Waves of Compassion

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It was here in the Cecil pub that I first met Bob Cummings, writer for the counterculture underground newspaper Georgia Straight, and another crew member from the bomb protest. Cummings would rail against injustice to the free press. 'The straight media ignore the real stories,' he complained, 'and if you write for an underground paper you should expect to be arrested.' Hunter would admonish Cummings about 'leftist rhetoric and posturing' in the Georgia Strait. 'The ideal newspaper,' he said 'will praise the radicals when they're right, and critique them mercilessly when they're wrong.' These debates were never resolved, but rolled on endlessly, washed down with rounds of beer.

It was here in the pub that Dr. Paul Spong, a scientist at the Vancouver Aquarium, appeared in 1974 promoting his radical idea that we should put our lives on the line to save the whales. The anti-war activists were skeptical at first, but Spong's idea would soon change the face of this little band of radicals.

On an Ocean Named for Peace

In 1969 in Vancouver hippies and revolutionaries mixed gleefully in the redbrick coffee houses of Gastown, and in the rainbow-painted organic juice bars of tree-lined Kitsilano near the University of British Columbia. 'Revolutions,' says Hunter, 'start at the outer fringes of the empire, in this case the American Empire.' When the U.S. announced that summer that they were going to test a 1.2 megaton nuclear bomb on the Aleutian Island of Amchitka, Vancouver peaceniks, love children, American draft dodgers, and Marxist revolutionaries began to agitate. In September 1969 Hunter warned in his newspaper column of 'a distinct danger that the tests might set in motion earthquakes and tidal waves which could sweep from one end of the Pacific to the other.' This image of the tidal wave captured the imagination of Canadians opposed to the U.S. bomb test.

Three decades later Hunter recalls 'In Vancouver at that time there was a convergence of hippies, draft dodgers, Tibetan monks, seadogs, artists, radical ecologists, rebel journalists, Quakers, and expatriate Yanks in the one major city that happened to be closest to Amchitka Island, where the U.S. wanted to explode a bomb. Greenpeace was born of all of this.'

Vancouver lawyer Hamish Bruce read Hunter's columns and called the reporter. Bruce wanted to start an organization called the 'Green Panthers.' Hunter and Bruce became fast friends. They plotted to establish the Green Panthers as the ecological equivalent of the Black Panthers, whose leader, Fred Hampton, Hunter had interviewed in Chicago. 'Our idea,' says Bruce today, 'was that ecology was the sleeping giant, the issue that was ultimately going to rock the world.'

At that time, Hunter was writing his third book, Storming of the Mind, about the 'new holistic consciousness,' in which he declares 'In ecology we see the new consciousness finding its roots.' Hunter predicted that continued environmental deterioration would lead to the rise of 'the Green Panthers or their equivalent,' and he advocated 'the hoisting of the green flag.'

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