Abstract
Long ago, I naively thought that Greenpeace revolved around rubber boats and media stunts. The reality of the organization only became apparent to me as I began to work on nuclear weapons issues during the 1980s. Now, after nearly 15 years of campaigning for Greenpeace, I was surprised to find that Rex Weyler's history of the group was not only illuminating, but also inspiring.
Greenpeace, as the name suggests, stands at the intersection of environmentalism and nuclear disarmament, a juncture that would probably not be as obvious today were it not for a group of ordinary citizens with extraordinary vision. They founded Greenpeace based on a budding philosophy of global citizenship and on the feeling that they could change the world. Weyler, one of the founders of Greenpeace International, documents the genesis and evolution of the group in his new book.
With his unique first-person perspective and a keen knack for storytelling, Weyler recounts the founders' adventures. “We were fragile pilgrims, not makers of history but participants lucky enough to have had the opportunity to meddle in the affairs of the world,” as Weyler observes. In careful detail he relates their first forays into such meddling–protests against Russian and Japanese whaling (the “green”) and against U.S. and French nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific (the “peace”).
Weyler colorfully documents the personal journeys of Greenpeace founders such as Irving and Dorothy Stowe, Ben and Dorothy Metcalfe, Jim and Marie Bohlen, Bob Hunter, and David McTaggart–people who don't have monuments or buildings named after them, but who have made a big footprint on the present environmental movement. Ben Metcalfe and Bob Hunter, both journalists, had a deep understanding of not only ecology, but also what makes a good story. Their decisions on how to impact policy-making through direct action and on how to use the platform of the emerging global media exploded Greenpeace onto the international stage.
Weyler, with a tone of homage, clarifies that Greenpeace was far from the first to come to environmentalism, pacifism, or activism. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Sierra Club, the World Wildlife Fund, the War Resisters, and the Quakers, among others, all predated Greenpeace. Activists in small boats protested at the Groton Polaris submarine yard in Connecticut more than 40 years ago; Greenpeace was born in 1969-1970. Without these organizations and individuals, Wey-ler writes, there would have been no Greenpeace.
The evolving environmental movement coupled with the Cold War political context of the late 1960s–in particular the ongoing large-scale nuclear testing programs–led to an evolution in thinking by the founders, Weyler writes. Hunter, one of the early intellectual leaders of Greenpeace, came to believe that the Earth was fast approaching a deadline: Humankind might not perceive the extent of the world's problems fast enough to remedy them.
When the United States announced in 1971 that it intended to carry out a series of high-yield nuclear tests under the Alaskan island of Amchit-ka, Greenpeace sent two ships on a protest voyage that generated significant media coverage, in turn sparking wide anti-nuclear protests across Canada. Within weeks of the announcement, the Nixon White House was on the defensive, and public opinion favored the protestors. Even a Coast Guard crew that arrested the protestors on one of the ships expressed their solidarity with Greenpeace's goals. An injunction to stop the series failed, and five hours after the Supreme Court declined to nix the tests, a 5-megaton device was detonated below Amchitka.
The Greenpeace crews returned to port, Weyler writes, feeling that they had failed. But although the group's first action failed to stop the test, it was actually a long-term success. The activists had struck a nerve with the public and helped to make the test the most controversial in the history of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). Within months, the AEC decided to end testing at Amchitka. Yet French nuclear tests continued in the Pacific, and Greenpeace committed itself to opposing them. The stage was set for the next two decades of protest in the South Pacific, leading to the end of all atmospheric nuclear tests, the cessation of French nuclear testing in 1996, and the infamous French attack on Greenpeace's Rainbow Warrior.
Weyler eloquently describes the evolution of what Greenpeace eventually found to be the necessary ingredients for its campaigns: a coherent political strategy, a clear message, and a skilled team. There was nothing inevitable about Greenpeace launching a campaign against whaling, and as Weyler documents, the group's arguments over diverting scarce resources away from disarmament campaigning were heated and personal. The emerging Greenpeace leadership in Vancouver learned about the sentient nature of great whales and that whalers were devastating their populations. The fact that the superpowers incorporated oil obtained from sperm whales as a lubricant for nuclear weapons confirmed to many that ecology and disarmament were two faces of the same coin, Weyler writes. It was decided to confront the whalers.
Greenpeace's first anti-whaling voyage in 1975 typified the approach that was to become the group's norm. Learning from the French navy's tactics, they adopted inflatable zodiac boats as a means to intercept the whaling ships. When Greenpeace's Phyllis Cormack and crew finally tracked down the Russian and Japanese whaling fleet in the north Pacific, activists for the first time placed themselves between the whales and the whalers' harpoons. The colorful story and images–Canadian hippies on an old boat confronting the Russians in America's backyard, during the height of the Cold War–were picked up by the media, bringing global attention to whaling. This was Greenpeace's “mind-bomb theory” in action, according to Weyler.
These early protests proliferated Greenpeace's message throughout the world, and offices sprang up in Europe and North America. What was at first a loose association eventually became a single, diverse international entity that worked hard to save the whales and stop nuclear testing. As Greenpeace grew, so too did the range of issues it worked on, expanding to include ozone depletion, global warming, industrial toxic pollution, and more. Weyler makes a convincing case that the world would have embraced ecological activism without Greenpeace, but not so quickly or decisively.
Weyler gives in-depth coverage to the organization's growth only through 1979, and therefore does not focus on later developments that caused a rift among the early members, including Patrick Moore's departure over policy disagreements. Greenpeace is a well-written, gripping tale that many will find fascinating, and I found inspiring. More than 30 years after those first acts of protest, the world needs more than ever people who are not only bold thinkers, but also bold activists.