Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist (15 page)

Nineteen seventy-six saw Greenpeace flower with other branch offices springing up in Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, Boston, and Toronto. Most of these were spontaneous gatherings of people who identified with what we had done and what we stood for. It was impossible for us to keep up with the growth in support. Some of these new groups were incorporating their own legal entities, thinking they could just take our Greenpeace name and raise funds with it. It proved a somewhat futile effort to keep all this growth coordinated and controlled. It didn’t help that our otherwise brilliant leader, Bob Hunter, didn’t care much for legal technicalities.

During the winter the story of our plans to stop the seal hunt made headlines across Canada. The annual slaughter of seal pups had been a tradition in Canada for more than 200 years. For the first time Greenpeace was portrayed as the Goliath against poor Newfoundland sealers who needed to put bread on the table. The intelligentsia and media of central Canada tended to side with people over seals. We were no longer white knights in shining armor to everyone.

On March 2, 1976, Eileen and I joined a small group of Greenpeacers who boarded the trans-Canada train in Vancouver for the five-day journey to Newfoundland, where we had announced our intention to stop the baby seal slaughter. We took the ferry from Sydney, Nova Scotia, to Port aux Basques in Newfoundland and rented a van to drive up to St. Anthony at the northern tip of the island. Halfway up the road we encountered a blizzard of arctic proportions. Snow built up on the van’s fan belt and threw it off, stranding us in hostile territory in the dark. We knocked on a nearby inn and were welcomed in for the night. The owners had seen us on TV earlier and were happy to have us staying with them. It was our first taste of Newfoundland hospitality.

The situation seemed a little different as we approached St. Anthony, a regional center of 5,000 people, many of whom had a history in the seal hunt and whose families were still employed to harvest the seal pups. What appeared to be a lynch mob had assembled on the outskirts of town. There were a lot of pickup trucks and the boys were drinking mickeys of whiskey and rum. One guy was displaying an actual noose and shook it at us as we approached. But they didn’t block our passage; they acted as a kind of escort as we made our way to Decker’s Boarding House.

The proprietors, Emily and Nate Decker, were there to greet us, despite the fact that the mob surrounded us when we got out of our van. They jeered and demanded we leave. We tried to make peace with them by explaining that our main target was the big factory sealing ships, not the little guys like them. Eventually the crowd dispersed and we settled into what would be our headquarters for the next two weeks.

The plan was to set up a base camp in tents on Belle Isle, a windswept frozen rock in the strait between Newfoundland and Labrador. We had rented two Bell Jet Ranger helicopters for the expedition. They ferried a group of us out to Belle Isle, where we were in range of the sealing grounds, which lay 50 miles off the coast among the ice floes. We put up our tents and bedded in for the night.

Morning ushered in a cold clear day, perfect conditions for flying to the ice. The helicopters arrived early and we set out to find the sealing ships. Within an hour we had spotted them. The potential for confrontation was made difficult by the Seal Protection Regulations, a law that made it illegal to fly lower than 2000 feet above any seal on the ice or to approach within one-half nautical mile of any seal without a permit. Of course we Greenpeacers had no permits. We had, in fact, been refused them. Only the seal hunters had permits.

The ostensible purpose of this law was to protect the seals from the noise of aircraft and to avoid disturbing them in their breeding grounds. Its real purpose, however, was to prevent photos of the hunt being taken, and, in our case, to prevent interference with the hunt. The law should have been titled the Seal Hunt Protection Regulations.

We would have defied the regulations in a second, but our pilots were responsible for half a million dollars worth of helicopters that belonged to the helicopter company. We had no choice but to comply. This meant a long hike across treacherous broken ice fields. About an hour after landing we finally arrived at the scene of the slaughter. There was blood everywhere. The sounds of fear from mother seals and the whack of the hakapik on baby seals’ skulls filled the otherwise still air.

Eileen was likely the first woman ever to witness this carnage in its 200-year history. She was certainly the first woman to try to protect a baby seal from a hunter’s club as she waded into the fray, throwing herself in front of a sealer as he approached his next victim. He pushed her aside, clubbed the pup, and skinned it in 30 seconds. The photographer from Agent-France Presse captured Eileen as she tried over and over to save a seal.

As crew photographer, I was busy with another confrontation. Bob Hunter and Paul Watson had positioned themselves in front of a 150-foot sealing vessel that was pushing its way through the ice. “We’re not moving,” yelled Bob to a man leaning over the bow. The ship lurched forward, splitting the foot-thick ice floe into shiny chunks. “They’re not movin’, Capt’n,” hollered the watchman. The cameras were whirring and clicking as the big bow bore down on the two tiny men. This was without doubt the first time people had stood in front of a ship at sea to try to stop it.

No more than ten feet from their backs the ship stopped, the captain cursing a blue streak as he backed off. We had stopped the progress of a sealing vessel and slowed the slaughter just a little bit. It was a symbolic victory but that’s what we really needed, something to turn the tone in the media. A headline such as “Greenpeace Stymies Seal Hunters” was a perfect tool to get people’s attention and to indicate progress in the campaign.

When we got back to the helicopters we discovered that Federal Fisheries officers were charging our pilots with landing too close to a seal. After we had landed a seal had hauled itself onto the ice through its hole and was less than half a mile from the machines. Our pilots were forcibly grounded, so this was to be our last trip to the ice that year. But we didn’t give up immediately. We returned to our base camp on Belle Isle, hoping our lawyers could figure out how to get the choppers flying again.

As we settled into our pup tents for the night we felt the wind coming up. In the morning we were greeted by a blizzard with 60 mile per hour winds, which confined us to our three-person pup tents that you couldn’t stand up in. The helicopters were grounded back in St. Anthony and we had no radio contact. It was three long days in subzero weather; the only time we left the tents was to do our business, and this was a most unpleasant experience as there was no shelter from the storm. To make matters worse, we ran out of fuel for our small camp stoves and had to resort to burning helicopter fuel. It produced more soot than heat, causing us to dub our shelters “black-lung tents.” I had never been in such abysmal conditions in my life. At times we feared we would freeze to death, but we had survival suits and warm sleeping bags and the food rations were sufficient. As far as I could tell we were the only living things in the vicinity with the exception of a big black raven that braved the driving snow. I couldn’t imagine what it was finding to eat in this desolate place.

Finally the blizzard ended and we heard the
whup-whup
of a helicopter approaching. We were tired and cold and dying for a hot meal. When the first chopper landed, I was shocked to see Paul Watson, who was the leader of the expedition, get on board, leaving a group of us behind to wait for the second machine to arrive. I’d had a couple of run-ins with Paul before, but this really bothered me. No leader takes off in a risky situation, leaving half his crew, including a woman crew member, behind. We did all get off Belle Isle safely in the end and decided to call it a day. We had made a big splash in the international media with our film and photos of the confrontation and we vowed to return the following year.

Save the Whales 1976

Bob Hunter and Paul Spong were now spending a lot of time in San Francisco working with David Tussman to establish a strong base for fundraising there. We were determined to get a larger boat for the whale campaign in 1976, one that could really go deep-sea and chase the Russians across the Pacific. We found the
James Bay
, an ex-Canadian minesweeper, whose twin 1200 horsepower diesels could make 18 knots, more than enough speed to outrun the factory whaling ships. It took over a month to prepare the
James Bay
for the expedition as the engines needed work, and the interior of the ship had been more or less gutted. I found myself cutting plywood for three weeks, building bunks and galleys for the crew. On June 13, 1976, we set out from Vancouver with a complement of 32 volunteers from seven countries.

We made our way down the west coast in favorable weather, then sailed up the Columbia River to pay a visit to our supporters in Portland and to raise awareness of the campaign. While in Portland we received word that a Soviet whaling fleet was approaching the California coast, so we cast off for San Francisco, where we would take on final fuel and provisions for a deep-sea voyage. Our San Francisco office was fully up and running now and had been very successful in raising funds for our mission. We made a quick turn-around from San Francisco and headed out to sea.

As we passed under the Golden Gate Bridge, the wind picked up. By early evening we were bucking into a full gale and had to change course to the north. One by one many of the 32 crew members succumbed to seasickness and collapsed in their bunks. The storm raged through the night and by morning only a few of us were left standing. Unlike your typical maritime crew, about half of the
James Bay
crew were vegetarians. This resulted in an interesting revelation. At the height of the storm, I was able to truthfully write on the wall of the ship’s head that every single vegetarian was sick in his or her bunk and that the only people capable of operating the ship were the meat-eating, whiskey-drinking, chain-smoking members of the crew. While vegetarians generally cite health or spiritual reasons for their avoidance of meat, this real-life situation suggests what is commonly referred to as a “weak constitution” might play an important role in one’s choice of things to ingest. I’m sure there are many people with strong constitutions who choose to be vegetarians, but we didn’t seem to have any on board the
James Bay
. Thankfully, I did quit smoking some years later, after a difficult struggle with the addiction. Meat and alcohol still remain essential parts of my diet, however.

By this time, we had become the fortunate beneficiaries of some inside information. After our first whale voyage, we had befriended Robert O. Taunt III—Bob to us —who joined the San Francisco Greenpeace office as a director. Bob was well connected in Californian political circles. In particular he knew Congressman Leo Ryan, who would later be tragically murdered during the Jonestown massacre in Guyana in November 1978.

It was arranged through Leo’s office in Washington that the intelligence services would provide him, on a daily basis, the previous day’s position of the Soviet whaling fleets. This information was relayed to our shore-based radio station and from there to the ship via shortwave.

The crew and pilots of the first campaign to Save the Seals pose on the ice floes off Newfoundland in March 1976. In back from the left, Bernd Firnung (pilot), Doug Pilgrim (Newfoundland guide), Michael Chechick (film producer), Ron Precious, (cameraman). In front from the left, Paul Watson, Bob Hunter, Jack Wallace (pilot), Eileen Moore, and me.

In order to keep the position confidential, we devised a code that could not be cracked unless one had inside information. We took a page at random from the San Francisco telephone directory and made three copies, one for Leo’s office, one for our shore radio station, and one for the
James Bay
. The position in north latitude and west longitude was coded by sequentially going down the address column in the directory and then across to the correct letter or number. So the sequence 36-5 meant go down 36 and across 5 in the directory. This system worked for us for three years, even after Leo was murdered, and it was the real reason that it was possible for us to find the whaling fleet in the middle of the Pacific. The funny thing was, no reporter ever asked us why we were so good at finding the whalers.