Waves of Compassion

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

The Eco-Navy we had dreamed of came to pass. The Dalai Lama, visited the Rainbow Warrior at the Earth summit in Rio. 'It’s a small boat,' he said, 'a little untidy. But it is a very powerful symbol, and the spirit on board made my spirit stronger too.' From Vancouver, we watched with some pride as the Warriors of the Rainbow mythology manifested around the world. Through all the craziness and wild visions, something profound had been seeded into the culture and was now blossoming on every continent.

Irving Stowe had passed away early, in 1974, of cancer. Then Bob Cummings passed away in 1987, Bree Drummond in 1997, and David McTaggart was killed in the car accident in Italy on March 23, 2001. Although retired from Greenpeace, it is typical of McTaggart that two weeks before he died he was in Amsterdam lobbying Greenpeace to join his campaign to establish a marine protection zone in the Caribbean. A few months before he died, McTaggart warned, 'It's an eternal struggle. We haven't really won anything. Every victory we've achieved could be rolled back in the blink of an eye. The environmental movement isn't something that can ever rest.'

Captain John Cormack died peacefully on November 17, 1988, at the age of 76 in Vancouver. 'Captain John,' recalls Hunter 'was the only fisherman on the westcoast who was willing to take a motley group of protestors up to the Aleutian Islands in 1971 to protest the American nuclear test at Amchitka Island. He skippered the first two whale voyages. Without Cormack, there's no Greenpeace.'

Jim and Marie Bohlen left the group in 1972 when Metcalfe took over. In 1974, they moved to Denman Island, and founded an energy-efficient, organic farm they called 'Greenpeace Farm.' Jim wrote The New Pioneer's Handbook about low-energy living. In 1983 Patrick Moore, then president of Greenpeace Canada, brought Bohlen back onto the board of directors to head the group's anti-nuclear campaigns. Bohlen joined the board of the Green Party of Canada, and in 1992 attended the UN Environment Conference in Rio. 'As the natural environment inexorably deteriorates,' Bohlen says today, 'perhaps that will prompt nation-state governments to relinquish some of their sovereignty and accept global green governance.'

Patrick Moore is now a private environmental consultant for forestry and other resource companies. He has been critical of some Greenpeace positions, and was seen by some environmentalists as a turncoat. Hunter once called him 'The eco-Judas' in his newspaper column, but has since softened and even apologized. In April 2000, on the 25th Anniversary of the first Greenpeace whale campaign, Hunter and Moore hugged in the kitchen of Pat and Eileen Moore's Vancouver home, all grievances forgiven. Gaia Hypothesis author James Lovelock has praised Moore's 'scientific environmentalism.'

'By the mid-1980's,' says Moore, 'we had won over a majority of the public in the industrialized democracies. Presidents and Prime Ministers were talking about the environment on a daily basis. At that time, I made the transition from confrontation to building consensus. After all, when a majority of people agree with you it is probably time to stop hitting them over the head and sit down and talk to them about solutions.' Moore now tours the world, speaking with governments and companies about environmental policy. 'The key points to a global environmental policy,' he says, 'are renewable energy and material resources, humans learning to control our population and urban sprawl voluntarily, and the protection of forests, primarily from inefficient agricultural production, by far the biggest cause of deforestation.'

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print