True Grit

Greenpeace Captain: My Adventures in Protecting
the Future of Our Planet
By Peter Wilcox (with Ronald B. Weiss)
Thomas Dunne Books, 2016, 314 pages

Without courage, what good are values? Over the past four decades, Peter Wilcox, a determined and dedicated Greenpeace ship captain (Rainbow Warrior, Arctic Sunrise, and other vessels), has repeatedly demonstrated unfathomable courage bringing attention to the destruction of this island we call Earth.

Greenpeace Captain is his story, written without braggadocio, and often set in far-off places. It highlights the true grit Wilcox and his crew live by, which includes never-ending respect for our planet, unshakeable trust in each other, and a tang of lunacy. Consider this nugget of advice from Wilcox: “Rule number one when jumping in front of a speeding destroyer: keep all your body parts on one side of the bow.”book cover thumbnail

Yeah, those people on Greenpeace ships can be wacko and headstrong; they are often young, well educated, and female. They understand that the brave get bloodied.

So why do it? Why risk life and treasure? “To bear witness to abuses… to shine a light on the terrible things we do to the Earth and to each other,” Wilcox writes. The goal is to bring attention to dire environmental issues by using the world’s media. His passion makes the powerful nervous.

Wilcox picks on the calamitous yet well-established habits of wasteful nations. Canada, my own country, for example, has a Seal Protection Act “which makes it illegal to get close to a baby seal unless you are going to kill it.” Wilcox and his crew took on this cause in the early 1980s, sailing to Canada’s eastern coast to intervene on behalf of the pups.

The book draws a clear distinction between Paul Watson’s Sea Shepherd Society, which calls for more aggressive actions, and Greenpeace, which mandates its eco-warriors never damage property. Wilcox is a professional, bringing truth to the adage that amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics. And when things get out of hand, he understands what every ship captain or airline pilot knows: “In an emergency no one rises to the occasion, you fall back on your training.”

But he also has a sense of humor. “There was fun in all these adventures,” Wilcox writes. And when spending more than two months in a Russian prison in 2013, he is almost moved to tears when a stiff guard secretly raises a closed fist as a sign of solidarity. We’re continually reminded that love is stronger than hate.

So what do Wilcox and Greenpeace have to show for it all?

Well. After some of their “actions” (along with those of other organizations) the European parliament banned the importation of clubbed baby seal pelts; Russia pretty much stopped whaling after years of denying it was doing so; France stopped nuclear testing in the Majuro Atoll (it was France’s intelligence agency that bombed and sank Wilcox’s Rainbow Warrior in New Zealand in 1985); the Japanese-Peruvian whaling industry shut down; and Watson’s ship single-handedly evacuated the radiation victims of Rongelap Atoll in the Marshall Islands, to name just a few of their victories.

Nonetheless, Wilcox writes that his greatest pride comes from inspiring others to take action.

For example, when the USS Conyngham, a supposedly nuclear-equipped guided-missile destroyer, tried to dock in nuclear-free Copenhagen, “one silver-haired lady jumped [into the harbor] wearing her Sunday best,” taking a lesson out of the Greenpeace book and putting herself between the destroyer and the dock.

Greenpeace Captain reads like a thriller. Like a good novel it doesn’t tell you anything; it shows you everything. It also gives life to the heroes who aren’t being discussed on the AM dial.

Out of respect for literary criticism, the story could have been told with a hundred or so fewer exclamation marks, but that’s being picky on my part. (A writer is allowed one exclamation point per year!)

What’s next for Peter Wilcox? Almost anything is imaginable. After all, Wilcox spent his life putting it all on the line for our planet, pulling it off with a resonant, almost mythic soul.

Greenpeace Captain concludes with four pages of acknowledgments and this quote from American journalist Hunter S. Thompson: “So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: Who is the happier man? He who has braved the storm of life and lived, or he who has stayed securely ashore and merely existed?”

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