Essays & Stories
Positively Genius: Bob Hunter 1941 – 2005
by Rex Weyler
In 1972, I arrived in Canada, one of 50,000 draft resisters, discovered Hunter’s outrageous columns in the Vancouver Sun and phoned him. I first met him in the Vancouver Press Club on Granville Street, where Hunter drained beer glasses and told stories. I sensed a unique genius. He saw things others missed. “Ecology isn’t just cleaning up the oil spills,” he said. “It is going to change everything. Science, politics, philosophy. The quantum physicists are saying the same thing. Everything is relationship.”
Hunter envisioned ecology as a mass movement, awakened with the tools of electronic media. “The mechanistic paradigm can’t manage the earth.” he insisted. “The new world view is ecology, systems theory.”
Hunter understood the demands of journalism, and could recite Marshall McLuhan’s media ideas, but he also applied those ideas to the preposterous task of transforming the prevailing worldview. Hunter wanted this revolution to be fun. Make love, not war. The first day I met him, he “ordained” me into his “Whole Earth Church.” All church members are ministers, he insisted. All members share a sacred responsibility to spread the word and heal the earth. His wry theatrics, however, only sweetened a serious message. He believed ideas could change the world, and he would prove it to be true.
Many people helped create Greenpeace, but Bob Hunter served as the trickster visionary at its early core, who inspired an army of believers and created something new: a peaceful, media-savvy environmental movement that was both spiritual and practical. When he saw the Zodiac inflatable boats that French commandos used to board a Greenpeace ship, he borrowed their tools. “That’s what we need,” he said, as he envisioned putting protesters in front of whaling ships. In 1975, Hunter guided the first Greenpeace whale campaign and made history. The wise guy cracked performance jokes over the global airwaves and changed the world.
I worked with Hunter over the next decade, inspired by his vision and warmed by his modest humour. We plotted strategies, sailed together on high seas campaigns, struck deals with Newfoundlanders over the seal hunt, and spent an afternoon in jail over a tiff with Soviet ships. In 1979, when the Canadian group handed Greenpeace over to a council of international environmentalists in Amsterdam, a reporter asked Hunter if the environmental movement was in good hands. “It’s in plenty of hands,” said the bard of civil dissent, “That’s what counts.”
I learned on May 2 that my old drinking buddy had passed away, no surprise since he had been fighting cancer for five years, but still a sad shock. I have received a flood of fond memories about our great friend. “I am anguished,” wrote Greenpeace cofounder Dorothy Stowe, 85 years old, one of the Quaker mentors to Hunter, who hosted the first Greenpeace meetings in her Vancouver living room. “His contribution was so basic to Greenpeace’s success.”
Sea Shepherd and Greenpeace veteran Paul Watson called him “one of the most inspiring and visionary environmentalists of our time. Bob’s courage was present until the end. I had a hard time appreciating the seriousness of his illness over the last year because he was always so upbeat and positive every time I spoke with him.”
Greenpeace International web editor Brian Fitzgerald wrote that, “Perhaps more than anyone else, Bob Hunter invented Greenpeace. Bob’s madcap creativity, strategic smarts, and hard-nosed journalistic sense of story would indelibly mark the Greenpeace brand of action.”
Greenpeace Executive Director Gerd Leipold wrote, “Bob was a storyteller, a shaman, a word-magician, a Machiavellian mystic, and he dared to inject a sense of humour into the often shrill and sanctimonious job of changing the world. He was funny and brave and audacious, inspiring in his refusal to accept the limits of the practical or the probable. He reveled in life’s ability to deliver little miracles in the form of impossibilities achieved. Greenpeace will forever bear the mark of his crazy, super-optimistic faith in the wisdom of tilting at windmills.”
Bob Hunter remains the funniest person I ever met, and his humour grew from spontaneous observation of a world that appeared absurd. He appreciated the irony and contradictions of life and history. The anglicized French Catholic Buddhist could chide the Pope and pray to St. Francis in the same sentence. “Catholic guilt isn’t going to screw up the world,” he once told me. “It might save it. We should feel guilty. We’ve been greedy little primates, getting big ideas, and kicking God out of the garden.”
His favorite target for scathing critique, however, remained his own shortcomings. “I was an awful, rebellious, early attention-deficient kid who was loved by my art and English teachers, but hated by the rest,” he once told me. “I cheated by scribbling novels when I was supposed to be doing schoolwork.” In 1976, on the Canadian minesweeper James Bay, renamed Greenpeace VII for the whale campaign, he made himself “latrine officer,” and explained, “because I’m not really good at much else.”
He evolved from journalist to advocate-journalist, to full-time activist, and mocked himself as “a traitor to my profession,” but only for a good cause. “The destruction of the earth will lead,” he warned, “to the destruction of ourselves.”
When I read his first novel, Erebus, I marveled at Hunter’s deep courage to expose himself, and admired his eloquence at doing so. Hunter’s humility inspired me more than any of his prodigious skills and traits. He appeared to recognize that it was not his fault that he entered this world so bloody smart and talented, so he made nothing of it.
Hunter retained his famous sense of humour to the end. The last time I spoke with him, he told me what he had learned from cancer treatment: “Get this,” he chirped. “My blood type is the same as my life’s philosophy. B-positive.”