Bob Hunter (left) with Ben Metcalfe, aboard the first Greenpeace voyage to oppose nuclear weapons testing in Amchitka.
In 1971, the word "Greenpeace" hadn't yet been coined. Bob was
a hippy journalist in Vancouver, a town which he described as
having "the biggest concentration of tree-huggers, radicalized
students, garbage-dump stoppers, shit-disturbing unionists, freeway
fighters, pot smokers and growers, aging Trotskyites, condo
killers, farmland savers, fish preservationists, animal rights
activists, back-to-the-landers, vegetarians, nudists, Buddhists,
and anti-spraying, anti-pollution marchers and picketers in the
country, per capita, in the world."
Mind bombs
A student of Marshall McLuhan, he was bent on changing the world
with what he termed "media mindbombs" -- consciousness-changing
sounds and images to blast around the world in the guise of news.
He got involved with a few folks in a church basement who wanted to
stop a US nuclear weapons test off Amchitka, which he called the
"Don't Make a Wave Committee".
Sailing into the bomb
But their plans were going nowhere until Marie Bohlen suggested
that the group simply sail a ship into the test site. Bob thought
it was a perfect "mindbomb," and on September 15, 1971, he and 11
other rag-tag activists would sail out to challenge the greatest
military force on Earth in a rusting fishing boat they called "The
Greenpeace." In doing so, they set off a wave of public support
and protest which closed the US-Canadian border for the first time
since 1812, ultimately shut the testing programme down, and created
a new force for environmental and peace activism which continues to
this day.
Greenpeace bears his mark
Over the next decade, Bob's madcap creativity, strategic smarts,
and hard-nosed journalistic sense of story would indelibly mark the
Greenpeace brand of action. From the pack ice of Newfoundland,
where he dyed the whitecoats of Harp Seal pups to make them
commercially worthless, to the Pacific Ocean where he stood between
Russian harpoons and the whales they were hunting, he inspired a
new brand of personal environmental activism.
Shaman, mystic
"Bob was a storyteller, a shaman, a word-magician, a
Machiavellian mystic, and he dared to inject a sense of humour into
the often shrill and sanctimonious job of changing the world," says
Greenpeace Executive Director Gerd Leipold. "He was funny and
brave and audacious, inspiring in his refusal to accept the limits
of the practical or the probable. He revelled in life's ability to
deliver little miracles in the form of impossibilities achieved,
and Greenpeace will forever bear the mark of his crazy,
super-optimistic faith in the wisdom of tilting at windmills."
Warriors of the Rainbow
In 1978, Hunter chronicled the birth of Greenpeace in his book
"Warriors of the Rainbow." It was a masterful feat of
storytelling, one which attracted a further generation of young
people into the ranks of the organisation. In its introduction he
wrote:
"We fought... an unequal battle against American and French
nuclear weapons makers; Russian, Japanese, and Australian whalers;
Norwegian and Canadian seal hunters; multinational oil consortiums
and pesticide manufactures; cynical politicians; angry workers;
and, again and again, ourselves. The people involved were men and
women, young and old, not all of them brave or wise, who found
themselves face-to-face with the fullest ecological horrors of the
century..."
Storymaster
Among Hunter's stock stories was the tale of how he'd stumbled
on to the Cree Indian myth of the "Warriors of the Rainbow" -- a
legendary tribe of spirits who would rescue nature when the Earth
became sick. The story involved a gypsy dulcimer maker, an old set
of fenceposts, and the gift of a book which Hunter claimed leapt
into his hands -- quite literally -- when The Greenpeace dropped
down a steep swell on its way to Amchitka. The story itself was
magical and mythological, and over the years Hunter would embellish
and polish it into a hilarious and inspirational piece of campfire
folklore.
Awful child
Hunter was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba in 1941. In his own words
"I was an awful, rebellious, early attention-defficient kid who was
loved by my art and English teachers, but hated by the rest. I
cheated by scribbling novels when I was supposed to be doing
schoolwork." He became a journalist for the Winnipeg Tribune and
later wrote a column for the Vancouver Sun in which he featured
environmental subjects. He quit writing the column when he joined
the first Greenpeace voyage to save the whales, becoming a reporter
explicitly to ensure his somewhat less than objective "message"
would reach a global audience, because "the subjective stuff
written by columnists [was] never picked up by the wire
services."
Journalism as opinion
He readily confessed that this made him "a traitor to my
profession," but believed he had a higher calling: "If we ignore
[the] laws of ecology we will continue to be guilty of crimes
against the earth. We will not be judged by men for these crimes,
but with a justice meeted out by the earth itself. The destruction
of the earth will lead, inevitably, to the destruction of
ourselves."
Hunter became president of the Greenpeace Foundation in 1973,
and served in that post until 1977.
He joined Toronto's City TV as an ecology specialist in 1988,
and for years hosted a highly successful morning TV spot for
Breakfast TV in his bathrobe, in which he read the day's newspaper
headlines and sputtered scandalously witty commentaries in a form
of rapid-fire stand-up journalism.
Advisor, speaker, comedian-in-chief
Over the years he continued to contribute to Greenpeace as an
advisor and occasional speaker, and kept up good relations with the
organisation's original luminaries, including many who were no
longer on speaking terms with one other. He authored several books
and founded a tongue-in-cheek religion, the Whole Earth Church.
In a recent book, Rex Weyler writes about reflecting with Hunter
on their experiences in the early days of Greenpeace:
"The ironies and tension of history simultaneously provided the
gift of history: that we got to live, to see the flourishing Earth,
the flying fish, dolphins, caribou, seal pups, the raging sea, the
blue light of morning, the miracle and terror of survival all
rolled into one; and that we were blessed with an opportunity to
serve it."
Bob Hunter made much of his opportunity to serve the Earth, and
Greenpeace will always be blessed with his spirit.