He was a self-confessed beatnik, a bum, a hippy, a semi-trained journalist, a philosopher and an ecologist, but the last thing Bob Hunter said he ever imagined doing was co-founding a group that ended up as a multinational company with 2,5-million members, branches in 40 countries and a byword for environmental activism.
Hunter, who died on Monday of prostate cancer aged 62, was a founding father of Greenpeace, and the most influential of all its early leaders. A radical young columnist on the Vancouver Sun newspaper, he had volunteered in 1969 to sail to the Aleutian Islands off Alaska in a barely seaworthy charter boat to try to stop the United States testing an atomic bomb.
As the only person among the draft dodgers, peaceniks and political idealists who understood how the media worked, he filed lurid — and hilarious — columns to document the voyage.
”I thought I was going to be a reporter, taking notes,” he said at the time.
”But I ended up being first watch.”
Largely as a result of the media interest Hunter created on the boat, President Richard Nixon fumed and the US supreme court dithered. Marches were organised around the world with unionists arm in arm with hippies. The bomb test was approved but it was the last. Two months later the US military abandoned the test series and declared Amchitka Island a wildlife sanctuary.
Hunter returned an international leader of the counterculture and subsequently shaped the beginning of the Greenpeace Foundation. As one of the saner voices in the febrile counter-politics of late 1960s west coast America and Canada, he became the person to whom the media most often turned to, and the deviser of most of Greenpeace’s early direct actions.
While many of the other founders of Greenpeace were more or less conventional peace activists, Hunter saw his role to put the ”green” into Greenpeace.
He was the first president of the organisation, came up with the name Rainbow Warrior for the group’s flagship, and, in 1979, he officially founded Greenpeace International.
”Bob was an inspirational storyteller, an audacious fighter and an unpretentious mystic,” said John Doherty, chair of Greenpeace Canada. ”He was serious about saving the world while always maintaining a sense of humour.” – Guardian Unlimited Â