with him, turning the tables completely and playing with his mind. Time to rethink the “experiment.”

  Over the next weeks Paul and Skana’s relationship deepened. Skana cultivated Paul’s trust so that Paul could eventually put his head in Skana’s mouth, surrounded by rows of six-inch sharp predatory teeth, with no fear.

  Paul began to invite friends to the aquarium to participate in this evolving relationship. On a moonlit night, flautist Paul Horn played to Skana from the side of the pool. Many of those present—some of them in an LSD-induced trance—felt certain they were witnessing a breakthrough in interspecies communication. Word of the late night séance got out. The aquarium staff claimed that they had found broken glass in the pool. Paul was fired. The management wanted a circus animal for paying customers, not a love-fest between man and whale.

  During his time at the aquarium, Paul had gained an abiding interest in whales of all species and began to study their evolution and natural history. He soon learned that one species after another had been driven to the brink of extinction by commercial whaling.

  Whales are ancient creatures that first appeared in the fossil record over 60 million years ago. They evolved after the great dinosaur extinction, caused by a large meteor that crashed near the Yucatan Peninsula, ending the Jurassic Age. Among the dinosaurs exterminated were the large marine plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs. Their disappearance left a big hole in the marine food chain, one that was, in evolutionary terms, filled quickly by whales and dolphins. They evolved from a species similar to the present-day hippopotamus. These creatures swam down a river to the sea and evolved into the largest animals ever to exist on Earth. They lived peacefully for over 60 million years, with no natural enemy except one of their own kind, killer whales, who rarely attacked them. Then we came along, learned to build boats, and in a few centuries nearly wiped them off the face of the earth.

  While some cultures, such as the Inuit (Eskimos), Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest, and the Norwegians had been whaling for a thousand years or more, the Dutch, British, and Americans didn’t start until the 16th century. Early whaling was conducted close to shore in small, rowed boats with hand-thrown harpoons. In both Western Europe and North America, early whalers often targeted right whales, so named because they were the “right” whale to hunt: They swim slowly and float after they are killed.

  By the 17th century the purpose for whaling had become purely commercial, as demand for lamp oil and lubricants increased with industrialization. Whale oil was the first commercially important oil, (it was used mostly to fuel lamps) and was obtained by slow cooking (rendering) the whale blubber. After coastal right whale populations had been significantly reduced, whalers turned to increasingly larger whales in deeper and more remote waters. In addition to whale oil, whalers sought baleen, sperm oil, spermaceti (wax), and ambergris for perfume.

  Baleen, or whalebone, are the large, hairy plates that hang down from the roof of a baleen whale’s mouth. Baleen whales include the blue, fin, sei, minke, Bryde’s, humpback, right, and bowhead whales. They gulp mouthfuls of plankton and fish-rich seawater and then close their mouths, forcing the water, but not the food, back out through the baleen plates that act as a filter. By this method, baleen whales consume tons of shrimp, small fish, and plankton each day. Baleen is flexible and is made of the same material from which fingernails, hair, and claws are made. Baleen was the plastic of its day and was used to make skirt hoops, corset stays, buggy whips, umbrella spokes, and many other products.

  Sperm oil and spermaceti came from the spermaceti organ of the sperm whale, a large oil-filled sac that comprises most of the whale’s huge head. Biologists believe the spermaceti is an acoustical lens for amplifying sperm whale sounds, the loudest of any animal. The powerful sound may be used to hunt and stun giant squid, cuttlefish, and other prey. One spermaceti organ can contain as much as 1890 liters (500 gallons) of sperm oil, which, even today, is considered one of the finest lubricants. Spermaceti, a waxy substance obtained from the oil, was used until the end of the 19th century in fine candles and for waterproofing clothing.

  Sperm whales also provided ambergris, a wax-like substance obtained from their intestines—often encasing the indigestible beaks of the giant squid that are a key part of their diet. Ambergris was used in the finest perfumes to enhance the fragrance’s longevity. Due to its rarity, ambergris was, and still is, an extremely valuable substance.

  In 1625, a Dutch businessman met with a Basque whaling captain and then built Smeerenburg, or Blubber Town, on the arctic island of Spitzbergen, north of Norway. The whaling facility included a dock where whales could be hauled out whole and dropped into a massive cooker for rendering the blubber into valuable oil. Between 1675 and 1720, whaling records show Smeerenburg whalers killed more than 30,000 bowhead whales.

  By the 1840s, more than 700 whaling ships with nearly 25,000 crewmen were plying the world’s oceans in search of ever more elusive whales—cramming their hulls full of oil, ambergris, and baleen to feed the ever increasing demand for these substances.

  Whaling became even more lethally efficient when fast steamships were combined with the harpoon gun and exploding harpoon tip in 1868. These inventions not only allowed the whalers to keep up with faster whale species, but also allowed them to kill the animals from a safe distance and ensured a quicker kill. No more dangerous “Nantucket sleigh rides” in small, rowed whaleboats towed at frightening speeds by harpooned, wounded whales.

  By the late 1800s, whalers had severely depleted the world’s oceans of many species of whales. Several, including the California gray whale, had been hunted to the brink of extinction.

  Fortunately for the whales, Thomas Edison’s lightbulb and petroleum oils were developed around this time. This dramatically cut the price for whale oil and sent many whalers in search of more lucrative professions. These inventions deserve some credit for saving whales from certain extinction at the turn of the century.

  Early in the 20th century when the whaling industry seemed to be on its last legs, explorers in the Southern Ocean discovered new and vast whale herds off the coast of Antarctica. It was the answer to the whaling industry’s woes. These were mostly baleen whales—blues and their smaller cousins the fin, sei, and minke. Baleen whales sink when killed, so techniques were developed to pump their bellies full of air after they were harpooned so that they would stay afloat. Large factory ships were built to process the whales at sea. Not only were the whalers after oil and baleen, they now sought the meat as well, which for the first time could be preserved in refrigerated storage compartments. Another technology that helped create the Southern whaling explosion was the ability to chemically hydrogenate whale oil to make margarine and soaps.

  The magnificent blue whales were the first to be wiped out by the new whaling fleets. Blue whales can grow to more than 30 meters (100 feet) in length and 136 tonnes (150 tons) in weight. Blue whales are the largest animals in the history of life on earth. They comprised about 90 percent of the whale industry’s catch in the first few decades of the Southern whaling industry. By the 1930s, some 30,000 blues had been killed in the Southern Ocean and the largest animal that has ever existed was on the brink of extinction.

  Next the whalers went after the fin whales. Fin whales can reach up to 27 meters (85 feet) in length and weigh 45 to 64 tonnes (50 to 70 tons) and are sometimes called the “greyhound of the sea” because they swim so fast. After depleting fin whale numbers, the whalers then pursued smaller species, the
sei, Bryde’s, and eventually the minke. At 7.5 to 9 meters (25 to 30 feet) in length, the latter is the smallest of the baleen whales.

  By the 1940s, all of these whale populations had been drastically reduced, just as their northern cousins had. Fortunately, no whale species was hunted to extinction. But many species were on the brink by then, some with only a few hundred individuals remaining.

  In 1946 the International Whaling Commission was formed to create a mechanism for the whaling nations to divide up what was left of the dwindling populations. Its members agreed to stop hunting some species and set quotas for the others. But the quotas were always higher than the populations could withstand. By the 1960s, the right, blue, humpback, fin, sei, minke, and sperm whale populations had all been slashed to a tiny fraction of their former size. Some regional populations had been completely wiped out.

  Somebody needed to put an end to this senseless slaughter. The world community had to be jolted into action before a whale species actually did go extinct. We arrived a bit late on the scene, but we knew it was better late than never. Paul Spong had come to us because we were the only environmental group that had launched a marine expedition and he saw the possibility of going deep-sea against the whalers. Most environmental groups were good at marching in the city with placards and standing in the mall with a petition. Greenpeace could go where the action was and bring the same attention to the whale slaughter as we had to nuclear testing.

  A Save the Whales campaign seemed like a brilliant idea, especially since whales were such huge symbolic creatures in their own right. Through magazines, movies, and television, the public was gaining an appreciation for the complexity of whale behavior, social life, and intelligence. Whales were cool. The television show Flipper aired on Sunday nights during primetime from 1964 to 1968 and was incredibly popular. The “songs” of the humpback whale were identified in the 1960s and recordings were sold to the public in 1970.[1]

  The hard-core antinuke peaceniks in our group were aghast at the idea of a Save the Whales campaign. What kind of hippy-dippy sentimentalists put whales—big lumps of floating blubber—ahead of the threat of nuclear holocaust? They thought we had gone completely soft, not realizing the whales would become a symbol for the salvation of life itself. Many of us thought if we couldn’t save the whales, the largest creatures ever to live on our planet, then what could we save? In the process we lost a few of the antinuke campaigners but we gained an army of supporters for the cause of the whales.

  I thought it was a great way to diversify and get beyond a one-issue organization and it added a positive note. There is limited appeal to a campaign focused on mass nuclear death and destruction. The whales were a symbol of life, and the promise of saving them offered a message of hope. I felt inspired by this positive energy and signed on with enthusiasm.

  Paul Spong was the inspiration, but Bob Hunter became the leader and driving force that pushed the Greenpeace whale campaign into reality. It is very likely Greenpeace would have come to an end as an organization if Bob hadn’t taken up this cause. He quit his job at the Vancouver Sun, found office space in the counterculture district of the city, and began to organize. It is not possible in a short account to explain the magic and power Bob brought to this exercise. In all the history of the environmental movement, the Greenpeace voyages to Save the Whales were undoubtedly among the most significant in terms of changing global thinking about the natural world and our relationship with it. Bob’s ability with words and his sheer energy and determination helped to launch a new world order of mass consciousness, using what we came to describe as “media mind bombs.”

  In fact it was Bob who invented the term mind bomb, then used routinely in the press and eventually reduced to the single word mindbomb. It refers to a video, a photo or a word picture, combined with interesting information, automatically spreading through the electronic media like wildfire. Today this phenomenon is called “going viral.” It occurs regularly as a major breaking news story, but it isn’t easy to manufacture a mind bomb to make a point about ecology. Bob was a genius at it; he knew how to craft his words to fit the image so that the media found it irresistible. Bob thought of the media as a giant machine screaming repeatedly, “Feed me, feed me.” His own mantra in response was, “Eat me, eat me,” and he provided fodder.

  The first local environmental group in Vancouver was SPEC (Society Promoting Environmental Conservation). Founded by nature lovers Gwen and Derrick Mallard, it gained public support and soon was able to hire a full-time executive director. Gary Gallon was pretty much a thinking person’s hippy like Bob and Paul and I, so we got along famously. Gary offered us office space in his building to organize our voyage to save the whales. He taught us a lot about being organized in a business sense. Gary was the first environmentalist I knew who took off his tie-dyed shirt, put on a jacket and tie, and went downtown to knock on CEOs doors to preach ecology. For this I dubbed him the first “ecocrat.”

  The Phyllis Cormack and the Vega in Winter Harbour, May 1975, ready for action against the Russian and Japanese whaling fleets. One month later our voyage would be broadcast around the world. Photo: Patrick Moore

  While Bob was putting the campaign together, hiring captain John Cormack again and raising funds, Paul Spong traveled to Oslo, Norway, the headquarters for the International Whaling Commission. Posing as a whale scientist (not a bad disguise as that’s what he was), he gained access to the records of the Soviet and Japanese whaling fleet’s movements over the years. At this time, in the mid-1970s, they were the only two countries operating deep-sea factory whaling fleets. It turned out that the Japanese fleet spent nearly all its time in the Western Pacific, west of Hawaii, but the Soviet fleet regularly operated off the coast of California in June. Amazingly the American public remained completely unaware that Russian harpoon boats were killing endangered whales just over the horizon off the California coast. This was before the 200-mile limit was established under the UN Law of the Sea treaty, so it was technically legal for other countries to fish and hunt whales up to 12 miles off the coast. There was no way the Phyllis Cormack, an 85-foot halibut boat, could really go deep-sea; but there was a chance we could intercept the Soviet fleet 30 to 100 miles off the coast of California. Talk about tilting at windmills—a tiny fishing boat up against the might of the Soviet empire in the biggest ocean on Earth. How were we going to do it? We were going to place ourselves in front of the harpoon boats to protect the fleeing whales as they were chased at 15 knots in rough seas.

  Eileen and I were still living and working in Winter Harbour when the campaign was first being organized, and I suggested to Bob Hunter that our coastal village would make a good base to train the crew in preparation for the confrontation with the whalers. He agreed.

  On April 27, 1975, the Phyllis Cormack, with the Kwakiutl Sisiutl symbol painted brightly on its single sail, departed Vancouver amid much fanfare with the promise to save the whales. The expedition arrived in Winter Harbour on April 29 and over the next six weeks we hosted the crew. We were joined by the 26-foot sloop Vega, formerly owned by David McTaggart and recently acquired by Greenpeace supporter Jacques Longini. I was assigned the task of training the mostly inexperienced crew members in seamanship and small craft operation.

  Paul Spong was correct in observing that we were the only environmental group that knew how to put together an ocean expedition. But on the first voyages to Alaska and Mururoa we had remained on the “mother ship” as our main boat came to be called. This time we intended to put people into small rubber inflatable boats, known as Zodiacs after the popular French brand. This would require launching three Zodiacs from the deck of the Phyllis Cormack in rough seas and then maneuvering them in front of a harpoon boat while it was pursuing whales. One Zodiac would carry the cannon fodder, an operator and passenger, who would try to get in between the harpooner and the whales to shield them. The passengers in the other two Zodiacs would be a still photographer and a movie cameraman. The logistics of d
oing this would be difficult enough on a millpond; trying it in typical ocean conditions off Cape Mendocino could be suicidal.

  It turned out that Bob Hunter got the idea of using Zodiacs from the photos Anne-Marie Horne shot while the Vega was being boarded at Mururoa atoll during the anti-French nuclear testing campaign. It was the French commandos who knew how to run Zodiacs, not us, but we could learn.

  Bob asked me to join the crew as first mate, so in April I left my job in my dad’s logging camp and after six weeks of training we headed for our rendez-vous with the whalers. It is not easy to find a whaling fleet in the Pacific Ocean. We knew where the whalers had been in early June for the past 10 years, but even that was an area of about 250,000 square miles.

  Our best bet was to listen for Russian voices on our marine short-wave radio and then use a direction finder to determine their position. After a couple of false alarms, we picked up the crackle of Russian voices and sailed toward the signal. Early on June 27, I was the first one to spot a Russian harpoon ship on the horizon. Then the huge factory ship and seven more harpoon boats came into view. As we steamed toward them, the first thing we came across was a dead sperm whale that had been harpooned and marked with a flag, a radar reflector, and a beacon so that it could be rounded up later. We had come across the Soviet fleet during the thick of a hunt.

  The dead whale was small, a baby well under the size limit set by the International Whaling Commission. We launched a Zodiac and Paul Watson got on the back of the whale so we could document its size in comparison to his. We then began to move closer to the whaling fleet.

  The eight harpoon boats were operating like a wolf pack, using their sonar to track the whales underwater after they sounded. When the whales surfaced, the boats were right on top of them. At first the whales just sounded again quickly before the gunners could take aim. But they couldn’t catch their breath, so after a few dives they had to stay on the surface to breathe. Then they would end up fleeing as fast as they could on the surface, eventually tiring and being gunned down one at a time. A favorite trick of the whalers was first to kill the dominant male, causing the females in the harem to come to his rescue as he thrashed about bleeding to death. Then the whalers would circle around and systematically kill the entire pod.