Endispiece

Auckland has been mercilessly developed since I was last there, thirteen years ago. ‘Downtown’ is now a humming, modern metropolis whereas once it struggled to the status of a pale imitation. Gone is the plethora of bars sporting ‘leaners’ as opposed to tables in which Greenpeace activists, working class ‘pakehas’ and Maoris hungrily swilled as much ice cold beer before the mandatory closing time of 6pm. Buildings have risen to alter the skyline out of all recognition. Perhaps most disconcertingly and certainly most poignantly, the half-submerged raft in the fishing dock which acted as a convenient drying out stopover for cormorants has been removed. Too tacky by half for modern Auckland. And the Floating Restaurant where we would wander to chat up the barmaids and quaff late night beer and whisky has tragically been towed away to an unknown fate.

It’s true that thirteen years ago Auckland was garish in its own America’s Cup kind of way and that even then it had pretentions of adulthood, but today’s Auckland is brutal in its full coming-of-age plumage. It was into the harbour waters of this older, less brassy Auckland that, 20 years ago, French secret agents slipped and quietly placed two limpet mines on the hull of Greenpeace’s flagship, the Rainbow Warrior, and sank her. Fernando Periera, Greenpeace’s Portuguese cameraman, taking his chance to retrieve his cameras from his cabin after the first and surely (we thought) the only blast, paid the ultimate price as the second bomb ripped a six foot hole in the Warrior’s side. France detonated her ‘force de frappe’ on far-off Muroroa Atoll, without the attentions of the Rainbow Warrior although a replacement vessel did not allow their crimes to go unreported or unopposed.

For the seven years before my last stint in Auckland, between 1985 and 1992, I lived and worked in Auckland between September and December of every year, preparing for Antarctic expeditions, five of which I led, on one of which I acted as observer and the final one on which I led the ‘temporary remote Antarctic monitoring programme’ (Tramp) – Greenpeace shorthand for a bunch of busybodies nosing around the giant US base at McMurdo. Our turning of the spotlight onto Antarctic environmental abuse occurred too late to stop the Americans leaving Scott’s Winterquarters Bay lifeless through heavy metal contamination and the impact of thousands of tons of ‘tide cracked’ junk metal and discarded vehicles which were simply left on the winter sea ice to await the summer thaw. Thankfully, all bases now more closely observe the codes of practice and most return their waste as a matter of course. So changed is the attitude to casual, routine, industrial-scale littering of the pristine global park which is Antarctica that the British Antarctic Survey perversely and in a statement full of self-denial, claims that today there is no waste problem on the continent.

They are right, of course, if you ignore the abandoned bases which are now rapidly being marketed as ‘heritage’ sites; if you ignore the legacy pollution problems such as Winterquarters Bay and if you focus exclusively on the recent conversion to removing waste generated by re-supply activities, and the waste remediation measures some nations have belatedly instituted. Despite these welcome advances, the imprint of man’s tenure on the ice is all too evident even today. Receding, climate-changed ice sheets are revealing long-forgotten, discarded waste, the origin of which has been lost due to the absence of adequate records.

Such international media attention as we Greenpeacers were able to direct on Antarctic environmental degradation over the years between 1985 and 1991 augmented and focused an intensive campaign to save the Antarctic from minerals exploitation. This campaign was masterminded by the late David McTaggart after American Antarctic aficionado and campaigner Jim Barnes had convinced him of its worth. The congruity of the campaigns to save Antarctica and to prevent the French from remorselessly turning a Pacific atoll, thousands of miles from Paris, into a radioactive cesspit was not lost on most of us. The ship on its way to protest the nuclear testing was sunk on orders from close to the top of French administrative power. The resolve of those on board the one on its way to protest the trashing of a continent doubled.

Margaret Thatcher, in a froth of crusading anti-Soviet and anti-terrorist vitriol, still could not bring herself to utter a solitary word of sympathy for Fernando or condemnation of the French for an indefensible act of terrorism – the first ever in New Zealand. The Greenpeace Antarctic ship en route for New Zealand was diverted via Muroroa where an exhausted and emotional crew did their best to vent the anger of the world on an impervious French military. Today, Antarctica is safe from minerals exploitation at least until 2041 and the French no longer explode nuclear weapons at Muroroa.

The old Greenpeace died with the Rainbow Warrior sinking. Its death was certified when McTaggart died in 2001. That may not be a bad thing, the Greenpeace McTaggart nurtured and crafted was built on confrontation and controversy. Times have demonstrably changed. But has the organisation changed as well? Sadly, in my opinion, it has not. It appears to be locked in the past. In my view it has not evolved. It has not demonstrated the intellectual flexibility or adaptability needed to occupy the vast untouched hinterland of campaigning opportunities offered by a world so fundamentally altered from the days of its birth. Nor has it released its true potential, employed its wealth wisely or encouraged its vast support base to democratise environmentalism which still remains ghettoised, and the preserve of the cognoscenti. Some of its claims are flimsy and hard to justify. It has failed to set any sort of radical, collaborative, broad-based agenda in which ordinary people, communities and society at large, can engage and with which it can identify. In my opinion, Greenpeace never crossed the Rubicon of turning jaw-dropping, innovative tactics from the negative to the positive. It can, should and must change, for in Greenpeace rest the hopes and aspirations of millions. It cannot betray that trust and faith.