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

by Patrick Moore

  The statistics for captive orcas are not encouraging. Their life expectancy in captivity is six years, which is about one-fifth what it is in the wild. Of 110 orcas taken from the ocean from 1967 to 2007 only 13 are still alive. The good news is that after years of failure, the aquariums have now learned to successfully breed orcas in captivity, and they now live longer than they did in previous years. Of the 42 whales currently in captivity 29 of them were born in captivity. Unfortunately, a total of 152 captive whales have died, 97 of which were born in the wild and 55 of which were born in captivity. At last it appears live captures in the wild have come to an end—a short but brutish period in our relationship with a magnificent species of marine mammal.

  Curtains of Death and the Gulag

  In 1983 the Rainbow Warrior sailed through the Panama Canal into the Pacific for the first time. We had been campaigning against the use of deep-sea driftnets in the north Pacific by the Japanese for a few years but had never actually confronted them at sea. Greenpeace Hawaii did the research and knew where to find the driftnet fleet—large ships that strung nets 30 miles long and 100 feet deep. This “curtain of death,” as we called it, caught thousands of dolphins, diving seabirds, turtles, and nontarget fish as well as the intended catch. This activity occurred far from land and out of sight of the public and the media. We aimed to change this practice, just as we had with whaling and sealing. It worked. Our underwater footage of dolphins and birds trapped in the nets went around the world on television. This made the public aware of this cruel practice and brought about worldwide support to end the driftnet fishery. David McTaggart briefed Ted Turner on the issue and he gave us funding to produce a documentary on the subject. We took the issue directly to the UN, where a resolution banning the practice was eventually passed in 1989. Once again Greenpeace demonstrated that direct nonviolent action, going to the scene and documenting the subject for all to see, was capable of creating real change.

  In what became the common practice of “serial campaigning” the Rainbow Warrior proceeded from the driftnet fishery directly to the northern Kamchatka Peninsula, where a Russian whaling station was still operating. The Russians were killing the gray whales that migrate annually from Baja California up the coast of North America and into the Bering Sea. Long since protected in Mexico, the U.S., and Canada, the grays were still being ground up for fertilizer and pet food in Russia.

  Bob Cummings joined the crew in Alaska as media coordinator, and I camped out in my living room in Vancouver for the marathon media-relations exercise that ensued. In a bold move, a group of eight Greenpeacers landed Zodiacs on the shore of the Kamchatka whaling station and began to document the operation. They were soon apprehended by Soviet authorities and taken to prison while the Rainbow Warrior made for U.S. waters with a huge Soviet warship in hot pursuit.

  One of the Zodiacs involved in the landing had managed to escape capture, and the driver had the film footage of the whaling operation and the Soviet soldiers taking the eight Greenpeacers away. He headed for the Rainbow Warrior but was knocked out of his boat by a large Soviet helicopter using its prop wash to try to stop him. The Soviets picked him out of the water, but the zodiac was left doing circles without a driver until the Rainbow Warrior returned to it. Miraculously, the film canister had remained in the Zodiac and was retrieved.

  Just as the warship was gaining, the spunky Greenpeace ship crossed the U.S. territorial border in the Bering Sea and the Soviet ship quit the chase and turned back. As soon as the Warrior landed in Alaska, Bob Cummings got on a plane with the footage. I met him in Seattle, where the raw film was fed to all the news networks’ satellites while I narrated it, explaining who was who and what had happened. It hit the global airwaves in true mindbomb fashion and the heat was on the Russians to set our people free. The drama lasted for days as Soviet authorities dithered and only made their dilemma worse. A week later the eight Greenpeacers were released to fanfare and fame. One more victory for the whales.

  In 1983 I met Russ George, a free-thinking biologist who turned me on to a book that has influenced me ever since. Seafarm: The Story of Aquaculture was written by Elizabeth Mann Borgese, from the Mediterranean island of Malta. She had been a central figure in the negotiations leading to the Law of the Sea Treaty at the United Nations in the 1970s. As she traveled around the world to fishing nations, Elizabeth became impressed by the growing practice of aquaculture, farming lakes, rivers, and the sea for fish and shellfish. She realized this was the future of seafood, that the wild fisheries could provide only so much until they became unsustainable. I agreed with her thesis and realized that just as people had turned to farming the land 10,000 years ago we must learn to tend the seas; to make the transition from hunting and gathering to farming. After a year of mulling over the concept of sustainable development I had found a way to make my transition from problems to solutions. I would start a salmon farm at my childhood home in Winter Harbour.

  The farming of fish goes back at least 3,000 years in China, where carp and other freshwater fish are still the main contributor to worldwide aquaculture production. Trout have been farmed for more than a hundred years around the world and catfish have been successfully domesticated in the U.S. South. Marine shellfish such as oysters and mussels, have also been farmed for centuries. But it wasn’t until 35 years ago that scientists and fish farmers cracked the life cycle of marine finfish.

  It was the coastal people of Norway who pioneered the art and science of salmon farming in the 1970s in the sheltered fjords along their rugged coast. Decades of overfishing had reduced the Atlantic salmon runs there to mere remnants as fleets from two-dozen European countries ravaged the northern seas. Fishermen had discovered that salmon congregated beneath icebergs near Greenland, so they pulled huge nets beneath the bergs, decimating both European and North American populations. The demand for wild salmon could no longer be satisfied, so necessity became the mother of invention.

  Salmon became the first marine fish species to be successfully farmed for a simple reason. Unlike most ocean fish, salmon breed in freshwater, returning to their natal streams to spawn, where the young fry hatch and rear before returning to the sea again. It had been relatively easy to figure out how to build hatcheries beside the streams and rivers, take eggs and sperm from the returning adults, hatch the eggs in incubators and grow the fry in ponds or tanks. This greatly increased the survival rate over the wild and thus returned more fry to the sea. Salmon enhancement of the wild populations became common practice in the Atlantic and the Pacific. But it would ultimately fail in the Atlantic partly because there were just too many fishing boats and not enough fish. By contrast, in the north Pacific there were only four countries—Canada, the U.S., Russia, and Japan—competing for wild salmon. The Pacific Salmon Commission was formed in 1989 to control the catch.

  The Norwegians figured out how to take the fry from freshwater salmon hatcheries and transfer them to “netpens” in the sea, where they were given a formulated feed and were grown out to market size. The entire life cycle was now brought into domestication and a new revolution in seafood production began. I am convinced that aquaculture is the future of healthy protein and oils to feed a growing world population.

  My mom’s dad, Art North, was a grizzled west coast salmon fisherman, who, with his three brothers, pioneered the salmon trolling fleet out of my home village of Winter Harbour in the 1930s. When I stayed with him and Granny Mary, he would take me out to sea at four in the morning, where among the rolling swells he pulled the silver salmon into his hold. I was always seasick and vowed never to become a fisherman. But I learned a lot from Granddad Art, as he taught me how to carve a toy boat and to gut fish. Later in life I questioned him about the practice of killing sea lions as a way of increasing the amount of fish available to fishermen. In the 1950s the Canadian fisheries authorities mounted machine guns on the bows of their patrol boats. They would visit sea lion colonies on islands and rocks off the coast and “thin” their populations. I
asked,

  “Granddad, did you catch more salmon after they killed the sea lions?” He scratched his head and replied, “I guess they didn’t kill enough of the bastards.” He was the gentlest, kindest man you could ever meet. How attitudes toward marine mammals have changed with the times!

  I told my brother-in-law, Peter Taylor, about the idea of salmon farming. Winter Harbour would be a good location to build a hatchery and netpen operation. A few pioneers had already established small salmon farms farther down the coast. We met them and learned the basics of what we needed to get started. Quatsino Seafarms was born, named after the inlet of which Winter Harbour is a part, and the First Nations people who first settled there. I was involved in a positive effort to farm the sea for the first time in my part of the world. It was as exhilarating as the first voyage to stop the H-bomb tests; maybe a bit more down to earth, but easily as meaningful. It was part of a bold new movement for the sustainable use of the sea. It would prove to be a challenge as great as any campaign to save the planet.

  Excited by the fact that I was participating in a sustainable new industry and producing good food, I approached my fellow Greenpeacers for support. “You know, we are against whaling, sealing, drift-net fishing, bottom dragging, and just about every way people are getting food from the ocean,” I said, then added, “How about if we come out in favor of sustainable aquaculture as a solution to the depletion of wild sea life?” I was surprised with the sharp rebuke. “No way; aquaculture is causing the destruction of coastal mangrove forests in the tropics,” one of my fellow Greenpeacers shot back “Okay,” I replied, “Let’s not endorse that kind of aquaculture. In fact, why don’t we define the meaning of sustainable aquaculture for the world so that we become leaders in providing the solution to getting food from the sea?” My entreaties fell on deaf ears. The only other scientist in the organization, Sidney Holt, was a staunch anti-aquaculture advocate who had the ear of Greenpeace chairman, David McTaggart. I thought, If Greenpeace is against farming fish, what on earth are we in favor of? It was my first brush with disillusion over a question of environmental policy. I let it slide and got on with the business of building our salmon farm.

  My younger brother, Michael, agreed to live in Winter Harbour and manage the operation. He had just returned from Europe, where he had married Sophie, who was from southern France. Eileen and I, Peter and Marilyn, Mike and Sophie and our families spent the summer of 1984 building a small salmon hatchery on the shore near the mouth of the Galato River. It rained every day of August as we laid out nearly a mile of 6-inch PVC waterline up the river to supply the hatchery. We purchased 100,000 Chinook salmon eggs and placed them in incubators. (The eggs were surplus to the government’s wild salmon enhancement program.) The farming had begun. We started to build the net pens and floating walkways we would need when the young salmon were ready to go in the sea.

  A wonderful biological transformation occurs in the lifecycle of salmon when they prepare for the transition from freshwater to saltwater. This is one of the more fascinating metamorphoses in nature, changing from the need to keep water out of the body in fresh water to the challenge of keeping water in the body in seawater. Chinook salmon are about four inches long when they suddenly turn from dark gray to shiny silver. This transformation is called smolting, derived from the same origin as smelting, as in smelting metals like iron and silver. The smolts, as the newly transformed salmon are called, are as silvery as a newly minted ingot and the sight of thousands of them circling in a big pond in the hatchery is mesmerizing.

  Under the Rainbow

  We had already put our first batch of smolts in the net pens when I traveled to Auckland, New Zealand, on July 10, 1985, with a small group of international directors to greet the arrival of the Rainbow Warrior and her crew. The Warrior, affectionately known as the R-Dub by insiders, was about to embark on another campaign against French nuclear testing at Mururoa, now conducted underground in the fragile coral atoll. The Warrior had recently been refit with two tall masts and auxiliary sails, giving her a beautiful profile at sea.

  We arrived on board the ship in time for lunch and spent the afternoon sitting in the galley shooting the breeze with the crew and exchanging the latest Greenpeace gossip. Everyone felt upbeat about the campaign, as there was some hope France’s new socialist president, Francois Mitterrand, might be more sympathetic to the antinuclear movement than his right-wing predecessors. As it turned out, that was a very bad call.

  After sharing dinner with the crew, the rest of us were driven to a rowing club graciously loaned to us for our stay. By midnight we were mostly settled into our bunks in the dormitory. At 10 past midnight the phone rang and Steve Sawyer answered it. Hardly able to speak, he reported to us that the Rainbow Warrior had been sunk at the dock 10 minutes earlier by two violent explosions. Our photographer, Fernando Periera, was missing. While Steve arranged for a taxi, I put in a call to David McTaggart, who was attending the International Whaling Commission meetings in Brighton, England, where it was midday. David immediately knew the French had sabotaged our ship and I concurred. Who else would do such a thing? We got in the taxis and made for the harbor, where we found a distraught and demoralized crew.

  The beautiful Rainbow Warrior was sunk in 20 feet of water with her bow and wheelhouse protruding at an unnatural angle. Media people were beginning to congregate, police were everywhere, and the crew found refuge in a harbor building at the top of the dock. We began the process of piecing events together.

  The first explosion had jolted the ship just before midnight, while a few crew members were still enjoying a nightcap around the galley table. Most were still out at the pub. Captain Jon Castle immediately went below to assess the situation and saw water gushing in through a gaping hole in the hull in the engine room. She would sink quickly, so he ordered everyone to get off. It was an easy step onto the dock. But Fernando had $10,000 worth of camera gear in his bunkroom in the stern compartment, so he rushed aft and down the hatch to retrieve it. The second explosion rocked the ship a minute or two after the first one, and it came from the stern, where Fernando was packing up his gear. He never emerged.

  The saboteurs had been methodical. They placed the first bomb next to the engine room, a large compartment below decks, to sink the Warrior quickly; they put the second one at the propeller/rudder assembly to disable the boat for good. At this they proved successful. The Rainbow Warrior would never sail again.

  It fell to me, as someone who remains calm in times of trauma, to take on the task of liaison with the authorities and to act as spokesperson with the media. The media wanted to know who had done the deed, and I had to be very careful at first to insist we didn’t know. We quickly determined it was almost certainly an act of sabotage, but you don’t accuse a country of terrorism unless you have some proof. The proof wasn’t long in coming. The police found a small Zodiac inflatable boat abandoned on the other side of the harbor. It had a label that said, “Made in France.” This was a clue of Inspector Clouseau proportions. Later it would be revealed that the French government, right up to President Mitterrand, had authorized the operation.

  Of course the French denied any involvement, and even when it became clear the French military was involved, the politicians proclaimed their innocence. It was soon learned that French operatives had illegally entered New Zealand waters in a sailboat two months before the bombing, smuggling the Zodiac, explosives, and dive gear into the country. They infiltrated the Greenpeace New Zealand offices, found out when the Warrior would arrive, and laid their evil plan. It was determined that two frogmen, trained as the French equivalent of the U.S. Navy Seals, had placed plastic explosives on the Rainbow Warrior’s hull. At the time I believed they were meant to explode simultaneously. I still can’t think of a reason to have them go off a minute or two minutes apart. I suppose the timers were not synchronized perfectly. This tiny technical imperfection caused the death of a fellow campaigner, the first and only death a Greenpeace member has suff
ered in action.

  Two of the French operatives, Sophie and Alain Turenge, later identified as Commander Alain Mafart and Captain Dominique Prieur of the French secret service, were apprehended at the airport before they could get out of the country. Charged with murder, they plea-bargained and were tried and convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 10 years in a New Zealand jail. A few months later, under increasingly brutal trade sanctions imposed by France, New Zealand allowed them to be transferred to Hao Atoll in French Polynesia, where France promised they would serve out the remainder of their sentence. Within two years they were both repatriated to France to a hero’s welcome. So much for justice in the Republic of France.

  But there was some justice. United Nations Secretary-General Mr. Xavier Perez de Cuellar stepped in as mediator and awarded Greenpeace an $8 million settlement for the loss of the Rainbow Warrior. Not bad when you consider it had been purchased for about $47,000 in 1978. Fernando Periera’s estranged wife was also awarded an undisclosed settlement, rumored to be of a similar magnitude. All parties except Fernando and his young son received adequate compensation.

  One of the best slogans in Greenpeace’s history found itself on a button commemorating the first anniversary of the bombing: “You Can’t Sink a Rainbow.” If it hadn’t been for the loss of life, it would have been the biggest giggle room affair in our history. France overreacted to such an extreme that it deserved the ridicule heaped on it. No other story in Greenpeace’s history has received as much media coverage as the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior. France handed Greenpeace its biggest mindbomb on a platter. I still won’t order French wine in restaurants; it’s overpriced and it reminds me of France’s dastardly deeds in the South Pacific. And what makes France think it has a right to continue to subjugate the people of Polynesia under colonial rule in today’s world?