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

by Patrick Moore

  In the spring of 1981, the United States was beginning to flex its nuclear muscles under President Reagan. It sent large warships into foreign ports to pay a friendly “visit.” New Zealand had banned ships carrying nuclear weapons from entering its territorial waters. The U.S. Navy would “neither confirm nor deny” the presence of nuclear weapons, so the New Zealand edict essentially barred all U.S. warships from entering its waters. Many of us in the Greenpeace Canada group admired New Zealand’s courage and thought our country should follow their lead.

  It was announced that the USS Ranger, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, would visit Vancouver to give the crew some shore leave. It was all in the serious tone of cold war rhetoric, staunch allies prepared to confront the Soviet threat. Canadians were being called on to pay fealty to their protectors to the south, a demand many Canadians have always resented. We like to think we are independent while at the same time neglecting to invest in effective defense forces. This means that we ultimately depend on the U.S. for protection. This “have your cake and eat it” attitude is compounded by a smug assertion of superiority: we don’t pack concealed weapons, hang criminals, invade other countries, or engage in bullying trade practices. Like most European countries, Canadians enjoy universal health care while the U.S., the richest country on earth, is still deeply divided on the subject. Thankfully some progress has been made under President Barack Obama, but there are strong political forces opposed to universal health care.

  I believe this resentment of U.S. dominance, both militarily and culturally, stems partially from the “meat in the sandwich” position Canada was in throughout the cold war. The long-range strategic nuclear warheads were aimed in their thousands from both the Soviet Union and the United States across Canadian soil and airspace. Out of a feeling of helplessness springs resentment against one’s closest friend and ally.

  Leading up to the USS Ranger’s visit we noticed that local newspapers were carrying many ads from escort agencies and individual young women offering their services to the servicemen who were about to arrive. I was said to have implied that the visit had less to do with national defense and more to do with randy young sailors looking for women and pot in our liberal social environment. Did I ever hit a hot button! The wrath of God descended on me in editorials and letters to the editor about insulting our allies and impugning the motives of the navy’s finest. At least the Canadians who appreciated America’s role in defending our freedom came out of the closet. It gave me pause, pondering the great questions of war and peace, hawks and doves, randy young sailors and loose women.

  But philosophical musings would not deter us from demonstrating against the awful might of the nuclear superpowers. To give us credit, we always made it clear that we would be equally opposed to a Soviet warship carrying nuclear weapons coming to Vancouver. Any nuclear weapons-carrying ship made our otherwise peaceful shire a first-order target in the event nuclear hostilities broke out.

  The Ranger was too tall to fit under the Lions Gate Bridge at the harbor entrance, so she would have to anchor in the outer harbor. It was Fred Easton who came up with the idea that we would send in Zodiacs to get under the anchor of the carrier so that the crew couldn’t drop the anchor without sinking or perhaps injuring us. We hired the Meander, the 85-foot wooden yacht we had used in the campaign against the Kitimat pipeline, and called for a flotilla of fishing boats and pleasure craft to join us.

  The harbor was thick with boats of all description as the big carrier entered the bay. More of a picket line than a blockade, we flew banners and carried signs of an unwelcoming nature. I made the best protest picket sign of my activist career. It read simply, “Go Home Death Machine.” The lead Zodiac placed itself under the anchor as hundreds of sailors hung over the gunnels to get a look at the spectacle below. The standoff lasted for about 10 minutes until the harbor police approached in a small cutter and ordered the Greenpeacers to get out from under the huge anchor. The Zodiac held firm as the police got out their pike poles and proceeded to poke holes in the Zodiac. No one had thought of that before! The inflatable boat was deflating fast as another Zodiac came in to rescue the crew, taking the crippled craft in tow. Amid the confusion the Ranger crew saw an opening and quickly dropped their anchor. The demo was over, but the media coverage played all day and evening. I wondered briefly if maybe with this fight we were in a little over our heads.

  It all comes back to whether one believes nuclear weapons are responsible for world peace or whether they should be abolished. Many people firmly believe that dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—an act that ended the Second World War— resulted in more lives being saved from continued combat than the number that were lost in the blasts. And many believe that the deterrence resulting from “mutually assured destruction” can be credited with preventing another all-out World War. Pacifists and antiwar activists take the opposite view, of course, that nuclear weapons are evil and should be abolished as soon as possible.

  Is it possible there is some truth in both positions: that we should strive to minimize nuclear weapons and prevent further proliferation, while maintaining enough of them to deter anyone from striking first? As globalization rapidly turns civilization into a single intertwined system, it is hard to predict in which direction this debate will take us. It is especially difficult, however, to imagine that all the countries in possession of nuclear weapons will ever give them up voluntarily. Hopefully, the institutions that are in place to prevent further nuclear proliferation will eventually succeed. And one hopes it will not require another hostile use of nuclear weapons such as Hiroshima and Nagasaki to place this issue at the very top of the global agenda. Recent agreements between the U.S. and Russia on nuclear weapons reduction and the disposal of nuclear materials indicate we are on the right path.

  In the summer of 1981, we established Greenpeace Germany in Hamburg. This was a calculated move as David McTaggart realized the future of the green movement lay in the German-speaking countries: Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. For whatever reason they were more swayed than other cultures toward a romantic view of nature and the radical approach to campaigning. It wasn’t long before Greenpeace Germany became the most powerful influence in the organization, largely due to its ability to raise funds from a wealthy and sympathetic public.

  August 1981 saw our expedition against trophy hunting back in Spatsizi Park for the third year. This time I stayed behind to do the media coordination while a crew of eight experienced Greenpeacers made another attempt to foil the hunters. They followed a hunting party deep into the mountains for three days: the hunters on horseback and the Greenpeace party on foot. On the fourth day, as the hunters were stalking a trophy mountain goat, a helicopter swooped down and landed by the Greenpeace camp. The head of the guide-outfitting company, Reg Collingwood, and three of his employees emerged from the machine. As we had remained on polite, though cool, terms throughout the three years of the campaign, a couple of our crew approached to welcome them. They were met with fists and flying belt buckles as the four men began to ransack the camp, beating anyone who got in their way, including Judy Drake. The little vigilante goon squad proceeded to pile the Greenpeacers’ tents, cameras, and camping equipment into a heap and then lit them on fire, all the while breaking noses and bruising the peaceful protesters who did not fight back.

  Satisfied that they had put a big crimp in our plans, the attackers took off in their chopper, leaving the Greenpeacers 30 miles from the nearest shelter in the high mountains. They walked out in a forced march and made it to the cabins at Cold Fish Lake before dark. Some months later a sympathetic northern judge gave the guide-outfitters a suspended sentence after which the Collingwoods filed a lawsuit against Greenpeace for interfering with their hunting business. Our lawyers advised us that we would probably lose. We offered the Collingwoods $20,000 and they accepted. Case closed. Campaign lost—for now anyway.

  In the mid-1990s, the B.C. government finally put an end to trophy hunting i
n Spatsizi. So it only took fifteen years to make our point. Today the issue of trophy hunting, especially for grizzly bears and polar bears, remains very controversial. I hope someday trophy hunting in the wild will end, but it is not easy to devise a solution for problem bears. When they start breaking into homes and killing pets, people take the law into their own hands. It’s fine to say from a distance that the bears have rights, too, but when you live among them it’s not that simple. The issue of managing wildlife and human/wildlife interaction is a philosophical minefield in which mutually agreeable positions are very hard to find.

  February of 1982 saw Eileen and me travel with three-year old Jonathan to Australia to make a film about uranium mining and to generate public awareness of both uranium mining and nuclear energy. We were opening up a new front: Greenpeace had been publicly opposed to nuclear energy for many years, but we had never taken on uranium mining, the primary ingredient in nuclear fuel.

  Australia has about one-third of the world’s known uranium deposits and because it has chosen not to build any nuclear power plants domestically, Australia provides the uranium for a considerable proportion of the world’s 436 nuclear power plants. In addition, one of the largest uranium mines, the Ranger Mine, is situated in the middle of the Kakadu National Park in sacred aboriginal territory in Northern Australia near Darwin. These facts created a story we wanted to capture on film, so I planned a journey through the uranium mining regions with director Michael Chechik and cameraman Ron Precious, both of whom had worked on a number of Greenpeace campaigns.

  When we arrived in Darwin, we learned that the Ranger Mine was securely fenced off and the owners weren’t fond of strangers. Trudging through crocodile-infested swamps in the heat, we circled around to the back of the mine and managed to get through the fence, where we could film the big mine-trucks hauling ore and waste rock. Later we interviewed aboriginal leaders, who showed us where mine tailings had been simply dumped onto the land, leaving it a lifeless wasteland. Then we flew over the vast expanse of the Kakadu wilderness and filmed the contrast between the natural beauty of the park and the scar created by the mine. The footage we shot in Kakadu and other sites in Australia was later combined with footage from Saskatchewan in Canada, another major uranium supplier, to create a film titled Keep It in the Ground. Little did I know that years later I would regret this one campaign and that I would openly support nuclear energy as part of the solution to environmental damage and sustainable energy.

  Chapter 10 -

  Consensus and Sustainable Development Discovered

  Taking a rare opportunity for some down time, Eileen and I stopped over in Fiji on the way back from Australia to Vancouver. We were captivated by the gentle and caring nature of the Fijians, who fawned over our blond-haired three-year-old Jonathan like he was their own. After a few days snorkeling on the Coral Coast, a fairly touristy area, we made our way to the capital, Suva. Here we arranged to travel by boat to the island of Ovalau, where we had booked accommodation in a remote camp. Arriving by bus at a tiny port, we were crowded onto an ancient wooden craft, which was about 50 feet long. People were hanging off the rigging as if this was a normal thing to do. Children were running loose among the various species of livestock and great bundles of food and clothing. “See any life jackets?” Eileen asked a little nervously. “Nope, but the tickets were cheap,” I half-joked to lighten things up a little. After all we were well away from the dock and Ovalau already loomed in the distance.

  Thankfully the sea was reasonably calm and we arrived off the coast of the island without incident. “Where’s the dock?” I asked the nearest crewman. “No dock here,” he replied just as the boat’s whistle sounded. We came to a stop and could see people scurrying into a small outboard-powered skiff on the shore. The beach was lined with palms, but there didn’t appear to be any sand. We were greeted by a skinny young Fijian boy and offloaded into the tiny skiff with all our gear—still no life jackets—and ferried to shore.

  It wasn’t exactly a vacation resort. We appeared to be the only paying customers in what we soon found out was a kava plantation with a couple of shacks they rented out to unsuspecting tourists. It was nearly dusk as we settled into a one-room flophouse, bare lightbulb and all. Then the mosquitoes arrived, by the hundreds, overwhelming the one mosquito coil we had been issued. During an almost sleepless night, we plotted our escape from this hellhole, having no clue how to get out.

  In the morning we learned a truck was leaving for Levuka, the only town on the island. Levuka was the original capital of Fiji under British rule during the days of sailing ships. We rode in the back of a pickup loaded with kava roots while our expatriate Kiwi host navigated the ruts and turns of an impossible road. Breaking over a rise, we saw the idyllic green face of the mountain slope rising from the sea above one of the sleepiest little villages on Earth. There were only two places to stay in town, so we chose the nicest one, the Mavinda Guest House. It was right on the rocky beach, where plumaria trees in bloom filled the air with perfume. Our big mama of a Fijian hostess told us the rent was five dollars a day; she realized that was a lot, but it included a full breakfast and a mosquito net over the bed. The most delicious papaya, known as pawpaw in Fiji, accompanied the full breakfast of bacon and eggs. We would have paid five dollars a day for the breakfast alone.

  During my daily walk to the old Ovalau Club—the only place where you could buy a few beers, and at the time still off-limits to the fairer sex—I noticed an oval-shaped thatch hut in the center of the village. Every afternoon at around three, about 15 elderly gentlemen would shuffle into the hut and sit in a circle on the dirt floor. The walls were somewhat transparent, so you could see the men talking in turn as they discussed village affairs. They were the Council of Elders and their job was to try to reach consensus, through dialogue, on the pressing issues of the day. I was struck by the softly spoken, polite manner of their dialogue; no one spoke over top of someone else. In fact each speaker always paused in respect to the previous speaker. Aside from the anachronistic fact that they were all old men (at least they weren’t all old white men!) their round-table, consensus-based approach impressed me. Little did I know at the time that in a few short years I would help bring this approach to modern-day environmental issues.

  While the elders were meeting the thunk-thunk sound of a young man beating kava roots filled the air. The root of the kava plant is difficult to chew, so it is chopped into pieces and placed into a length of steel pipe capped with a heavy screen on the bottom. A steel rod is then used to pound the kava. This process releases the juice of the roots into a bowl below the pipe. When the elders emerge from their deliberations, the kava is ready for them, and they switch to cocktail hour with the other villagers, all still sitting in a circle. Kava contains kavalactones that have a narcotic effect, giving the body a warm feeling and stimulating thought. Judging by the effect the kava had on me, I wouldn’t be surprised if the elders reached more agreements after their private huddle than during it.

  Our time in Fiji gave us a chance to get our heads above water, and under it as well. We had been going full-on for the six years since the whale campaign began and really hadn’t stopped to think about our future. Eileen and I had enjoyed snorkeling in Mexico soon after we first met. Now we were in a snorkeling paradise, and we took to it like ducks.

  I don’t think there is a better remedy for stress than a coral garden teeming with fish of implausibly bright and diverse colors. Sharks, barracuda, giant clams, and moray eels swam around us. Both of us realized we were completely at home in this otherworldly environment, not fearful at all. Ever since, we have been seeking the perfect snorkel. We’ve taken up scuba diving as well.

  A few weeks later, I made my way to Halifax to join the Rainbow Warrior crew for the 1982 seal campaign. I had agreed to lead the campaign after being out of the main action for a couple of years while we sorted out the internal struggles that had given birth to Greenpeace International. We felt we might be on the verg
e of a breakthrough as the European Parliament was considering banning seal pup skins from entering the European market. Now was the time to put the pressure on, so we drew up a blockbuster plan to get the media attention we needed.

  There was always a hare-brained idea or two that would emerge in Greenpeace. This year Mike Bailey and his action team had come up with hovercrafts. Apparently we were going to fly over the ice floes in these machines and interrupt the slaughter more effectively. I remained skeptical, knowing the conditions out there: ice pans piled eight feet high and huge waves rolling beneath them. But it would make a good impression on the media, so I went along with the plan.

  We decided to show off our hovercraft fleet to the media in Halifax Harbour. We had rented one big one, the kind the Coast Guard might use for rescue missions, and two tiny ones about 12 feet long for close combat. We called a media conference at the Halifax docks, where we would unveil our, until now, secret armada. The idea was to have the media assembled and then to have the hovercrafts arrive in a cloud of spray from farther down the harbor.

  As the spokesperson, I was with the media waiting for our secret weapons to arrive. It began to snow as we waited. And waited. Soon it was approaching blizzard conditions and the snow began to stick to us and build up on the windward side of our heads. Thirty minutes later there were still no hovercraft. Finally, the two small hovercraft arrived, a rather pitiful sight, but at least there was some action and noise. As they circled around, we learned the big hovercraft was not going to show up, ever. We were quietly informed that as it was warming up, a big piece of metal cowling had been sucked through the wooden propeller, reducing it to a nub. There was no spare prop.