Greenpeace New Zealand Weblog

Chris Robinson, Lloyd Anderson, David McTaggart, Tony Marriner and Brice Lalonde on Greenpeace vessel “Vega” before heading to Moruroa to stop a nuclear weapons test.

(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.

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In 1969, Marie Aimee took her two children for medical treatment, a six-day voyage across the Indian Ocean from their home on Diego Garcia island to Port Louis, Mauritius. Her husband, Dervillie Permal, stayed behind to work at a coconut oil factory and tend the family garden and animals.

After visiting the doctor and picking up supplies in Port Louis, Marie and her children arrived at the quay for the trip home. However, a British Government agent refused to allow them onto the boat, stranding Marie and her children in Mauritius. Throughout the following weeks, other marooned islanders appeared, congregating in a local slum, living in boxes or tin shacks. Two years later, Marie’s husband arrived in Port Louis with one small bag and a chilling story.
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Lyle Thurston

This week came the sad news of the passing of another warrior; Lyle Thurston - one of 12 crewmembers on the original Greenpeace campaign - has died of pneumonia at the age of 70 in Victoria, BC, Canada.

The Independent describes him as “a pharmacist and doctor, though that’s not to say he wasn’t… a hippie, a radical ecologist and a rebel who preferred ballet and opera in an era of rock. While living in a commune of doctors and lawyers in Deep Cove, north of Vancouver, in a house they called “the party mecca”, he became widely known as “the Doc” after he took to setting up a makeshift, free-of-charge medical tent at rock concerts to treat kids who had overdosed. It was the Sixties. He was kept busy.” Read more »

I spotted an interesting ‘the way we were‘ piece of historical trivia in the paper here in Lyttelton this morning.

In 1982 the Lyttelton Borough Council was second only to Christchurch in what would be a series of NZ towns, cities and boroughs that would declare themselves nuclear free. This caused quite a stir at the time and because Lyttelton is a major port the move had special significance in the eventual ban on nuclear ships entering NZ ports that remains in place to this day.

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Ecology? Look it up! Your involved.

- Rex Weyler

Deep Green is a new monthly column by Greenpeace’s unofficial historian, Rex Weyler.

Rex was a director of the original Greenpeace Foundation, the editor of the organisation’s first newsletter, and a cofounder of Greenpeace International in 1979. He was a photographer and reporter on the early Greenpeace whale and seal campaigns, and has written one of the best and most comprehensive histories of the organisation, Greenpeace (Raincoast, 2004). His book, Blood of the Land, a history of the American Indian Movement, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Read more »