Waves of Compassion

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Paul Watson left Greenpeace in 1977 to start his own group, The Sea Shepherd Society, and has had bitter conflict with Greenpeace ever since. In 1994 Watson was confronted by Greenpeace in Norway after he rammed a Norwegian whaling boat. 'Greenpeace is not opposed to whaling,' said Greenpeace Norway Chairman Leif Ryvarden. 'One must be allowed to harvest a renewable resource.'

'That infuriated me,' says Watson today. 'That was a denial of everything Greenpeace stood for. However, there are many campaigners within Greenpeace who are sympathetic to our Sea Shepherd campaigns, and we receive useful information from them all the time. I don't want to see the destruction of Greenpeace but I have to kick the monster in the ass now and then to remind them where they came from.'

Rod Marining is still active in forestry and other environmental protests in British Columbia. In April 2001 he returned to the U.S./Canada border with anti-globalization activists protesting the FTTA Quebec City Summit. 'The young protesters were all milling around with signs, and one of them asked me what they should do. 'Close the border,' I told him. They were concerned about the police. 'Relax,' I said. 'We closed this border for two hours in 1969 to stop the atomic bomb tests. Let's see what you can do.' They all huddled together to talk, then they walked out on the road and sat down. They closed the border for six hours. Broke our record.'

Bob and Bobbie Hunter moved to Toronto in 1988. Bobbie is a Project Coordinator for Rogers Cablevision, designing and overseeing construction projects. 'When we opened the first Greenpeace office in Vancouver,' Bobbie recalls, 'no one was paid. Our entire overhead was the $50 rent and the phone bill. Other than that, every penny we raised went toward getting the Phyllis Cormack out to confront the Russians. Greenpeace Germany just built a US$35 million office building. More power to them, but times have changed.'

Bob Hunter was hired by Toronto's Citytv as an Ecology Specialist. He has remained active with Greenpeace as well as with Watson's Sea Shepherd Society. His Storming of the Mind is considered a media-activist's classic. After four books about Greenpeace, he wrote Occupied Canada, Cry Wolf, On The Sky, and Red Blood: One (Mostly) White Guy's Encounters with the Native World, in which he recounts his discovery at his mother's deathbed that her great grandfather had married a Huron woman.

'If anything,' says Hunter now, 'the ecology crisis is more urgent and I would advocate even tougher environmental law. Let's see the CIA, Mossad, M-I5, and UN Security Council put to work in defense of biosphere diversity. I want to see the Coast Guard and Navy out there saving whales and halting over-fishing at the point of a cannon, if necessary. I want to see Mounties throwing loggers in jail instead of treehuggers and wildlife being defended instead of hunted, with heavy sentences and staggering fines and zero-tolerance for eco-crimes. Greenpeace helped put ecology on the consciousness map, but we have work still to do.'

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