IN 1966, A YALE-EDUCATED LAWYER AND Quaker named Irving Stowe arrived in Vancouver and began voicing his anti-war sentiments in the Georgia Straight newspaper. Dismayed when the Sierra Club showed a lack of concern about nuclear testing, Stowe and UBC ecology student Patrick Mopre travelled to Alaska and attended public hearings about a forthcoming nuclear blast on an island called Amchitka.

Following the formation of the Don't Make A Wave Committee in 1970, a Vancouver social worker named Bill Darnell coined a catchier name for the new activist group during a meeting at the Unitarian church on 49th Avenue and Oak.

The rest is Greenpeace. The Greenpeace Story (Prentice-Hall $19.95) by Michael Brown and John May is the most comprehensive account yet written about the international network that now boasts a membership of more than three million people.

The global movement started with one battered 80-foot halibut boat, the Phyllis Cormack, and a slipshod crew of 12 that included Vancouverites Ben Metcalfe, Bob Keziere, Bob Hunter, the late Bob Cummings, Vancouver-born Captain John Cormack, co-founder Jim Bohlen, Darnell and Dr. Patrick Moore.

They set sail for Alaska on September 15, 1971 to bear witness, in the Quaker tradition, to the Americans' proposed underground blast at Amchitka. Younger Greenpeacers became inspired by a small press book, Warriors of the Rainbow (Naturegraph Publishers, 1962), a collection of Indian myths once given to journalist Bob Hunter by a wandering dulcimer-maker.

The extensively illustrated Greenpeace book chronicles protest voyages to Amchitka and Moruroa (Polynesia), Save-the-whale campaigns, anti-sealing efforts, farsighted anti oil tanker manoeuvres, French government sabotage of the Rainbow Warrior, support from the likes of Brigitte Bardot and Bryan Adams, and a myriad of other demonstrations around the world on behalf of the earth's environment.

[Summer/BCBW 1989]