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They were the generation that grew up in the wake of Hiroshima. They called themselves ecoholics, mind-bombers, and mind-punks. Their home was 1970s Vancouver, which they liked to call "the Shire," after J.R.R. Tolkien's idyllic paradise of tranquil Hobbits. They were far from the jungles of Vietnam and the protest-filled streets of Paris and Washington, but they created a movement that changed history.
Greenpeace tells the remarkable story of the world's leading environmental protest group, from its early days in Vancouver's psychedelic underground scene to its evolution into a global super-movement that boasts 2.8 million supporters in 40 countries and an annual budget of $240 million.
The author, Rex Weyler, participated in the group's first anti-whaling campaign in the north Pacific Ocean and wrote this book with the collaboration of Greenpeace and those of its founders who are still alive. His hefty 623-page volume came out around the same time as a lighter, parallel effort by Greenpeace co-founder Robert Hunter, called The Greenpeace to Amchitka. The two books complement each other nicely. Hunter's is an intensely personal memoir written in the heady days of 1971, while Weyler's is more comprehensive and biographical, surveying the group's evolution, political divisions, and personal conflicts, including the split between the so-called "mystics" and "mechanics"--the dreamers versus the practical thinkers. "We were fragile pilgrims," Weyler writes in this nicely paced and intimate chronicle, "not makers of history, but participants, lucky to have had the opportunity to meddle in the affairs of the world." --Alex Roslin
Vancouver Sun
"Vancouver's endowment to the world ... Our tranquil west coast 'Shire' seemed an unlikely place to spawn a transforming international movement capable of taking on the establishment and winning."
