Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist (27 page)

Excited by the fact that I was participating in a sustainable new industry and producing good food, I approached my fellow Greenpeacers for support. “You know, we are against whaling, sealing, driftnet fishing, bottom dragging, and just about every way people are getting food from the ocean,” I said, then added, “How about if we come out in favor of sustainable aquaculture as a solution to the depletion of wild sea life?” I was surprised with the sharp rebuke. “No way; aquaculture is causing the destruction of coastal mangrove forests in the tropics,” one of my fellow Greenpeacers shot back “Okay,” I replied, “Let’s not endorse that kind of aquaculture. In fact, why don’t we define the meaning of sustainable aquaculture for the world so that we become leaders in providing the solution to getting food from the sea?” My entreaties fell on deaf ears. The only other scientist in the organization, Sidney Holt, was a staunch anti-aquaculture advocate who had the ear of Greenpeace chairman, David McTaggart. I thought, If Greenpeace is against farming fish, what on earth are we in favor of? It was my first brush with disillusion over a question of environmental policy. I let it slide and got on with the business of building our salmon farm.

My younger brother, Michael, agreed to live in Winter Harbour and manage the operation. He had just returned from Europe, where he had married Sophie, who was from southern France. Eileen and I, Peter and Marilyn, Mike and Sophie and our families spent the summer of 1984 building a small salmon hatchery on the shore near the mouth of the Galato River. It rained every day of August as we laid out nearly a mile of 6-inch PVC waterline up the river to supply the hatchery. We purchased 100,000 Chinook salmon eggs and placed them in incubators. (The eggs were surplus to the government’s wild salmon enhancement program.) The farming had begun. We started to build the net pens and floating walkways we would need when the young salmon were ready to go in the sea.

A wonderful biological transformation occurs in the lifecycle of salmon when they prepare for the transition from freshwater to saltwater. This is one of the more fascinating metamorphoses in nature, changing from the need to keep water out of the body in fresh water to the challenge of keeping water in the body in seawater. Chinook salmon are about four inches long when they suddenly turn from dark gray to shiny silver. This transformation is called
smolting
, derived from the same origin as
smelting
, as in smelting metals like iron and silver. The smolts, as the newly transformed salmon are called, are as silvery as a newly minted ingot and the sight of thousands of them circling in a big pond in the hatchery is mesmerizing.

Under the Rainbow

We had already put our first batch of smolts in the net pens when I traveled to Auckland, New Zealand, on July 10, 1985, with a small group of international directors to greet the arrival of the
Rainbow Warrior
and her crew. The
Warrior
, affectionately known as the R-Dub by insiders, was about to embark on another campaign against French nuclear testing at Mururoa, now conducted underground in the fragile coral atoll. The
Warrior
had recently been refit with two tall masts and auxiliary sails, giving her a beautiful profile at sea.

We arrived on board the ship in time for lunch and spent the afternoon sitting in the galley shooting the breeze with the crew and exchanging the latest Greenpeace gossip. Everyone felt upbeat about the campaign, as there was some hope France’s new socialist president, Francois Mitterrand, might be more sympathetic to the antinuclear movement than his right-wing predecessors. As it turned out, that was a very bad call.

After sharing dinner with the crew, the rest of us were driven to a rowing club graciously loaned to us for our stay. By midnight we were mostly settled into our bunks in the dormitory. At 10 past midnight the phone rang and Steve Sawyer answered it. Hardly able to speak, he reported to us that the
Rainbow Warrior
had been sunk at the dock 10 minutes earlier by two violent explosions. Our photographer, Fernando Periera, was missing. While Steve arranged for a taxi, I put in a call to David McTaggart, who was attending the International Whaling Commission meetings in Brighton, England, where it was midday. David immediately knew the French had sabotaged our ship and I concurred. Who else would do such a thing? We got in the taxis and made for the harbor, where we found a distraught and demoralized crew.

The beautiful
Rainbow Warrior
was sunk in 20 feet of water with her bow and wheelhouse protruding at an unnatural angle. Media people were beginning to congregate, police were everywhere, and the crew found refuge in a harbor building at the top of the dock. We began the process of piecing events together.

The first explosion had jolted the ship just before midnight, while a few crew members were still enjoying a nightcap around the galley table. Most were still out at the pub. Captain Jon Castle immediately went below to assess the situation and saw water gushing in through a gaping hole in the hull in the engine room. She would sink quickly, so he ordered everyone to get off. It was an easy step onto the dock. But Fernando had $10,000 worth of camera gear in his bunkroom in the stern compartment, so he rushed aft and down the hatch to retrieve it. The second explosion rocked the ship a minute or two after the first one, and it came from the stern, where Fernando was packing up his gear. He never emerged.

The saboteurs had been methodical. They placed the first bomb next to the engine room, a large compartment below decks, to sink the
Warrior
quickly; they put the second one at the propeller/rudder assembly to disable the boat for good. At this they proved successful. The
Rainbow Warrior
would never sail again.

It fell to me, as someone who remains calm in times of trauma, to take on the task of liaison with the authorities and to act as spokesperson with the media. The media wanted to know who had done the deed, and I had to be very careful at first to insist we didn’t know. We quickly determined it was almost certainly an act of sabotage, but you don’t accuse a country of terrorism unless you have some proof. The proof wasn’t long in coming. The police found a small Zodiac inflatable boat abandoned on the other side of the harbor. It had a label that said, “Made in France.” This was a clue of Inspector Clouseau proportions. Later it would be revealed that the French government, right up to President Mitterrand, had authorized the operation.

Of course the French denied any involvement, and even when it became clear the French military was involved, the politicians proclaimed their innocence. It was soon learned that French operatives had illegally entered New Zealand waters in a sailboat two months before the bombing, smuggling the Zodiac, explosives, and dive gear into the country. They infiltrated the Greenpeace New Zealand offices, found out when the
Warrior
would arrive, and laid their evil plan. It was determined that two frogmen, trained as the French equivalent of the U.S. Navy Seals, had placed plastic explosives on the
Rainbow Warrior
‘s hull. At the time I believed they were meant to explode simultaneously. I still can’t think of a reason to have them go off a minute or two minutes apart. I suppose the timers were not synchronized perfectly. This tiny technical imperfection caused the death of a fellow campaigner, the first and only death a Greenpeace member has suffered in action.

Two of the French operatives, Sophie and Alain Turenge, later identified as Commander Alain Mafart and Captain Dominique Prieur of the French secret service, were apprehended at the airport before they could get out of the country. Charged with murder, they plea-bargained and were tried and convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 10 years in a New Zealand jail. A few months later, under increasingly brutal trade sanctions imposed by France, New Zealand allowed them to be transferred to Hao Atoll in French Polynesia, where France promised they would serve out the remainder of their sentence. Within two years they were both repatriated to France to a hero’s welcome. So much for justice in the Republic of France.

But there was some justice. United Nations Secretary-General Mr. Xavier Perez de Cuellar stepped in as mediator and awarded Greenpeace an $8 million settlement for the loss of the
Rainbow Warrior
. Not bad when you consider it had been purchased for about $47,000 in 1978. Fernando Periera’s estranged wife was also awarded an undisclosed settlement, rumored to be of a similar magnitude. All parties except Fernando and his young son received adequate compensation.

One of the best slogans in Greenpeace’s history found itself on a button commemorating the first anniversary of the bombing: “You Can’t Sink a Rainbow.” If it hadn’t been for the loss of life, it would have been the biggest giggle room affair in our history. France overreacted to such an extreme that it deserved the ridicule heaped on it. No other story in Greenpeace’s history has received as much media coverage as the bombing of the
Rainbow Warrior
. France handed Greenpeace its biggest mindbomb on a platter. I still won’t order French wine in restaurants; it’s overpriced and it reminds me of France’s dastardly deeds in the South Pacific. And what makes France think it has a right to continue to subjugate the people of Polynesia under colonial rule in today’s world?

I departed from New Zealand with a renewed determination to chart a different course. I could understand how the bombing might cause some in Greenpeace to harden their resolve to fight French nuclear testing, and I supported that view. But it wasn’t for me. I was simply exhausted from carrying the flag for 15 years and I needed a fresh start. I wanted to move from constant confrontation, always telling people what they should stop doing, to trying to find consensus about what we should do instead. I had been against three or four things every day of my life for the past 15 years. I now decided to figure out what I was in favor of for a change. I wanted to find solutions rather than problems and to seek win-win resolutions rather than unending confrontations. The salmon farm was starting to look like a pretty good exit strategy from my 15-year Greenpeace apprenticeship.

I had personal reasons to move on as well as professional ones. My two boys, Jon and Nick, who was born in October, 1984, were growing up with a mostly absentee father. I had been living out of a suitcase for far too long. There was also the fact that I had gone into my Greenpeace career straight out of university. It was the only job I had known other than my stint in the logging camp. I wanted to go back and take care of the home fires for a change. I wanted to make a contribution to sustainable development in my home province of British Columbia.

Chapter 12 -
Greenpeace Sails Off the Deep End

Aquaculture wasn’t the only issue that gave me reason to question my continued involvement in Greenpeace. Beginning in 1982 a campaigner from Greenpeace Germany, Renate Kroesa, had led the effort to end the production of the herbicide 2,4,5-T, otherwise know as Agent Orange. It had gained notoriety during the Vietnam War when it was used to defoliate vast areas of forest to expose Viet Cong troops. The only factory still manufacturing this chemical was in New Zealand, so Renate traveled there and eventually succeeded in closing it down. This was the first Greenpeace toxics campaign involving dioxin and other chlorine-containing chemicals.

Soon after, scientists discovered that the effluent from pulp and paper mills contained small amounts of dioxin. The detection of dioxin was due to the radically improved diagnostic tools for measuring minute quantities of substances, down to parts per billion and parts per trillion. The dioxins were being formed by a reaction between the chlorine gas used for bleaching the paper and organic matter in the pulp. Dioxins are known carcinogens, so it wasn’t long before Greenpeace launched a campaign for “chlorine-free” paper mills. This became a worldwide campaign but was particularly targeted at the Canadian pulp and paper industry.

As soon as the industry became aware of this problem, it began working to solve it. At first it seemed likely pulp mills would need to eliminate chlorine altogether and switch to much more costly ozone and oxygen bleaching processes. As it turned out a combination of secondary treatment, similar to advanced sewage treatment, and switching from chlorine gas to chlorine dioxide, did the job of reducing dioxin to below detectable levels. (Chemists never assume that any substance is at zero; we can only be certain down to the level at which we are technically able to measure a substance.) Then there was the communications challenge of explaining that using something called chlorine dioxide eliminated dioxins! From the time of detection, it took one of the world’s largest industries only five years to research, develop, and implement the solution. But Greenpeace has never accepted this approach, sticking to its “chlorine-free” position to this day.
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