rip: bob hunter

Bob Hunter, the first president of Greenpeace, died of cancer on May 2, 2005 at the age of 63. It's sobering to think about this man's legacy. His work has impacted millions and yet, I'd never heard his name until this week.

Pictured: Bob Hunter in the radio room with the skipper, John Cormack, June 1975, while preparing for a showdown with Russian whalers. The radio had not worked for three days, and the crew was unable to tell anyone where they were, let alone broadcast to the media. They had yet to see the whalers, but could hear Russian voices over the radio.
Courageous ecowarrior who co-founded Greenpeace and artfully manipulated the media to shame the despoilers of the Earth

Bob Hunter was one of the original ecowarriors. A man with a knack for words — indeed he coined the term eco-warrior — he was also a man of action who inspired a new brand of personal environmental activism.

He was nearly killed when a Russian whale hunter’s harpoon parted his hair as he bobbed in a rubber dinghy in the cold waters of the north Pacific between the whaler’s bows and its quarry. On another occasion he narrowly escaped being killed by a hunter’s icebreaker when he was dyeing the white pelts of baby harp seals to make them worthless.

He was a prolific journalist, the author of more than a dozen books, a broadcaster, a scathingly humorous critic of polluters, dumpers and exploiters, and a celebrity spokesman for environmental activism, but his greatest claim to fame was his role in the founding of Greenpeace in 1971.

Hunter was an admirer of the ideas of his fellow-Canadian, the communications guru Marshall McLuhan. He put McLuhan’s celebrated dictum that “the medium is the message” into dramatic, mediagenic practice and took his environmentalist message to a vast global audience.

Another of the punchy new expressions Hunter coined was “mind bomb”, to describe an image which leaves an indelible image on the mind’s eye. The first “mind bomb” spawned Greenpeace in 1971.

Hunter, proud possessor of Greenpeace membership card No 000, became the organisation’s first president in 1973 and helped to lead it from a rickety rented office with a handful of volunteers in Vancouver to an international movement with branches in more than 40 countries and more than 2.5 million members.

Hunter had been unpaid for all but two months of the seven years he worked for Greenpeace.

Via NPR and http://www.timesonline.co.uk