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Out on a Limb for Mother Earth: Radical Environmentalists Say No to Compromise
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19252 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1991 |
6,888 Words |
| Author
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Brandon Mitchener
Brandon Mitchener is a wire-service reporter specializing in
economic and environmental issues, who recently relocated to
Frankfurt, Germany. |
If all the beasts were gone, we would die from great loneliness of spirit, for whatever happens to the beasts, happens to us. All things are connected.
--Chief Seattle
Antarctica, 1989: It's a dirty job, but somebody has to do it. Six thousand miles from home, four Greenpeace activists spend the southern hemispheric summer picking through garbage and shifting sewage from research bases they suspect of violating Antarctic environmental protection regulations. They find Americans bulldozing litter into McMurdo Sound, Japanese whalers mounting yet another "scientific" hunt in antarctic waters, and French workers blasting an airstrip through a penguin rookery.
Exposure is the goal, so when the world ignores its scientific reports, Greenpeace stages a show that's impossible to ignore. On January 7, several activists hold a sit-in at the French airstrip site and have to be dragged away. On January 31, the Greenpeace ship Gondwana launches a small navy of inflatable dinghies between four Japanese ships and the minke whales they are trying to harpoon.
·Iceland, 1986: On November 9, just a month after joining an Icelandic whale-meat packaging firm, twenty-year-old Rodney Coronado and a friend sneak into the engine rooms of two of the company's four ships, open some valves, and let the vessels sink in Reykjavik harbor. Before fleeing the country, the two saboteurs also trash the firm's only whale-meat processing plant.
Paul Watson, founder of the Sea Shephered Conservation Society, claims responsibility, saying he is punishing Iceland for ignoring the international law that banned commercial whaling in 1986. Iceland demands his arrest, and Watson, to call Iceland's buff, flies over. He is held for twenty-two hours without charge, then released. The International Whaling Commission reserves public comment, but Watson says Iceland implicitly admitted breaking the law and had recognized his group's right to enforce it.
·Arizona, 1981: A nascent Earth First! (always with the exclamation point), led by ex-Wilderness Society lobbyist Dave Foreman and three friends, throws a "coming-out party" atop the Glen Canyon Dam, which Foreman calls "a 700-foot-long ugly blob of concrete plopped in the middle of the Colorado River near the Arizona border."
Blowing up
...
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