I arrived in Vancouver, on the westcoast of Canada, in the spring of 1972 as a fugitive of American justice, a draft-dodger with the FBI on my trail and intimidating my family to give me up. I faced 25 years in prison had they caught me. My wife of 6 months, Glenn, and I slept by the furnace in the cellar of a Vancouver shelter set up for war objectors on 7th Avenue near Fir Street. We had our sleeping bags, a change of clothes, forty-seven dollars, and a wrinkled piece of paper with the names of Canadian peace activists who might help us.

Unitarian minister and University librarian Mac Elrod and his wife Norma took us in and introduced us to local pacifist crowd. I found a job as reporter and photographer at the North Shore News community newspaper. While covering a local story, I met Bree Drummond who was sitting in a platform, high in a cottonwood tree to save it from being felled for a parking lot by North Vancouver maintenance crews. Her boyfriend, Rod Marining, was a wild Yippie environmentalist who had helped stop the construction of a Four Seasons Hotel at the entrance to Vancouver's magnificent Stanley Park by declaring the land 'All Season Park' and camping out on the site until the developers gave up. He also had sailed for the Aleutian Island of Amchitka to protest a U.S. atomic bomb test there as a member of the Don't Make A Wave Committee that had changed its name to the 'Greenpeace Foundation' that spring.

Discuss Ecology in Caf? Utne's: cafe.utne.com

Rod introduced me to Bob Hunter from Winnipeg, clearly the hippest young journalist in the city, writing a daily column in the Vancouver Sun in which he explained Gestalt Therapy, described peyote ceremonies, introduced edgy psychologists like R. D. Laing, and quoted famed ecologist Rachel Carson. Hunter had written a brilliant novel, Erebus, and a profound, post-McLuhan analysis of media and social consciousness, Storming of the Mind. He had also sailed on the protest boat with the Don't Make a Wave Committee. He had a beard, long hair, and a large leather bag over his shoulder, filled with newspaper clippings, books, and his own journal in which he wrote incessantly. I liked him right away, traveled in similar media circles, and began sharing beer and philosophy with him at the Cecil Hotel pub. Now, three decades later, the Cecil is a glitzy strip bar, but in the early 1970s it was a pool hall and hangout for Vancouver radicals and intelligencia. Greenpeace had no public office at this time. We sat near the pay-phone to conduct both our journalist and activist business.