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

by Patrick Moore

  Whereas previously the whalers had adopted a policy of calling off the hunt when we interfered, now they were using the brute force of all 10 killer-boats to overpower us. It was a gruesome scene and ironically it worked very much in our favor. When we docked in San Francisco to refuel, we released the footage of the slaughter to ABC news. It aired nationally, and among the many viewers was President Jimmy Carter. He phoned us after the airing and spoke with Bob Taunt, the most politically connected member of our group. In the news clip I was interviewed about our encounter with the whalers, and I mentioned they were killing whales that were clearly under the size limit set by the International Whaling Commission. President Carter asked Bob if we could supply evidence of this to him so that he could instruct the U.S. delegation to the International Whaling Commission to bring it before the international body. We fulfilled his request, but the IWC never brought formal charges against Russia, even though our evidence was irrefutable.

  We had come into San Francisco to refuel, but by this point we had no money. The San Francisco office had committed all its funds to the Ohana Kai expedition and the Vancouver office was so far in debt the bank had closed its doors to us. We were desperate to get back on the whaling grounds. Rex Weyler, Mel Gregory, and Caroline Keddy were out when they saw a marquee advertising a Jerry Garcia (of the Grateful Dead) performance at a small club. They entered the club and announced to a biker bouncer that they were from Greenpeace and would like to speak to Jerry Garcia. The biker had heard of us and thought we were cool, so he escorted the boys backstage, where they explained our predicament. “We need about $10,000 for fuel and food,” explained Mel. “Will you do a benefit concert for us?” Jerry said, “Sure, as long as Tom Campbell produces it.” Rex had never heard of Tom Campbell, but he soon found out Tom was the impresario among benefit concert producers. He was a hippy like most of us and had worked with everyone from Jackson Browne to Bonnie Raitt. “When would you like to do this gig?” Tom Campbell asked Rex. “Friday,” said Rex. “Which Friday?” Tom inquired. “This Friday” (it was Monday), Rex replied. “Yah, right,” kidded Tom.

  It took a while, but eventually a plan was devised. The benefit would be held at Pier 33, where the James Bay would be the backstage. This way there was no need to book a venue in advance; all we needed was fair weather. Word would go out on the underground telegraph, radio stations, and street flyers. Tom phoned Maria Muldaur and she agreed to warm up the crowd.

  On the day of the concert, the sky was brilliantly blue and a brisk breeze starched the flags and banners flying from the James Bay’s rigging. A faithful crowd of Dead Heads and San Francisco hipsters magically appeared and Maria Muldaur opened with her signature number, “Midnight at the Oasis.” While pot smoke wafted among the assembled thousand or so the Jerry Garcia Band played for the whales while we counted the money on board our floating backstage home. Eureka! It was exactly enough to fill the fuel tanks and larder and get us back on the high seas.

  Or so we thought until certain members of the San Francisco office demanded they get half the loot because we were in their town and the Ohana Kai needed money too. For me this marked a turning point. It felt like a stickup by your own side and became the official beginning of a conflict that would last two years. Up until now I had been willing to chalk the rivalry up to instinctual competitive urges. Now I saw it as a dangerous sign of division and betrayal. We put the money in our on-board safe and told the San Francisco office to take a hike. Our lines were cast by nightfall and we slid back into the open sea with full tanks and fresh coordinates for the Russian whaling fleet.

  Unfortunately for the Ohana Kai expedition, which did eventually leave the dock in Honolulu, our footage of the whale slaughter overshadowed their two encounters with the other Soviet factory whaling fleet north of Hawaii. At the time I could only think it was just deserts for having deserted the home team in the first place. It was all coming into focus, there was mutiny in the ranks. But we had so much campaigning to do that the problem kept slipping through the cracks. As it turned out, our initial campaign encounter on the James Bay and the buzz it created would be the highlight of the 1977 whale voyage.

  While the two whale-saving voyages were under way in the North Pacific, Bob and Bobbi Hunter set out for new frontiers—the last whaling station in Australia at Albany in Western Australia. By this time, Australia was a somewhat reluctant whale killer, but economics and inertia had kept the practice going. Bob and Bobbi landed in Sydney, where they were met by a typically idealistic yet technologically inept band of volunteer whale-worshipers. They had been promised everything for the expedition would be organized but nothing had been. In an epic journey, they crossed the 2000-mile expanse of the Nulabar Desert in completely worn-out vehicles that broke down at least once a day. Upon their arrival in Albany, the group expected Bob to know how to assemble a Zodiac from scratch; after all he was a leader of the greatest whale-savers on Earth. Actually Bob was about the most technically incompetent member of our eco-navy; instead words were his bag. But as was usual, perseverance furthered the cause, and the Zodiacs were eventually launched from the beach into the Southern Ocean. Unfortunately, the Southern Ocean is the roughest body of water in the world, with normal seas running 20 feet or more—not the place for a 14-foot Zodiac.

  The whaling operation was from a shore station, so the harpoon boats operated individually, not in a pack like the factory fleets. In order to confront the killer boats without a mother ship of their own, Bob and his crew had to follow them up to 40 miles from shore and then try to interfere with them. While tactical success was limited by weather and logistics, the campaign made big news across the country and support poured in. The following year, after a Royal Commission was struck, Australia decided to get out of whaling for good and took its vote against killing whales to the International Whaling Commission.

  With all of us home from the wars we spent the fall preparing for the seal campaign, scheduled for early 1978. I hoped we could bring the various offices together by including everyone in the expedition. By this time Bob Taunt had become my strongest ally in the U.S. Greenpeace universe. He did not share the insurgent mentality of many of his colleagues, due in large measure to his good breeding and allegiance to moral principles. Finally having wrested control of the seal campaign from Paul Watson, Bob and I worked tirelessly to put on the best expedition to date. It would be a multipronged effort.

  The head of our Los Angeles office, Phil Caston, was acquainted with animal rights activist Tippi Hedren, who was famous for her starring role in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 thriller The Birds and who is nowadays known as the mother of Melanie Griffith. Tippi asked her friend Pamela Sue Martin to join our expedition, which she agreed to do. (Pamela Sue was acclaimed for her role in the TV series Nancy Drew.) In addition, Monique van der Ven, an up-and-coming Dutch actress, agreed to join to provide popular appeal in Europe.

  Meanwhile Bob Taunt worked with Leo Ryan to put a motion before the House of Representatives to condemn the Canadian seal hunt. It passed by a wide margin, embarrassing the Canadian government into officially “regretting” that the U.S. was meddling in its sovereign affairs. Congressman Leo Ryan, a Democrat, and Congressman Jim Jeffords, a Republican, agreed to accompany us to Newfoundland to make a bipartisan statement condemning the hunt on behalf of the American people.

  In addition we assembled a Greenpeace crew representing all the offices in North America and once again vowed to interfere with the slaughter. This year we would return to St. Anthony and again use Decker’s boarding house as our base. Helicopters were hired and the expedition to save the seals was under way for the third consecutive year.

  The actresses and politicians piqued the media’s interest as they flooded into St. Anthony for the Greenpeace extravaganza. By this time the Canadian government had made it impossible for anyone to go near the seal hunt without a permit. Peter Ballem led the negotiations for the permits, promising we would not interfere with the seal hunt while
we were on the ice with our dignitaries. Peter, Bob Taunt, and I, with camera and film crews, accompanied Pamela Sue, Monique, Leo, and Jim to the ice floes, where they were able to witness the scenes of carnage with their own eyes.

  During our tour of the hunt, a series of events occurred that could make a grown man cry. We came across a seal hunter who had clubbed a seal pup that was with its mother. The mother seal lunged to attack him, so he beat her over the head with his hakapik and then drove the sharp end of the hakapik into the pup’s head and proceeded to drag it away from the mother. The mother seal recovered from the blow and began a desperate full-speed seal waddle across the ice after her pup. The hunter, who could easily outrun the mother seal, stopped and with an experienced hand tore the skin off the pup in 30 seconds and threw it in a growing pile of furs. When the mother seal caught up, she approached her skinned baby and sniffed it before snuggling up to the carcass as if to protect it. I swear that she had tears in her eyes as she mourned the loss of her child. As we left the scene, the mother was still huddled over the remains. The film footage we shot of this event was so powerful that forces in favor of the seal hunt made a concerted effort to claim that it was staged. Years later, Greenpeace took one propagandist, Icelander Magnus Gudmundsson, to court to obtain an injunction against his continued claim that the footage was staged. This was long after I had left Greenpeace, but I was pleased to testify before a judge in Oslo, Norway, that I had witnessed the slaughter myself and that there was nothing staged about it.

  Returning to a packed media conference at Decker’s, Leo Ryan summed up the feelings of the group when he said, “Just stop this.” It was an emotional day and an even more emotional media conference. The footage obtained that day, including that of the mother and her skinned pup, was carried on news broadcasts around the world. The Canadian authorities were reduced to a damage control operation that didn’t work very well. We had taken the campaign global and the world was on our side.

  With this phase of the campaign over, our four guests departed, leaving us with the job of trying to engineer a confrontation with the sealers on the ice floes. The Canadian government seemed determined to keep us away from the hunt, having had enough bad press for one year. The federal Fisheries and Oceans department had set up a temporary office in a nearby motel room to “manage” the seal hunt, so Peter Ballem and I, accompanied by our photographer Rex Weyler, went there for a visit. We simply intended to inquire about the procedure for obtaining another permit to visit the seal hunt.

  As we walked in the door of the “office,”, the small staff immediately left the room. We decided to wait for them to return. A few minutes later a Fisheries officer came back with a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in tow, who promptly arrested us for loitering. This scenario was like something straight out of Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant.” We had difficulty keeping a straight face as we were hauled in for questioning. By the time we were released, the media had thronged the police station and we made the international news once again. It’s amazing how the authorities often play right into your hands. These guys could use a course in issues management!

  Now the authorities really didn’t know what to do with us. Peter Ballem pulled out all the stops, contacting the Prime Minister’s Office in Ottawa, stating that we had a constitutional right to go out to the ice and that the permits should be issued. We were shocked when we learned that the PMO had issued instructions to the Fisheries officers give us the permits. We had to make a verbal statement that we wouldn’t interfere with the seal hunt, but we crossed our fingers behind our backs. Why did they think we wanted to go out there?

  Eileen kissed me goodbye for the cameras as we boarded the helicopters and made our way to Cartwright, Labrador, on March 17. The ice and the seals had drifted northward, so we could not reach the seal hunt in a single flight. Fortunately our pilots had access to a fuel cache up the coast of Labrador (Newfoundlanders call it “down the Labrador” even though it is north). The weather forecast called for blizzard conditions the next morning as the crew settled in for the evening in Cartwright. A small miracle brought a bright blue sky the next morning and we took off in the subzero cold of a north Canadian winter. The seal herd was about 50 miles offshore and we landed before noon on the ice floes in the midst of the hunt. We had not told our lawyer, Peter Ballem, what we intended to do, but our mission that day had a single purpose: I had decided to make a statement by sitting on a baby seal and demanding this one seal be spared the hunter’s club.

  When we landed, we spent some time getting footage and photos of the seal killing and the environment in which this was taking place. Then I spotted a baby seal that lay off to the side of the action and went over to it, sat on its back, and grabbed hold of its flippers in order to prevent it from escaping. I had no idea how strong these little creatures were, and this one wasn’t so little either. It was all I could do to hang on to this “tough little bugger, ” as I later described the pup. It wasn’t long before the Fisheries officers and their RCMP buddies noticed I was astride the pup. They made their way over and gathered around me, along with our film and photo crew, Peter Ballem, Bob Taunt, and a couple of sealers, who were leaning on their hakapiks.

  I clung to the seal pup for dear life and announced to the assembled group that I wanted the sealers to spare this one pup, just this one. The sealers could go and find any number of other seals to club, but I was protecting this pup. Surely it was reasonable to spare one pup’s life. Of course, the authorities didn’t see things that way and, in fact, realized their jobs would be on the line if they allowed me to save even one seal’s life, so they told me I must get off the seal or be arrested. The Fisheries officer asked the sealers if they wanted to kill this seal. “Aye bye,” one replied. We went back and forth a few times with the camera rolling and Rex snapping shots until the ultimatum was given. Now I am not one to go limp and be forcibly dragged away upon being arrested for civil disobedience. I believe the moment the long arm of the law tells you that you are under arrest you should go peaceably and not resist. That’s what the civil in civil disobedience means.

  So I was arrested and taken off the seal and had to watch while the two sealers who had been pressed into service by the authorities bashed its head in and skinned it. It’s not as if I hadn’t witnessed this procedure before. When I arrived in the Cartwright jail, they took my belt and shoelaces so I couldn’t hang myself in the prison cell. I guess this was standard procedure, but it did seem a bit funny at the time. Thankfully Peter was able to get me out of there before nightfall, and we were all back together in St. Anthony that evening. We had succeeded in getting our confrontation and it was once again broadcast around the world.

  In some ways this “seal-sitting” episode was both the most disappointing and the most rewarding campaign action I was ever involved in. It was disappointing because the color film footage, with sound, shot by Steve Bowerman while I was arrested on the seal while pleading for its life, never saw the light of day. We will never know if Steve made a technical error or if sabotage was involved. All we know is that when the film footage arrived at the CBC’s Montreal studio for processing it was exposed and useless. Steve had either exposed it by mistake (perhaps he had not closed the camera magazine properly) or someone had purposely exposed the film so that it would never be seen. To this day I suspect the latter, as we all did at the time.

  The best news was that Rex’s black and white still photos had survived. When he sent them over the wire service, the photo of me sitting on the seal was published the next morning in more than 3000 newspapers around the world. This was the widest distribution of any Greenpeace still image in the history of the organization until then. So the seal-sit was a great success, even though we didn’t get the ultimate media hit on TV. You win some, you lose some.

  In an extraordinarily petty move the Canadian attorney general filed a charge against our lawyer, Peter Ballem, for “aiding and abetting” my seal-sitting crime. This w
as probably because Peter had managed to get us our permit and here we had embarrassed the government once more. This meant that Peter could not defend me in court, so we needed yet another lawyer to defend both of us. Longtime Greenpeace supporter David Gibbons, who was one of the most prominent criminal lawyers in Canada, stepped up to the plate. (Gibbons died in 2004.)

  As if we hadn’t garnered enough attention from the media during the seal hunt itself, we were now faced with a trial in Newfoundland for loitering in a temporary Fisheries office and for sitting on a baby seal without permission from the minister of Fisheries and Oceans. We arrived in Corner Brook, Newfoundland, in early June 1978 to face the charges. Anyone could see this was a trumped-up situation, but the government was serious, so we had to respond in a similar fashion even if it was laughable. With lay Judge Gordon Seabright presiding the proceedings began with the charges against Rex and me for loitering in the temporary Fisheries office. The highlight of the trial came during David Gibbons’s closing remarks, when he opined in high court fashion, “Your Honor, Judge Seabright, I must inform you that if my clients are convicted in this matter, it will no doubt go down in the annals of jurisprudence as the shortest loiter in history.” We calculated that the loiter had lasted for about seven minutes. “Not guilty,” came the verdict. Now we were to move on to the more serious charge: sitting on a baby seal without permission from the minister of Fisheries and Oceans. Oh yes, and the charge that my lawyer had aided and abetted me in this heinous crime, all under the so-called Seal Protection Regulations.

  But before we could move on the lawyer acting for the Crown interjected with a complaint. Apparently David Gibbons was not called before the bar in Newfoundland. Without an invitation from the provincial law society, Gibbons could not defend me in a Newfoundland court and we would have to retain another lawyer who was called to the bar. Now my first lawyer had been charged with helping me commit my crime, my second lawyer was disallowed from representing me, so to appear before the judge on our behalf we hired a third lawyer who new nothing of the case.