It was not good that we were stranded, with no radio contact, in an intensifying blizzard. Moreover our helicopters were flimsy with limited fuel for flying and an insufficient amount to keep us warm in the subzero Newfoundland winter. But then again, I was stranded with Brigitte Bardot, the most beautiful French actress, an intellectual, whom the philosopher Sartre had used as a model for a character in one of his novels. Another consolation was the large provision of food we had on board to resupply the camp. And if things got really desperate we had a good stock of rum and whiskey meant for the camp as well. I mean, if we couldn’t find the camp in a whiteout it was okay for us to survive on their rations, right? I’m forever thankful that after about an hour the storm lifted long enough for us to get the choppers in the air and find the camp.
The mood at the camp was mainly jubilant, at least on the surface. Most crew members seemed pleased to meet a superstar and there were lots of photos taken and some group discussion about the environment and animal welfare and the seals. However, beneath the veneer of smiles this encounter brought out a deep division in the personal philosophies of the Greenpeace crew. Some of our number thought it belittled the high cause of Greenpeace to associate with an actress who was primarily known for her love of cats, dogs, and horses. Other members, myself included, realized that we could benefit by linking with Brigitte, thus making a more powerful statement for the seals than either one of us could alone. There was no doubting her sincerity, and it didn’t matter that we Greenpeacers didn’t belong to the upper-class European elite as Brigitte did.
We soon realized that we weren’t going any farther out to the sealing grounds on this day. There were blizzard conditions all around and it was another miracle that we were able to return to Blanc Sablon and the relative comfort of our motel rooms, where most of us were sleeping on the floor. But sleep could come later, we had another big dinner planned and the prospect of succeeding tomorrow. Just before dinner I was informed that Paul Watson had declared his legal right to control the helicopters, as he had signed the rental contract. Some members of the expedition had impressed on him their disapproval of Brigitte, as she was not “serious” like we were. I asked Paul to reconsider, but he was determined to assert his authority. I joined the Greenpeace/Bardot dinner with bad news. When I told Henri I could not provide any helicopters, the next day he retorted, “You will never see Brigitte again.” I felt crushed, of course, and very disappointed that we couldn’t work together any longer.
The next morning a privately owned Bell Jet Ranger helicopter took off at dawn from Blanc Sablon with Brigitte and her crew on board. Henri had worked late into the night to find an alternative now that we had cancelled. They reached the ice, where the seal pups lay about like big white Easter eggs and Brigitte held a baby seal in her arms. The photo appeared on the front cover of Paris Match and the accompanying article mentioned her visit to the Greenpeace camp on Belle Isle. I felt vindicated but still wished we had delivered her to the seals ourselves.
The expedition now wound to an end with some bitterness on my part. Paul Watson had behaved like a spoiled child and really undermined our effectiveness. I documented every detail about Paul’s misbehavior and wrote to Bob Hunter about my concerns. I was actually a bit surprised on my return to Vancouver that most of the board members agreed with me. They could see Watson was too much of a rogue elephant for a group that prided itself on being a democratic collective.
Immediately after the seal campaign I set out for Europe with two reels of 16-millimeter film footage of the seal hunt. In those days the best way to get footage aired on TV was to deliver it to the studio, where they made a duplicate of it for their archives. They didn’t have live satellite feeds in the old days! I traveled to Rome, where Eileen was staying with her sister. Upon landing in Rome about 20 of us were missing our luggage. We insisted that the airline’s baggage handlers go back to the plane again and look for it. They claimed they had done so. Unfortunately all our luggage went on to Bangkok and I had to wear my brother-in-law’s clothes for the next five days until my bags miraculously returned. They also contained the two reels of film without which my trip to Europe would have been a disaster.
Once my suitcase and film had been returned, Eileen and I set off to deliver the footage to TV stations in Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and France. When we arrived in Paris we were nearly broke, so we were thankful when Brice LaLonde, the founder and head of Les Amis de la Terre (Friends of the Earth), put us up in his large apartment in Montparnasse. I had made friends with the young photographer who was with Brigitte Bardot’s group in Blanc Sablon, so we looked him up and met for lunch. He offered to give our regards to Brigitte, who issued an invitation to Eileen and me to have dinner at her Paris apartment that same day. Brigitte’s sister and brother-in-law joined us for a delicious vegetarian meal. That evening we discussed all manner of environmental and political subjects. Henri had been wrong: I did see Brigitte again!
[1]. Commensural–a relationship between two species where one species benefits and the other species suffers no harm. Compare to parasitical where one species benefits and the other species is harmed or to symbiotic where both species benefit.
Chapter 7 -
Taking the Reins
By April of 1977, it had become clear that Bob Hunter needed a break from leading our fast-growing organization. He was tired and cranky and just plain worn out. Bob asked me if I would take over. As he wrote in his book, Warriors of the Rainbow, “There was no doubt who should succeed me: it was obviously Patrick Moore’s turn. He had been my own ecological guru for so long, it seemed inevitable to me that sooner or later he would run the organization anyway. Everybody else seemed to have a special focus, whether whales or seals or bombs or nuclear reactors. He was the lone interdisciplinarian. Whether he would be able to lead people or not would depend on himself and the flow of events hurtling about him.”[1] This last observation would prove prophetic.
As the new president of the Greenpeace Foundation, I had inherited a fractious organization. Greenpeace had now grown into a full-fledged movement with offices springing up like weeds all over North America and in Europe, and we had not really taken care of the legalities. Bob and most of the rest of us had been focused on campaigning and raising enough money to keep the bank off our back. Meanwhile little Greenpeace fiefdoms were being established in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, Boston, Montreal, and Toronto. Not all these new Greenpeacers felt an allegiance to the Vancouver organization, even though they were operating with our name and using our deeds to raise money for their little bureaucracies. The Vancouver organization was deeply in debt, in excess of $100,000, while the new offices were all debt-free and didn’t seem compelled to send us any of their money.
I had realized for some time that this was an untenable situation; we couldn’t have eight Greenpeace organizations that weren’t connected to one another legally. I would spend the next two years, in between campaigns, trying to address this issue and bring the factions together. But as they say, the horses were well out of the barn.
Of more immediate concern was the fact that Paul Watson was now in full rebellion against the “Vancouver office” as the dissidents liked to call it. As if it was just another office and not the founding center of the Greenpeace empire. Paul was going around to the other offices and openly fomenting opposition against Vancouver. This played into the hands of the new people, many of whom hardly knew us and who saw an opportunity to have their very own Greenpeace group. Even worse, Paul made regular announcements about what Greenpeace was going to do next without consulting the committee first. One morning we awoke to read in the daily press that Greenpeace would next head to Africa to save the elephants. This was news to us and we didn’t think it was funny. After all Paul was a member of board of directors. It was a clear case of insubordination.
By a vote of 11 to 1 (Paul being the 1), Paul Watson was voted off the board of the Greenpeace Foundation in May 1977. To this da
y, he tells people he quit, but believe me, Paul is not a quitter: we had to fire him. Paul soon started his own group, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, and earned a reputation for ramming and scuttling whaling ships. He fashions himself as a larger-than-life action figure who will defeat the evil overlords of industry. I admire the bravado he demonstrates in his ongoing campaign against Japanese whalers in Antarctica. He has landed a TV series called Whale Wars on Animal Planet, which highlights his high-seas confrontations with these whalers. The very successful TV series South Park based one of their most hilarious episodes, “Whale Whores,” on Paul’s adventures in Antarctica. Even though it was mercilessly critical, it must have given him a good laugh and put some wind in his sails. I say more power to him on that front.
Now there was an even bigger rebellion under way. Paul Spong and George Korotva had relocated to Hawaii, from where they announced that they would launch the 1977 whale campaign with a new ship. Because Vancouver’s Greenpeace Foundation was so deep in debt, they believed it couldn’t possibly finance a whale voyage. So they formed Greenpeace Hawaii, as if they owned the brand, and started raising money there. The San Francisco office, and other U.S. offices, pledged to support the campaign. Back at headquarters, we were becoming pretty isolated.
Spong’s and Korotva’s defections were not treasonous. The two men were just fanatical about the campaign and didn’t have time for legal niceties or bureaucracy. In those days everyone was wearing “Question Authority” buttons, and there were lots of anarchists in our midst. It was hard to question the religious fervor of the whale savers, unless you were responsible for the debt. I suppose I could have moved to another city and started a Greenpeace office myself, but that was not in my nature. I wanted to pull this bunch of renegades together into a stronger, global organization rather then allowing it to degenerate into fractious chaos.
The Hawaiian group found an ex-navy sub chaser that had operated at a speed of 26 knots when it was built 25 years earlier. It was a bucket of bolts when George found it, but it was all they could afford at $70,000, so they bought it and set about a refit. An air of machismo pervaded the whole Hawaiian effort: They would put a boat to sea that would go faster, farther and really stop the whalers in their tracks. They would show that bunch of hippies back in Vancouver how you really put an eco-navy together. There were times when they forgot this war was all about communicating ideas and images to the masses; it was not about defeating an enemy fleet in battle.
In the meantime Bob Hunter and I and the gang back in Vancouver managed to pull off a couple of successful campaigns in our own back yard. In early 1977 there was a proposal to build a supertanker terminal at Kitimat on the northern British Columbian coast to receive the oil from the Alaskan North Slope. Then the oil would travel by pipeline from Kitimat to the lower 48 states. We didn’t believe that British Columbia, with its rugged rocky coastline known as the “Graveyard of the Pacific,” should bear the risk of a massive oil spill, especially since the coastal waters are rich in sea life, including sea otters, orcas, and salmon.
The pipeline proponents had hired a cruise ship, the Princess Patricia, to carry a group of municipal politicians and media to view “the route of the supertankers” as a promotional exercise. We cobbled together a coalition of First Nations, United Church members, union leaders, and other environmentalists and planned to blockade the junket as the 300-foot cruise ship came past Hartley Bay, a First Nations village at the mouth of the inlet leading to Kitimat. We chartered the beautiful 80-foot wooden ship Meander for the voyage up the coast, where we were joined by a flotilla of smaller boats. The First Nations and church representatives had radioed to the Princess Pat, requesting that they be allowed to come aboard and read a statement that opposed the supertanker port proposal. We all expected that this fairly civilized request would be granted, but the captain didn’t answer our hails, even though he knew our radio frequency.
As the cruise ship rounded the point, we could see that it had no intention of stopping, in fact it seemed to be accelerating. The captain had decided that the best plan was to try to run the blockade. He picked a spot where there were fewer of our boats and gunned it. Suddenly all the little boats were converging on the path of the cruise ship. The faster ones managed to get in front and alongside. Horns were tooted and the protesters on board yelled anti-supertanker slogans. As news helicopters swirled around the scene, politicians stood on the cruise ship’s deck sipping cocktails. The media were frantically recording this amazing uprising around them. We succeeded in completely upstaging the pipeline promoters, and our protest ran on the local news for two days.
On board the Meander we were jubilant until we learned that the Princess Patricia had run over two Greenpeace members who were dogging the ship in a Zodiac. The Zodiacs floorboards had buckled in the cruise ship’s bow wave, and Rod Marining and Mel Gregory had been thrown out and sucked under the hull. This incident had been captured on video. We had visions of minced Greenpeacers coming out behind the propellers of the ship. But within 10 minutes, one of the Hartley Bay boats arrived with two shivering cold, slightly injured crewmen. They had been spit back out from beneath the hull before they hit the props. This was as close as we had come to losing anyone in six years of hard campaigning.
The media made the captain’s decision to run the blockade look callous and public opinion ran hard on our side. Public hearings were called and a year later it was announced that the Kitimat supertanker port was dead. We may have prevented our own version of the Exxon Valdez oil spill from happening on the B.C. coast.
Following on the heels of our supertanker campaign, the B.C. government announced that it was going to spray a 50,000-square-mile area of forest with insecticides to control an infestation of spruce budworm. I had studied forestry and pesticides and did not believe that the aerial spraying would solve the problem. I also believed it would do considerable damage to other species. We announced our intention to occupy the forest with dozens of volunteers so the government would have to risk spraying people if it went ahead. There were actually only about six of us, with a few allies among the First Nations communities in the area, but we made it seem like we had a volunteer army. Long before email was common, we made sure that we had lots of coins so that we could place calls to the media from a pay phone by the highway. We made the front page of the Vancouver Sun and the Province newspapers as a result of our plan to act as human shields to stop the spraying. Twelve hours before the spraying was to begin the premier called a special cabinet meeting and emerged to announce that the decision to spray had been rescinded. We had “saved” billions of budworms. Our opponents couldn’t accuse us of only caring about cute and cuddly animals that day! Meanwhile, our thoughts turned back to the plight of the whales.
The gang in Hawaii was taking ages to get its ship, now renamed the Ohana Kai (meaning “family of the sea” in Hawaiian), ready for its voyage. It was early June and the whaling season was beginning. Bob and I were concerned that if the Ohana Kai didn’t get off the dock there would be no campaign and we would lose the two years of momentum we had built up. We decided we had better start organizing Plan B. The James Bay was available and was already operational , except for the fact that it needed a minor refit. The owner gave us generous terms and we somehow found enough money to outfit the ship. Affording diesel fuel would be another matter. We stocked cases of Greenpeace T-shirts and whale buttons to sell at stops along the way. I assembled an excellent crew that included Captain John Cormack, who had skippered us on our first voyage to Amchitka and our first whale voyage. I was now the leader of the expedition and could choose a crew I thought would be capable and compatible, and get beyond Bob’s frantic style of running things. Bob and I were the best of friends, but we had very different ways of going about our business. Bob generated the chaos from which Nietzsche said dancing stars are born; I was much more methodical and calculating in my approach (or so I like to think).
Within three weeks the James B
ay was ready to sail. It was a good thing because the Ohana Kai was still tied to the dock when we set sail on July 17, heading straight south down the coast off California. Thirteen days later, thanks to the CIA and our friend Leo Ryan, we were in the midst of the Soviet fleet in gale force winds off Baja California. It was too rough to launch the Zodiacs and the whalers didn’t seem to be doing much, so we just shadowed them for a couple of days. There was a plan for the Ohana Kai to rendezvous with us, but even then they were still in the harbor. Thank goodness we had a Plan B!
After two days the sea calmed a bit, but it was still running a six-foot swell when we saw the harpoon boats go into action. Conditions were marginal for the Zodiacs, especially for the people standing tethered in the bow trying to capture the events on film. Eight sperm whales surfaced in front of three harpoon boats, so we launched two Zodiacs and sped toward them. Rex Weyler and Michael Bailey succeeded in blocking the first harpoon shot, which missed the intended whale. Now we saw another seven harpoon boats bearing down on the fleeing pod. With two Zodiacs and a rough sea we tried desperately to shield the whales during the next two hours as they were gunned down one after the other. The crew watched from the deck of the James Bay as blood filled the sea around us, whales screaming and writhing in agony until all was quiet. It was a tough day.
Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist Page 12