The Greenpeace to Amchitka: An Environmental Odyssey

Joseph Jones is librarian emeritus at the University of British Columbia
Library and the author of Reference Sources for Canadian Literary
Studies.

After more than three decades, a single surviving photocopy of Robert
Hunter’s typescript emerged from a friend’s file, found a publisher,
and became this book. At the time of the writing, publisher Jack
McClelland decided the book he had commissioned should only be a
collection of captioned photographs. This second take uses 46 pages of
photographs to illustrate 172 pages of text.

In the fall of 1971, a small fishing boat set out from Vancouver to
protest a U.S. underground nuclear test at Amchitka, an island far out
in the Aleutians west of Alaska. Although the destination remained
beyond reach, the undertaking itself generated the desired media
attention. The role this event played in the birth of the Greenpeace
organization is what stands out in retrospect.

Centred on that 45-day voyage, Hunter’s account finds a structure in
the chronology. The main divisions (before, during, and after) permit
present-day contextualizations to frame the original piece. In the end,
the core document owes most of its interest to the eyewitness status:
“Ninety percent of history is being there.”

Among the elements dominating the story are ocean-going travelogue, a
sense of incipient eco-catastrophe, media-savvy protest strategy,
navigation and port sociology in the northeast Pacific, psychosocial
tensions in an ad hoc collective, and the personality of Robert Hunter.
All of these get refracted through a dated and overblown rhetoric that
owes too much to Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer (both explicitly named).
Overt appeals to analogues weaken the writing, especially the repeated
invocations of Moby Dick and Lord of the Rings.

Throughout the work, a diffuse spirituality careens from the I Ching to
David’s slingshot to Aboriginal ritual. In his first run at this
pervasive theme, Hunter claims that no one in the group has associated
with a church as an adult and asserts that he himself hates churches
with a passion. A photograph shows an on-board poster (“Has the church
lost its soul?”) that suggests the deconstructability of this
vehemence.

Hunter died in the spring of 2005. The Greenpeace to Amchitka provides
an accessible primary account of the constellation of personalities and
politics that presided at the formation of Greenpeace.