Waves of Compassion

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On October 2, when the U.S. detonated the bomb at Amchitka, a mob from Vancouver stormed the U.S. border, closing it to traffic for two hours. A banner placed at the border crossing read: 'Don't Make a Wave' in reference to the potential tidal wave. In January 1970 the protestors moved to the U.S. Embassy and 'liberated' Granville Street in downtown Vancouver. The seeds of Greenpeace were in these crowds. Hippies on bicycles milled among the anti-bomb protestors, stopping cars and delivering speeches about ecology.

Among the protestors was freelance journalist Ben Metcalfe, who had a radio program on the CBC. Metcalfe, on his own initiative, had placed 12 billboard signs in Vancouver that read:

'It's hard to imagine now, ' says Metcalfe, 'but in those days most people had no idea what the word ecology meant. I was doing environmental stories on my radio program and I started a campaign to stop the Skagit River Dam. In the winter of 1969 and 1970, the U.S. bomb tests were the hot story. The night we closed the U.S. border, Hunter and Hamish Bruce were there, and Jim and Marie Bohlen.'

The Bohlens had fled to Canada from the U.S. to keep their sons out of Vietnam. Jim, a World War II naval veteran and plastics engineer, started a Canadian chapter of the Sierra Club and formed the Canadian Assistance to War Objectors, providing shelter for draft dodgers. 'Our first Sierra Club action,' recalls Bohlen, 'was to save a seagull nesting habitat in Nanaimo Harbour. It was during this campaign that I discovered the power of the press. Later, I met Irving and Dorothy Stowe at an End the Arms Race demonstration.'

Irving Stowe was a lawyer from Providence, Rhode Island who had adopted Quakerism. He and Dorothy had participated in a protest against the nuclear Polaris submarines in Connecticut during which the Committee for Nonviolent Direct Action placed boats in front of the launching subs. Later, the Stowes moved their family to Canada to keep their son out of the U.S. military. When the U.S. announced a new, 5-megaton nuclear bomb test on Amchitka Island, the Bohlens and Stowes wanted to do something dramatic to protest. Exploiting the popular tidal wave image, they formed a spin-off of the Sierra Club called The Don't Make a Wave Committee, which met in the basement of the Vancouver Unitarian Church.

Don't Make a Wave was an ad hoc committee, endorsed by the Sierra Club, the United Church of Canada, the B.C. Federation of Labour, the Canadian Voice of Women, and other peace and ecology organizations.

Hunter, Metcalfe, Cummings, Bruce, and Marining attended the Don't Make a Wave meetings, chaired by Irving Stowe. 'These meetings were marathons,' recalls Hunter, 'lasting 6 or 7 hours, featuring long, philosophical diatribes, and often going nowhere. We wanted to do something significant, but we were trying to operate by consensus. We went around in circles for months.' Marie Bohlen, inspired by the Quaker boat the Golden Rule, suggested to Jim one morning over coffee that someone should 'just sail a boat up there and confront the bomb.' Moments later, in one of the synchronous events that would characterize the evolution of Greenpeace, a Vancouver Sun reporter phoned for an update on the Sierra Club's plans to protest the bomb. 'Before I knew it,' recalls Jim Bohlen, 'I was telling them we were sailing a boat into the test zone.'

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