Bob Hunter - co-founder of Greenpeace - dead at 63 - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

Charlatan · 05-03-2005, 12:28 PM

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.

Daval · 05-03-2005, 12:34 PM

I used to watch his daily 'Paper Cuts' segment on BT on CityTV every morning. I had no idea he was sick.

Rest in Peace.

Cynthetiq · 05-03-2005, 12:51 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Daval

I used to watch his daily 'Paper Cuts' segment on BT on CityTV every morning. I had no idea he was sick.

Rest in Peace.

don't you mean rest in (green)peace?

always sad when a person leaves the planet.

OFKU0 · 05-03-2005, 06:04 PM

Liked watching him on t.v. and the un-politically correct views he always stated. Bringing awareness to the masses regardless of the topic was his forte. Never was nor will I ever be a fan of Greenpeace though.

Seer666 · 05-03-2005, 07:58 PM

Bet the French are havig a party right now. I give him props for taking a stand on what he beileved in. More then most people evr do.

merkerguitars · 05-03-2005, 09:27 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by OFKU0

Never was nor will I ever be a fan of Greenpeace though.

Back when he founded greenpeace it was actually a good organization, now its just a bunch of whiners claiming about corporations.

OFKU0 · 05-04-2005, 07:36 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by merkerguitars

Back when he founded greenpeace it was actually a good organization, now its just a bunch of whiners claiming about corporations.

Certainly awareness of the environment and the earth's eco-system are important for sustainability on various levels but ramming fishing vessels and endangering human lives to save whales really smacks of a fucked up God complex.

And now most people who haven't been brainwashed by the musings of Greenpeace (and believe me I see it,...any day now 'til classes begin in September, scores and scores of 19 and 20 years olds are going to knock on my door touting the praises of Greenpeace, yet when I offer an alternative to what they've been told to believe, they will argue fervently and accuse me of everything anti-environmental under the sun,......Yaaaaaawwwnnnnnnn.) see Greenpeace as militant environmentalists, which in many instances they are.

I wonder if Greenpeace picks up the tab when their disciples smash windows and destroy private property at WTO meeting. Ironic though, in causing such destruction, the capitalistic wheel turns harder and more often to replace the damage. Factories emitting pollutants will replace the bricks and glass, tranporting the materials by vehicles will emit more greenhouse gases and those who do the work get paid then occationally eat ate McDonald's. Funny ain't it.

RangerDick · 05-04-2005, 08:16 AM

May he rest in peace. My condolences to his family and friends.

His fine organization has been the object of much derision and ridicule due to its endless lunacy, and sissy-boy ways. Anytime I see "Greenpeace" in a headline, I immediately read the article because I know I'm in for a good hearty, soul felt laugh.
Case in point, the following article........."Kyoto Protest Beaten Back by Inflamed Petrol Traders"

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article...487741,00.html

Quote:

Britain

February 17, 2005

Kyoto protest beaten back by inflamed petrol traders
By Laura Peek and Liz Chong

WHEN 35 Greenpeace protesters stormed the International Petroleum Exchange (IPE) yesterday they had planned the operation in great detail.
What they were not prepared for was the post-prandial aggression of oil traders who kicked and punched them back on to the pavement.

“We bit off more than we could chew. They were just Cockney barrow boy spivs. Total thugs,” one protester said, rubbing his bruised skull. “I’ve never seen anyone less amenable to listening to our point of view.”

Another said: “I took on a Texan Swat team at Esso last year and they were angels compared with this lot.” Behind him, on the balcony of the pub opposite the IPE, a bleary-eyed trader, pint in hand, yelled: “Sod off, Swampy.”

Greenpeace had hoped to paralyse oil trading at the exchange in the City near Tower Bridge on the day that the Kyoto Protocol came into force. “The Kyoto Protocol has modest aims to improve the climate and we need huge aims,” a spokesman said.

Protesters conceded that mounting the operation after lunch may not have been the best plan. “The violence was instant,” Jon Beresford, 39, an electrical engineer from Nottingham, said.

“They grabbed us and started kicking and punching. Then when we were on the floor they tried to push huge filing cabinets on top of us to crush us.” When a trader left the building shortly before 2pm, using a security swipe card, a protester dropped some coins on the floor and, as he bent down to pick them up, put his boot in the door to keep it open.

Two minutes later, three Greenpeace vans pulled up and another 30 protesters leapt out and were let in by the others.

They made their way to the trading floor, blowing whistles and sounding fog horns, encountering little resistance from security guards. Rape alarms were tied to helium balloons to float to the ceiling and create noise out of reach. The IPE conducts “open outcry” trading where deals are shouted across the pit. By making so much noise, the protesters hoped to paralyse trading.

But they were set upon by traders, most of whom were under the age of 25. “They were kicking and punching men and women indiscriminately,” a photographer said. “It was really ugly, but Greenpeace did not fight back.”

Mr Beresford said: “They followed the guys into the lobby and kept kicking and punching them there. They literally kicked them on to the pavement.”

Last night Greenpeace said two protesters were in hospital, one with a suspected broken jaw, the other with concussion.

A spokeswoman from IPE said the trading floor reopened at 3.10pm. “The floor was invaded by a small group of protesters,” she said. “Open outcry trading was suspended but electronic trading carried on.”

Eighteen police vans and six police cars surrounded the exchange and at least 27 protesters were arrested. A small band blocked the entrance to the building for the rest of the evening.

Richard Ward, IPE’s chief executive, said that the exchange would review security but denied that protesters had reached the trading floor. However, traders, protesters and press photographers confirmed to The Times that the trading floor had been breached.

Mr Ward would not discuss whether he would press charges, and said he would not know until this morning if there had been any financial loss.

Greenpeace later started a second protest at the annual dinner of the Institute of Petroleum at the Grosvenor House Hotel on Park Lane, in Central London. Greenpeace claimed that five campaigners had got into the Great Hall. About 30 protesters were outside the hotel, some blocking the front entrance by sitting down and locking themselves together, while others sounded klaxons and alarms. Climbers scaled scaffolding to unfurl a banner reading, “Climate change kills, oil industry parties”.

05-03-2005, 12:28 PM	#1 (permalink)
Charlatan Getting it. Super Moderator Location: Lion City	Bob Hunter - co-founder of Greenpeace - dead at 63 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. __________________ "My hands are on fire. Hands are on fire. Ain't got no more time for all you charlatans and liars." - Old Man Luedecke

05-03-2005, 12:34 PM	#2 (permalink)
Daval Junkie Location: The True North Strong and Free!	I used to watch his daily 'Paper Cuts' segment on BT on CityTV every morning. I had no idea he was sick. Rest in Peace. __________________ "It is impossible to obtain a conviction for sodomy from an English jury. Half of them don't believe that it can physically be done, and the other half are doing it." Winston Churchill

05-03-2005, 06:04 PM	#4 (permalink)
OFKU0 Junk	Liked watching him on t.v. and the un-politically correct views he always stated. Bringing awareness to the masses regardless of the topic was his forte. Never was nor will I ever be a fan of Greenpeace though. __________________ " In Canada, you can tell the most blatant lie in a calm voice, and people will believe you over someone who's a little passionate about the truth." David Warren, Western Standard.

05-03-2005, 07:58 PM	#5 (permalink)
Seer666 Oh dear God he breeded Location: Arizona	Bet the French are havig a party right now. I give him props for taking a stand on what he beileved in. More then most people evr do. __________________ Bad spellers of the world untie!!! I am the one you warned me of I seem to have misplaced the bullet with your name on it, but I have a whole box addressed to occupant.