Bearing Witness on the High Seas

“All everyone wanted to talk about was the seals.” Many people have not, even today, forgiven Greenpeace for its campaign 30 years ago to stop the seal slaughter, which drew a lot of heat on Canada and the ire of many east coast fisher folk who saw their livelihood threatened and their reputations besmirched. “That’s all they wanted to talk about,” Phil remembers. “People were rarely indifferent.” When the cod collapsed and the fishery was closed in 1992, Greenpeace again got blamed for saving the seals which, the fishermen claimed, killed the cod. Like many people, even Phil’s own dad hated Greenpeace and, as a respectful son, before he became a canvasser, he subscribed to the same point of view.

But after he had his own children, his attitude began to change. At work as a graphic designer, he became aware of the toxic chemicals he was handling, and at home he began to take notice of the waste and began recycling.  He started thinking of the environment and the damage being done to it. It was then that he signed up with Greenpeace as a fundraiser, engaging the public on their doorsteps about the state of the planet, arguing passionately for change and ultimately eliciting a donation despite the grudge against Greenpeace. “One way to canvass effectively is to study the issues and the more I knew about the issues, the more outraged I became,” he says.

Because of his years of experience at sea both in the navy as a sonar operator hunting down Russian submarines and on commercial seismic ships exploring for oil and gas, he was encouraged to work on the ships. Being at sea is Phil’s passion, and once on board he discovered the MV Greenpeace to be everything a ship should be.

“There was an esprit de corps; the crew wanted to be there rather than complaining about the pay or the boss. It was like, ‘Where have you been all my life?’ ” Moreover, his commitment was strengthened by the huge success of his first campaign at sea.

“Well, that’s a story in itself,” he says, setting the scene at the time. Boris Yeltsin was the new president of Russian and on the first state visit to Japan since the war between the two countries, he came hat in hand looking for investors.  Because of the work of Greenpeace, it was known that Russia was dumping nuclear waste into the Sea of Japan. When this issue was raised by a Japanese politician, Yeltsin promised publicly to stop the dumping.

“Two weeks later, we caught them red handed,” recounts Phil with obvious glee still. The timing could not have been better, with the UN two weeks later debating the existing moratorium on nuclear dumping at sea, which some countries wanted to end. But everything changed after Russia was caught in the act. Instead a permanent, world-wide ban on dumping nuclear waste at sea was put in place. “Not bad for a few days work,” says Phil, who, dressed in a radiation suit and holding a Geiger counter next to a Russian ship, ended up on the cover of Time  and MacLean’s magazines. On his inaugural campaign, he “saw Greenpeace at its best.” He also realized the power of bearing witness, one of Greenpeace’s core values. “We were there, we bore witness and we got the images out to the world and the world was rightly outraged.”

Since that first action, Phil has sailed all of the Earth’s oceans crewing many of the Greenpeace ships in all sorts of roles including deckhand, cook, boatswain, mechanic and assistant engineer. He has visited more than 50 countries for numerous campaigns but can’t pick a favourite: “They were all pretty amazing.”

Certainly amazing was his trip to Greenland to document the impacts of global warming on the melting ice cap. He was stunned by the massive scale of the icebergs and fascinated working with the world’s top scientists who were able to document the fastest moving glacier.  Their findings confirmed beyond all expectations the loss of ice due to global warming. “We did a wonderful job finding out how terrible it is,” he jokes.

Then there is the personal danger he often faces as in his last campaign intercepting Japanese whalers in the Southern Ocean. Although great care is taken to be as safe as possible, Phil is quite prepared to put himself in harm’s way. “It is up to someone else to pull the trigger and so far they haven’t,” he says nonchalantly.

Sometimes it is others who are in danger as when Greenpeace delivered 500 tonnes of medical equipment to the victims in Sumatra of the huge Boxing Day tsunami in the Indian Ocean in 2004. Or more recently, when he was aboard the Rainbow Warrior as it sailed passed the Israel sea blockade to bring medicine into Lebanon. It was his first time in a war zone and the bombing of Beirut is something he hopes never to see again. He will, however, soon be back in the region; he returns to the Middle East early 2007 to bolster local peace groups (“After all, peace is half our name”) and assess the environmental damage caused by war.

It is not a life for everyone, and Phil admits it can be difficult “living in a box, months at a time, eating, sleeping, and working with 30 strangers.” But it is the people who bring him back. “In Greenpeace, people make an extra effort to get along to make it work,” he says.

While other people normally travel on their vacations, Phil goes home on his. He spends his time with his young kids who think it is perfectly normal for their father to be off at sea fighting to save the world, (even when their friends think it is amazing). But while it is difficult for Phil to be apart from his children, it is for them that he does it.

“I need to be able to say to my kids that I did my best so they could have clean air and water and a peaceable planet.”  He can certainly say that.