Canada

How the environmental movment was (re)born in 1969

In 1969 in Vancouver hippies and revolutionaries mixed gleefully in the redbrick coffee houses of Gastown, and in the rainbow-painted organic juice bars of tree-lined Kitsilano near the University of British Columbia. ‘Revolutions,’ says Hunter, ‘start at the outer fringes of the empire, in this case the American Empire.’ When the U.S. announced that summer that they were going to test a 1.2 megaton nuclear bomb on the Aleutian Island of Amchitka, Vancouver peaceniks, love children, American draft dodgers, and Marxist revolutionaries began to agitate.

In September 1969 Hunter warned in his newspaper column of ‘a distinct danger that the tests might set in motion earthquakes and tidal waves which could sweep from one end of the Pacific to the other.’ This

image of the tidal wave captured the imagination of Canadians opposed to the U.S. bomb test.

Three decades later Hunter recalls ‘In Vancouver at that time there was a

convergence of hippies, draft dodgers, Tibetan monks, seadogs, artists, radical ecologists, rebel journalists, Quakers, and expatriate Yanks in the one major city that happened to be closest to Amchitka Island, where the U.S. wanted to explode a bomb. Greenpeace was born of all of this.’

Vancouver lawyer Hamish Bruce read Hunter’s columns and called the reporter. Bruce wanted to start an organization called the ‘Green Panthers.’ Hunter and Bruce became fast friends. They plotted to establish the Green Panthers as the ecological equivalent of the Black

Panthers, whose leader, Fred Hampton, Hunter had interviewed in Chicago. ‘Our idea,’ says Bruce today, ‘was that ecology was the sleeping giant, the issue that was ultimately going to rock the world.’

ô

At that time, Hunter was writing his third book, Storming of the Mind, about the ‘new holistic consciousness,’ in which he declares ‘In ecology we see the new consciousness finding its roots.’ Hunter predicted that continued environmental deterioration would lead to the rise of ‘the

Green Panthers or their equivalent,’ and he advocated ‘the hoisting of the green flag.’ On October 2, when the U.S. detonated the bomb at Amchitka, a mob from Vancouver stormed the U.S. border, closing it to traffic for two hours. A banner placed at the border crossing read: ‘Don’t Make a Wave’ in reference to the potential tidal wave. In January 1970

the protestors moved to the U.S. Embassy and ‘liberated’ Granville Street in downtown Vancouver. The seeds of Greenpeace were in these crowds.

Hippies on bicycles milled among the antibomb protestors, stopping cars and delivering speeches about ecology. Among the protestors was freelance journalist Ben Metcalfe, who had a radio program on the CBC. Metcalfe, on his own initiative, had placed 12 billboard signs in Vancouver that read:

Ecology Look it up. You’re involved.

Read the whole story about the combat on nuke tests and whaling. Google « Waves of compassion » or go www.greenpeace.org