Farewell to a Warrior of the Rainbow: Robert Hunter By Mike Roselle

 Bob Hunter’s was a life full of mystery and adventure. Refusing to live in the past, his later writings on history and the environment were among his best. They should be read in every classroom where the media and environmental activism is discussed. For me, it would be hard to imagine a world without Greenpeace, and even harder to imagine Greenpeace without Bob Hunter. His boundless optimism, his keen understanding of modern media and his grounding in the Quaker tradition of non-violence and witnessing gave Greenpeace its essence.

The voyage to Alaska by the Phillys Cormack to protest the U.S. Military’s atmospheric testing of large yield weapons of mass destruction was not just another anti-nuclear campaign but a seminal event that would usher in a new way of looking at, and interacting with, the world around us. Indeed it would be hard to overestimate the importance of what Hunter and his motley band of cohorts accomplished in the early years, and the debt that we owe all of them for their courage and foresight. Without Greenpeace I think it is safe to say that there would not be an Earth First! or a Rainforest Action Network. More importantly there would probably not be a nuclear test ban treaty and we would all be exposed today to significantly higher levels of toxic radiation from atmospheric nuclear testing, and be living under an even greater threat of nuclear war.

Today, Greenpeace is a large sophisticated international environmental pressure group with a long list of accomplishments in the field of conservation and nuclear non-proliferation. Greenpeace now has offices in 24 countries, and is running campaigns from the Arctic to Antarctica, from the Amazon rainforests to the boreal forests of Siberia, from the Bearing Sea to the South Pacific. The current generation of Greenpeace activists have among their ranks some of the most experienced, accomplished and dedicated campaigners on the planet. Yet I can’t help but thinking that Bob Hunter had something quite different in mind when he and the rest of the Greenpeace founders began to build a new movement that would unite the anti-nuclear and environmental movements into a potent force for social change.

In 1970, ecology was a brand new word and many people thought the world was on the brink of a catastrophic nuclear war. With the Viet Nam war raging across Southeast Asia, atmospheric nuclear testing by the superpowers in full swing and the release of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring came a sense of hopelessness and despair.  Bob Hunter thought the newly released photo of the Earth taken from the Apollo mission to the moon would forever change the way people treated what was now known to be a tiny fragile speck of life in the endless ocean of space, and he more than anyone believed that we were on the cusp of a new awakening, a new enlightenment that would bring the people of the world together to stave off the Earth’s destruction. And while this has yet to happen, and sometimes it seems farther away than ever, that brave little band of crazies on the Phillys Cormack have proved to the world that anything is possible if you still have hope and are not afraid of ridicule or failure.

In Canada Bob Hunter is as close as any environmentalist has ever been to a national hero. Yet here he is barely known, and his passing received but a brief mention in the press. Even many environmental activists here in the U.S. are scarcely aware of the tremendous impact he had and the enormous contribution he made to our movement. Bob Hunter will be missed, but his spirit lives on in all of us who continue the struggle. His generous spirit, sense of humor and his undaunted courage should serve as an inspiration to us all in these troubled times. Without Bob Hunter the situation we face here on Earth would be much worse than it is now, and we would not have that shining example of how a small group of committed people could truly change the world for the better.
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