Bob Hunter, love him or hate him, died the other day of prostate cancer. I would list him as one the most influential Canadians ever... He, almost single handedly created the modern environmental movement...
I thought some of you might be interested to read one of the many obits written about him.
LINK
World News
May 03, 2005
Bob Hunter: The Times obituary
Bob Hunter was one of the original eco-warriors. A man with a knack for words - he coined the term eco-warrior - he was also a man of action who inspired a new brand of personal environmental activism.
He was nearly killed when a Russian whale hunter’s harpoon parted his hair as he bobbed in a rubber dinghy in the cold waters of the north Pacific between the whaler’s bows and its quarry. On another occasion he narrowly escaped being killed by a hunter’s icebreaker when he was dyeing the white pelts of baby harp seals to make them worthless.
He was a prolific journalist, the author of more than a dozen books, a broadcaster, a scathingly humorous critic of polluters, dumpers and exploiters, and a celebrity spokesman for environmental activism, but his greatest claim to fame was his role in the founding of Greenpeace in 1971.
Shaggy, pony-tailed and outrageous in the best anarchic traditions of the late-Sixties hippie counter-culture - legend has it that he was the first reporter to wear blue jeans to work in the offices of the Vancouver Sun newspaper - Hunter was an admirer of the ideas of his fellow-Canadian, the communications guru Marshall McLuhan. He put McLuhan’s celebrated dictum that "the medium is the message" into dramatic, mediagenic practice and took his environmentalist message to a vast global audience.
Another of the punchy new expressions Hunter coined was "mind bomb", to describe an event which leaves an indelible image on the mind’s eye. The first "mind bomb" spawned Greenpeace in 1971. Incensed by American plans to carry out an underground nuclear test on Amchitka, one of the Aleutian islands off Alaska, a mixed bunch of activists, Hunter among them, bought an old fishing boat and set sail from Vancouver to vanquish the might of the United States military machine.
The boat was too slow, the protesters never reached the test site and the nuclear blast went ahead as planned - but the media had been watching and the words "Green" and "Peace", emblazoned on coloured panels hung from the fishing boat’s bridge, detonated a chain reaction of eco-activism in North America and round the world. Within the year nuclear testing on Amchitka was halted, and the island was declared a wildlife sanctuary.
Hunter, the proud possessor of Greenpeace membership card No 000, became the organisation’s first president in 1973 and helped to lead it from a rickety rented office with a handful of volunteers in Vancouver to an international movement with branches in more than 40 countries and more than 2.5 million members.
Greenpeace’s next media mind bomb was its shipborne protests against the French nuclear tests at the Pacific atoll of Moruroa in 1972 and 1973. After much heavyhanded intimidation, a French naval vessel rammed and boarded the Greenpeace flagship - a modest yacht called Vega - and beat its skipper, David McTaggart, so severely that he lost the sight of one eye.
The nuclear test went ahead but the world was outraged, doubly so when film of the beating, which the French authories categorically denied, was smuggled to the world’s media. The French navy won the battle but it was clear that Greenpeace, armed with little more than idealism and the ability to manipulate the media with powerful imagery, was winning the war.
The juxtaposition at Amchitka of nuclear weaponry and endangered wildlife foreshadowed a fault-line, mirrored in the name Greenpeace itself, between those who saw the movement as campaigning for disarmament and those who saw the protection of the environment as its priority. The implicit division led to fierce arguments among the group’s early activists, especially as their ranks began to be swelled with anti-whaling protesters. Hunter fell out with his friend and fellow founder Paul Watson, for instance, over the limits to hands-on eco-activism. Watson was voted off the board in 1977 and founded his own group, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.
Greenpeace endured what Hunter called its "loss of innocence" in the mid-1970s when it campaigned against the clubbing of baby seals in Newfoundland. The spate of gruesome mind-bomb images of cuddly white baby seals dying on the ice in pools of their own blood won supporters in European cities but caused uproar in Canada, when the success of the campaign to boycott the seal-fur trade devastated the communities of Newfoundland and Inuit hunters whose livelihoods depended on the sealhunts.
Amid internal power struggles and much argument about passionately held beliefs, Hunter stepped down from the presidency of Greenpeace in 1978 to concentrate on his writing career. "Henry Kissinger brags that power is an aphrodisiac," he said. "Well, giving up power is an anti depressant." Hunter had been unpaid for all but two months of the seven years he worked for Greenpeace.
Robert Hunter was born in St Boniface, Manitoba, in 1941. His father returned only briefly to his family after the war and Hunter was raised mainly by his French-Canadian mother, Augustine Gauvreau. He grew up in Winnipeg and dropped out of high school to pursue an ambition to be a writer. He did a variety of temporary jobs - he worked in a meat-packing factory and sold encyclopaedias (he once spent a night in jail for selling without a permit) before becoming a messenger and then a reporter on the Winnipeg Tribune. On a visit to Europe in the mid-1960s he met and married his first wife, Zoe Rahim, a campaigner for nuclear disarmament.
In 1968 he was appointed a columnist at the Vancouver Sun and published, to some critical acclaim, his first novel, Erebus, based on his experience of the Winnipeg slaughter house. Within a few years he left the Sun to concentrate on his work with Greenpeace and on his writing. Apart from prolific contributions to magazines and newspapers, he also wrote scripts for a widely syndicated TV series, The Beachcombers, before achieving comfortable new fame in the 1980s as a television broadcaster. For Citytv in Toronto he presented - in his dressing-gown - an early-morning critique of the day’s print media called Papercuts.
In 2001 he ran for election in the Beaches-East York constituency of Toronto but failed to be elected after a rival candidate dredged up an apparently discreditable episode from his past. In his Gonzo-esque book On the Sky: Zen and the Art of International Freeloading (1988), Hunter had described sexual adventures with multiple, and possibly underage, partners in Thailand. When these heated passages from the book were made public during the campaign Hunter shrugged them off as fantasy and provoked hilarity when he threatened to sue the rival party.
Other of his books enjoyed a happier reception. Occupied Canada (1991), an audacious retelling of Canadian history from the point of view of its native peoples, co-written with Robert Calihoo, a Kwakiutl, won critical acclaim. After writing the book, Hunter learnt that his mother had Huron blood. He exploited that ancestry in one of his most successful books, Red Blood: One (Mostly) White Guy’s Encounters With the Native World (1999), which opened with an anecdote that he always claimed to be entirely true. He said that when he was 18 he got lost in Northern Ontario but was saved from a frozen death by a mysterious Huron trapper.
In 2004 Hunter published his last book, a history of the movement to whose birth he contributed so much: The Greenpeace to Amchitka. By then, however, prostate cancer had been diagnosed.
Bob Hunter is survived by his second wife, Bobbi, and his four children.
Bob Hunter, environmental activist, was born on October 13, 1941. He died on May 2, 2005, aged 63.