Audio By Carbonatix
In September 1971 a group of hippie Canadians hired a boat and piloted it to the Aleutian island of Amchitka, hoping to halt a U.S. nuclear test. “They didn’t actually get to the test on time, but that’s how Greenpeace was born — people trying to make a difference,” says Greenpeace campaigner Melanie Duchin. “We’ve had people jump on whaling ships, chain themselves to the harpoon guns, put themselves in front of factory trawlers, put Zodiacs underneath an area where nuclear waste is about to be dumped into the sea.”
Armchair activists won’t have to risk arrest or frostbite to get a salty taste of adventure when Greenpeace visits South Florida this week. They can tour the grassroots environmental organization’s (docked) flagship Rainbow Warrior. Not to be confused with the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society’s Ocean Warrior, responsible for ramming and sinking several whaling ships (Greenpeace proposes nonviolent civil disobedience), this replacement vessel first set sail in 1989 after its namesake was sunk by a double bomb blast on July 10, 1985, which drowned a crew member. French secret service agents were arrested for the incident.
Warrior 2 traveled two months to Miami from the Marshall Islands to launch Greenpeace’s 30th anniversary Take Back the Earth Tour of the East Coast, promoting awareness about global warming. Although Florida has no Greenpeace office, it will be the kick-off point because the state is, as Duchin puts it, “really on the front lines of global warming.” For emphasis the group will unfurl a banner three feet above the high-tide line on Miami Beach, demonstrating the level scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predict the sea will rise to in the next century. But Duchin, with Greenpeace since 1987, still looks on the bright side: “We’re gonna try and make it kind of a humor-filled event, because sometimes global warming’s kind of a drag.”
A drag indeed. Greenpeace also will transmit images of both our healthy and unhealthy coral to the current Kyoto Protocol conference (which Bush and Co. refuse to get with) in Germany. “We’re going to be showing them pictures of what’s going on in Florida,” Duchin says. “They need to know what’s at stake.”
