Obituary: Bob Hunter

Bob Hunter with the doomed Rainbow Warrior. File picture / Herald

Bob Hunter, Greenpeace co-founder and first president. Died aged 62.

Bob Hunter, the Canadian journalist who co-founded Greenpeace, helped introduce the world to effective environmental activism.

In the early 1970s, when a columnist with the Vancouver Sun, Hunter attended meetings with like-minded activists.

The discussions centred on how to pressure the United States to end its nuclear testing programme in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska.

It was the beginning of Greenpeace. Hunter christened the group the "Don't Make a Wave Committee" - the name denoting the disturbance a nuclear blast would make in the oceans.

It had nothing to do with the media disturbances he would make over the ensuing years in crusades that, under the Greenpeace banner, ranged from halting nuclear testing to putting a stop to the hunting of whales and seals and the pollution of oceans.

Time magazine placed him in a recent top 10 of the world's eco-heroes of the 20th century.

His early anti-nuclear committee agreed that the best place to protest against the tests was where they were happening.

On September 15, 1971, Hunter and 11 idealistic colleagues rented a rusting fishing vessel, the Phyllis Cormack, and sailed it to waters just off Amchitka Island, Alaska, where the testing was based.

They renamed the vessel Greenpeace - thus creating an organisation that has since become a byword for environmental activism, with 2.5 million members in 40 countries.

At the time, Hunter underestimated the impact that the ship's voyage would have on him and his friends.

He wrote often-hilarious dispatches for publication in the Sun. Those reports from Alaskan waters produced a tizzy of indecision in Washington. President Richard Nixon and the US Supreme Court came under pressure to suspend the tests and the ensuing row between Washington and Ottawa caused the closure of the US-Canadian border for the first time since 1812.

In the end, America tested the atomic bomb in the Aleutians.

But two months after the Greenpeace contingent left, Nixon abandoned the tests and declared Amchitka Island a wildlife refuge.

Hunter was not alone in establishing Greenpeace, but his zeal and skill at media manipulation earned him leadership of the group in 1973.

He also invented the term "rainbow warriors", describing the organisation's growing band of activists (the name was apparently inspired by a Canadian Indian book of native myths). By 1973 Hunter had been named the first president of Greenpeace and he remained long enough to see its transition into a global movement.

Rainbow Warrior was also the name given to the ocean-going ship that Greenpeace was later to purchase for its campaigns.

It took Hunter to the Arctic, where he joined others in daubing the pelts of seal pups with paint to make their skins worthless to hunters and confronted the harpoons of Russian whale hunters.

Arguably the most famous of all Greenpeace incidents was the Auckland wharfside sinking of the first Rainbow Warrior by French agents in July 1985.

Nothing could have better illustrated French frustrations over Greenpeace than this rather bumbling act of sabotage, which also resulted in a death.

Three years later the organisation had a new ship, Rainbow Warrior II.

Hunter eventually left Greenpeace to focus on writing books and columns.

The current Greenpeace executive director, Gerd Leipold, said Hunter was "inspiring in his refusal to accept the limits of the practical or the probable ... Greenpeace will forever bear the mark of his crazy, super-optimistic faith in the wisdom of tilting at windmills."

Few would question the impact of a man who, perhaps more than anyone else, initiated the modern environmental movement.