Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist (21 page)

On the
Rainbow Warrior’s
way back from Iceland, the U.K. Mariners Union informed our crew that nuclear waste was being dumped into the Atlantic 200 miles off the coast of Spain. For some years the European countries with nuclear power plants had been pooling their low-and medium-level nuclear wastes, putting them in oil drums and dumping them into the Atlantic. There was some evidence that the U.K. was slipping spent nuclear fuel from naval submarines into the drums. British ships were carrying this out under the auspices of the London Dumping Convention, an international body set up to regulate marine disposal of waste. It caused one to wonder, If it was acceptable to dump nuclear waste in the sea, then what couldn’t be dumped? This was clearly a job for Greenpeace.

In the most dramatic confrontation since the first encounter with the Soviet whalers, the crew of the
Rainbow Warrior
piloted their Zodiacs into position beneath the platform where the barrels of nuclear waste were rolled off into the sea. Time after time, the Greenpeacers attempted to block the barrels, only to be repelled by high-pressure water cannons wielded by the dumping ship’s crew. Finally a Zodiac positioned itself squarely under the platform as the barrel was jettisoned. The heavily laden barrel fell and crushed the bow of the Zodiac, dramatically flipping the driver into the sea, from where he had to be rescued by his fellow campaigners. All this was filmed and broadcast around the world to an unbelieving audience as no one had ever exposed nuclear dumping before. Greenpeace Europe was now on the map in a big way.

Meanwhile, the
Peacock
arrived back in Los Angeles from the annual whaling campaign to considerable fanfare and the media paid the usual great attention. However, I felt as if we had put on the same show once too often. It was difficult to break through to the top spot in the news and there just wasn’t the zing we had had in previous years. Sure there was the big party the night we arrived, which more than a few Hollywood celebrities attended. I wandered around the room wondering what more we could possibly do to bring attention to the plight of the whales. We had gone to sea for four years in a row, sailed thousands of miles, confronted the whalers on many occasions and captured it all on film; and yet whaling continued unabated. We had sent representatives to the International Whaling Commission year after year to lobby for the whales and had even recruited small island-nations, such as the Seychelles, to join the IWC to vote against the whalers. Now it seemed all for naught. As the celebration raged into the night, I fell into a state of despair.

There were plenty of reasons for despair in the fall of 1978. Shortly after we returned to Vancouver we heard the grisly news that Congressman Leo Ryan had been gunned down while investigating the People’s Temple cult in Jonestown, Guyana. The mass suicide that followed caused revulsion around the world. Greenpeace had lost a great ally.

It had now become clear that our San Francisco office was determined to break away from the Greenpeace Foundation, taking with it our history, our money, and our name. They were simply willing to take advantage of the fact that we had not done our legal homework and that we were weakened by our debt while they had money rolling in. Their attitude emboldened all the other branch offices in the U.S. and Canada to break away too, leaving the founding organization in a very difficult position.

Determined to resolve the situation, we called a meeting in the fall of 1978 that was attended by representatives of all the Greenpeace offices, including the European groups represented by David McTaggart. Dubbed an international meeting, it was the first time all the leaders of the various new groups had come together. It was exhilarating for all of us to meet around the same table at the Vancouver home of our accountant Bill Gannon. However, the exhilaration did not last as the meeting degenerated into factional disputes over who owned what rights to the Greenpeace name in what country. We adjourned agreeing to think about these issues over Christmas.

In the spring of 1979, we called a second international meeting and chose a neutral ground at the University of British Columbia. The Greenpeace Foundation proposed we form an international board of directors that would see the founding organization in Vancouver in control but that would include a number of key leaders from the other offices. The other offices, San Francisco in particular, asserted that nothing short of autonomy for their organizations was acceptable. After two days the meeting ended with the other offices staging a walkout. The negotiations were over.

Most galling was the fact that David Tussman, the lawyer who had volunteered to help us establish our U.S. group, now led the San Francisco office, and by example the other offices, into open rebellion against the organization that he owed his living to. This was clearly a breech of his fiduciary duty and contrary to everything he had sworn to uphold as a member of the legal profession in California. To this day I believe we should have sued to have his license to practice law revoked for betraying his client. But our backs were to the wall, and we didn’t really believe in attacking our own people.

Realizing there was no possibility of resolving the issue through negotiations, in June 1979 the Greenpeace Foundation filed a lawsuit against Greenpeace America in San Francisco for breach of trademark and copyright. The lawsuit focused on the right to use the name Greenpeace for fundraising and publicity. From a legal perspective the case was cut-and-dried. Peter Ballem, who took on our case without charge, advised us that we were certainly the legitimate owners of the word
Greenpeace
, and because there was no question that we had created the San Francisco organization we would win in court. The political reality was not so cut-and-dried, however.

The political reality hit me squarely in the face in the form of a cream pie when I was ambushed by members of the Seattle group while leaving my office late one afternoon. This surprised and humiliated me, but we had no choice but to stay the course if we wanted to keep Greenpeace whole. In their zeal to become “independent,” San Francisco and the other offices seemed oblivious to the fact that if they got their way, then anyone could call themselves Greenpeace and start raising money using the images from our campaigns. The thought of Greenpeace degenerating in this way was my worst nightmare. I wanted desperately to keep the organization together as I realized how powerful it could be if it didn’t disintegrate.

Early in the legal battle I made a tactical error that I still regret. It was the campaigner in me that caused me to travel with Eileen to San Francisco to hold a media conference to explain why we were suing our office there. First, the San Francisco media instinctively sided with their locals, so the coverage was not at all good from our perspective. Worse, this gave the San Francisco office the opportunity to use our public utterances as the basis of a counter-lawsuit. They filed a nasty legal action, not against the Greenpeace Foundation but against myself and Eileen personally, for libel and defamation. We had simply explained the nature of the lawsuit to the media, and that we believed that the San Francisco office’s effort to secede was illegal. I was served at my home in Vancouver with a writ claiming $1 million in damages. It was clearly an act of intimidation and to some extent it worked, especially as it devastated Eileen.

Having set a lawsuit in motion, I traveled to England in July to attend the International Whaling Commission meeting with the purpose of talking to David McTaggart about the implications of the lawsuit. In what I later found to be typical fashion he refused to meet with me, sending Greenpeace France representative Remi Parmentier in his stead. I told Remi that the Greenpeace groups in Europe should be concerned about the legal action because they would also be affected by the outcome. I later found out Remi’s report had been interpreted by McTaggart as a threat when in fact it had clearly been meant as a diplomatic communication. I was probably a slow learner, but I was gradually finding out how Machiavellian the politics of environmentalism were, especially when David McTaggart was involved.

Thankfully we received some very good news during that summer of our discontent. The IWC voted 12 to 2 to end the sperm whale hunt in the North Pacific, effectively banning factory whaling in the world’s largest ocean. For a few days we all set our differences aside to celebrate a victory that had taken five years of hard campaigning to achieve. It was only the first of many anti-whaling decisions that would see factory whaling banned altogether by 1981.

When I returned home, I realized we were fast becoming surrounded by our own creation. Every Greenpeace office from Seattle to Boston to Toronto to Paris was aligning itself against the people and the organization that had made them successful and famous in their countries, their cities, and their communities. At least the lawsuit gave all these previously disjointed organizations a common cause—opposition to us!

During the summer I made several trips to San Francisco to try to resolve the impasse. At one point David Tussman and a majority of his board agreed to sign a contract whereby funds would be shared among the offices, but at the last minute they refused to do so. We heard that David McTaggart had come over from Europe to visit the Boston and San Francisco offices in an effort to get their support for his proposal. David’s idea for Greenpeace was that we should organize on national lines with each country getting one vote. This served his purpose perfectly as he had three countries—England, Holland, and France—squarely in his camp. Canada and the U.S. were the only other countries with substantial organizations, so David’s formula would automatically give him control. I had to admit his proposal was at least practical, and I also had to admit he was way ahead of the rest of us as a politician.

Bob Hunter, who was still on our board but had no executive position, staunchly opposed the lawsuit against San Francisco. He preferred the idea that some kind of cosmic intervention would take place and felt that the lawsuit was somehow beneath us. Of course his passive attitude was precisely why we had ended up in such disarray in the first place, but there was no telling him so. He had often said, “May a thousand Greenpeace offices bloom,” but he had no regard for the legal mess this approach invited. Bob openly sided with McTaggart, and he managed to convince our lawyer, Peter Ballem, that the case should be settled along McTaggart’s lines. Now not only had our San Francisco lawyer betrayed us, but our own lawyer had decided not to take instructions from his client but to “give us advice” that the majority of our board didn’t agree with. It was enough to make one wonder about lawyers who offer to work for a charitable cause for free.

All this bickering didn’t keep us from starting new campaigns here and there. Earlier in the year we had been approached by Jim Wright, an accomplished landscape photographer and naturalist from Smithers in northern British Columbia. He told us big-game trophy hunters from the U.S. and Europe were coming to Spatsizi Provincial Park and were permitted to kill grizzly bears, mountain sheep, mountain goats, wolves, and just about anything else that moved. “It’s one thing to allow such a practice outside the parks,” Jim appealed, “but why should we permit trophy hunting for our finest wildlife specimens in a Class A Wilderness Park, where it is theoretically illegal to so much as pick a flower?” After researching the subject, we agreed with his point of view. Trophy hunting, where the main objective is to obtain souvenir parts of the animal for display, certainly can’t be compared to subsistence hunting for food. We decided to send an expedition to Spatsizi to confront the hunters and their guides.

Representatives gathered for Greenpeace’s first meeting to attempt to settle the dispute between the Greenpeace Foundation and the Greenpeace branches in North America, Europe, and New Zealand. David McTaggart, who soon garnered the support of all the branch groups, is in the second row at the far left. I am in the back row at the far right. This photo always brings back a flood of memories. photo: Rex Weyler

British Columbia is divided into Guide Outfitting areas and foreign nationals must employ a guide to hunt wildlife. The guiding license for the Spatsizi Park was owned by the Collingwood brothers, a couple of delightful hayseeds who were well established in the area. They set up tent camps and laid in supplies before the hunting season began. Once it started, they took their clients into the wilderness on horseback for days at a time. They packed a lot of rifles.