Chris Robinson, 1951 - 2008
(Originally posted by Brian Fitzgerald from Greenpeace International)
Chris Robinson died of cancer a few hours ago at the age of 57.
Chris was a salty dog, a Greenpeace activist who spent his life on the sea, one of the original Rainbow Warrior crew and later captain of the Vega.
I find it hard to believe he’s gone. He was the guy who could sail through anything — from Pacific typhoons to Mediterranean storms in which the tiny Vega was doing 11 knots on bare poles. He ran inflatable boats under radioactive waste barrels being dumped in the sea. He challenged the French military again and again by sailing into their self-declared “exclusion zone” around the Pacific nuclear weapons test site at Moruroa. He went up against war machines and trident submarines. One activist who sailed with him said he was one of the few who you knew, if you put your life in his hands, he’d shepherd it safely through whatever it was you had to face, and hand it back to you.
Yet while he had the toughness of someone who cold sail into the teeth of an atomic bomb and not flinch, he possessed the gentlest of souls — one you counted yourself lucky to have met.
He loved a laugh and a smoke and a glass of wine under an olive tree and the sound of a didgeridoo. He gave my son his first motorcycle ride.
I’ve known many people in Greenpeace who I considered heroes. Chris was a hero to them all.
Trusted, loved, and respected, he will be greatly missed. Fair winds, Chris Robinson, fair winds.
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I met Chris in 1990 when I first joined Greenpeace to work on the campaign against French testing. For me, Chris was at the heart of that campaign… and that campaign still represents to me all the good things about Greenpeace and about how the passion of a few people to make change can ultimately make a difference for the better. The people like Chris - and Henk, Martini, Bunny, Anna, Brian, Steve S, Elaine, David McT…who committed so much to it for so long were, and are, very special people.
Sailing to Moruroa and working with people in Tahiti like Oscar Temaru and Marie-Therese Danielson was definitely a labour of love for those of us who had the privilege of doing it. Chris was passionate about it, and his energy and love for both people and the environment, the sea in particular, and his capacity to engage and motivate people, are something I’ll always remember. That chuckle and cheeky grin…
I never met Chris myself. Judging from the comments on the original post he must have changed a lot of lives.
If you knew him, please add your thoughts.