Bob Hunter 1941 – 2005

A unique genius

For Vancouver Sun

By Rex Weyler

May 2, 2005

 
I first met Bob Hunter in the Vancouver Press Club on Granville Street, in 1973, after arriving in Canada as one of 50,000 draft resisters. I discovered Hunter’s columns in the Vancouver Sun and phoned him. In the pub, as 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 see it. Everything is relationship.”

Hunter knew journalism and could recite Marshall McLuhan’s media ideas, but he also envisioned ways of applying those ideas to change the prevailing worldview. “The mechanistic paradigm can’t manage the earth.” he insisted. “The new world view is ecology, systems theory.”

When he saw the Zodiac inflatable boats that French commandos used to board a Greenpeace ship, rather than whine about police state tactics, he borrowed their tools. “That’s what we need,” he said. In 1975, Hunter guided the first Greenpeace whale campaign and made history. The wise guy cracked theatric jokes over the global airwaves and changed the world.

Hunter wanted the revolution to be fun. The first day I met him, he “ordained” me into his “Whole Earth Church.” All church members are preachers, he insisted. All members share a sacred responsibility to help heal the earth. His wry theatrics, however, carried a serious message. Hunter believed ideas could change the world, and he proved it to be true.

Inspired by his vision, and warmed by his modest humour, I worked closely with Hunter over the next decade. We plotted strategies, sailed together on high seas campaigns, struck deals with Newfoundlanders over the seal hunt, and spent an afternoon in jail together over a tiff with Soviet ships. In 1979, when the Canadian group handed Greenpeace over the a council of international environmentalists in Amsterdam, Hunter remained philisophical. When asked if the environmental movement was in good hands, he commented, “it’s in plenty of hands. That’s what counts."

I learned this morning that my old drinking buddy had passed away, no surprise since he had been fighting cancer, but still a sad shock. I have received a flood of fond memories about our great friend and mentor. “I am anguished,” Greenpeace cofounder Dorothy Stowe wrote today, “to learn about Bob Hunter's death. It would be nice if Greenpeace would set up a memorial fund to honour his memory,” she wrote. “His contribution was so basic to its success.”

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,” wrote Watson. “He not only had an idea, he nurtured his idea and saw it become an international powerhouse.”

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, for me, the funniest person I ever met. His humour grew from spontaneous observation of a world that appeared absurd. The anglicized French Catholic Buddhist would 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 well-fed primates.”

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.” He made himself “latrine officer” on the James Bay minesweeper in 1976, “because I’m not really good at much else.”

As he evolved from a journalist to an advocate-journalist, to a full-time activist, he mocked himself as "a traitor to my profession,” but for good cause. "The destruction of the earth will lead, inevitably, to the destruction of ourselves."

When I read his first novel, Erebus, I glimpsed his 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 recognized 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, a week ago, 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.”

 
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Rex Weyler is the author of Greenpeace: How a Group of Ecologists, Journalists, and Visionaries Changed the World (Raincoast Books, 2004).