http://freepressonline.com/Content/Features/Christine-Parrish-Archives/Article/When-the-Ocean-Calls-Pete-Willcox-Answers/52/776/45016
Greenpeace Captain
When the Ocean Calls, Pete Willcox Answers
by Christine Parrish
Thursday, April 21, 2016 11:29 AM
I opened the door of the gunmetal gray Prius and plunked into the
passenger seat, closing out the cold sea wind at the Islesboro ferry
landing. I had met veteran Greenpeace Captain Peter Willcox only once,
but we had been communicating for a couple of years, mostly through
email and a couple of phone conversations, and I had written extensively
about his detention in Russia in 2013 after protesting against oil
drilling in the Arctic.
I had expected he would be driving a truck, like all the fishermen and
boat-guys I knew. Toolbox in the bed, foul weather gear behind the
driver’s seat.
“A truck? Not me,” said Willcox. “We just got it at Shepard’s. It was
a trade-in. A 2012.”
The dashboard of the Prius looked like the instrument panel of a small
plane. A couple minutes later we pulled into the driveway of the house
he shares with his wife, Maggy Aston Willcox, longtime publisher of the
Islesboro Island News.
He checked the instrument panel.
“One hundred nineteen miles to the gallon,” Willcox said.
There’s no denying that Willcox is famous. Not movie star famous, though
that may yet come. Not rich and famous. That probably will never come.
Willcox’s fame has gone up and down in the course of his 40-year career
as an environmental activist. He’s famous for leading the campaign
against clubbing baby seals that led to the nosedive of the luxury fur
trade, famous for stopping Japanese whalers, famous for having the
Rainbow Warrior blown out from under him by the French intelligence
service when he was docked in New Zealand — killing his friend and
fellow crewmember, photographer Fernando Pereira.
His new autobiography, “Greenpeace Captain: My Adventures in Protecting
the Future of Our Planet,” Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martins Press
(Hardcover: $27.99, Ebook: $14.99), which was co-written with friend Ron
Weiss and released on Tuesday, April 19, will probably make him famous,
again.
He shrugs it off.
It’s not that he minds talking to the press. He’s been doing that for
decades. It’s just, well, fan-dom isn’t really his gig. Besides, out
there on the ocean, fame doesn’t impress anyone. And, here at home, it’s
how you live your life that matters.
Willcox is a sailor, first. Boats have been a part of his life since he
was a little kid. He’s been a peaceful environmental activist since the
groundswell of the modern environmental movement in the early 1970s,
when the youth of America was engaged in the political process and the
word “compromise” had not yet crept into the lexicon as a code word for
not ticking off donors to environmental organizations.
Willcox grew up in the civil rights era and participated in
demonstrations with his parents. Nonviolent protest was and remains part
and parcel of the man. He is a likable leader, according to his
shipmates. Easy to work with, easy to work for, always willing to lead
the most radical action by example, and a respected mariner who is
tempered by experience. He knows his boats and what they are capable of
right down to the rivets.
Willcox has never given in — to borrow Winston Churchill’s famous
phrase about being under siege. Over time, he has gotten somewhat jaded
with the directions Greenpeace has taken, and he realized a while ago
that only a few of the environmental protests he has been involved in
have led to lasting change, even as the global environment continues to
worsen. But even as he left his idealistic youth behind and had a
family, even as generations of young activists came and went from the
Greenpeace ships he captained — the Rainbow Warrior and the Arctic
Sunrise — Willcox stayed the course.
At 62, he has remained absolutely committed to non-violent environmental
activism. He pays attention to the choices he makes, right down to his
fish sandwich and his choice of raingear. Peter Willcox has never,
never, never given up.
In 2013, Willcox was arrested with 29 other international activists who
were staging a peaceful protest against a Russian oil drilling rig that
was on its way to be the first to extract oil from wells drilled into
the floor of the Arctic Ocean and pumped up through the ice.
Gazprom, the Russian government-backed company, was going after oil in a
tempestuous sea in an area that had only become available for drilling
because the use of fossil fuels had warmed the polar regions and thinned
the ice. In every way, it was ethically unsound to take advantage of the
damage to create more damage for short-term economic gain. Added to
that, no one knew how to clean up an oil spill in the Arctic. There was
barely a protocol for drilling in the Arctic Ocean, much less knowledge
about how to clean it up or the extent of the environmental impacts. It
was a soulless enterprise.
Not that the Russians had a corner on drilling in the Arctic ocean. They
just happened to get there ahead of the rush.
Greenpeace activists aboard the Arctic Sunrise planned to climb partway
up the side of Gazprom’s massive oil drilling rig, hang a banner that
read “Save the Arctic” on the hull, then occupy a small livable module
that they would suspend with climbing ropes to the rig for as long as
they could get away with it. They didn’t plan to board the oil rig or
damage it. The activists planned to hunker down and refuse to move while
filming the whole damn thing and shooting it around the world on social
media. That is a Greenpeace signature: forceful and daring civil
disobedience. No violence. No destruction. Massive media attention
desirable.
It didn’t work out that way. The Greenpeace climbers were arrested at
gunpoint by Russian special forces whose faces were covered with black
balaclavas that they never took off. The commandos carried AK-47s and
sheath knives, which they brandished at the protesters. They cut the
climbing ropes on the Gazprom rig, dropping one of the climbers into the
frigid water.
The Greenpeace ship, the Arctic Sunrise, which was standing off in
international waters, was boarded by the Russian military commandos
dropping out of helicopters, who detained the crew at gunpoint.
The news that the Arctic Sunrise had been boarded was already pinging
around the globe. A few key activists locked themselves in the radio
room and hastily uploaded images and video of the boarding to Greenpeace
International headquarters in Amsterdam just before the Russians
started ripping out satellite lines and disabling communications equipment.
As the commandos broke down the radio room door, the holdouts tweeted:
We’ve been boarded. Headed to Russia. #savethearctic
After being towed for four days to Murmansk, the Arctic Sunrise crew
learned they could face piracy charges, with a potential 15-year jail term.
Willcox might have been expected to retire after the charges were
dropped and he was released from a St. Petersberg jail two months later.
This had been far worse than he or anyone else expected. Willcox had
seen his share of actions and jail cells in foreign countries. It
wasn’t that uncommon. He had played chicken with big Soviet whaling
ships off of the Russian and Alaskan coasts when the Soviets were still
a union. He had chained himself to Japanese whaling harpoons in Peru,
protested French nuclear testing in Polynesia, and led actions to stop
tuna fishing before the tuna runs out.
This stint in Russian detention was different. It had shaken the crew.
Willcox worried they would blame him, and a couple of crew members
seemed to do just that, even though Willcox had no inkling that the
Russian oil protest would be any different than dozens that had come
before —including one against Gazprom the year before.
Not only that, Willcox had recently married Maggy Aston of Islesboro, a
woman who he had shared a summer romance with decades before while
captaining the Clearwater — a sloop owned by singer and environmental
activist Pete Seeger.
After he’d logged 400,000 sea miles over 40 years of environmental
activism, no one would have been surprised if Pete Willcox had had enough.?
Instead, he asked for another ship.
He got one, and two months after being released from a Russian jail, he
intercepted the Russian ship that was preparing to offload that first
take of Arctic Ocean oil at a Rotterdam dock in The Netherlands.
To do it, Willcox maneuvered his 150-foot Greenpeace ship between the
dock and the massive oil tanker, whose hull rose up beside the
Greenpeace ship like a canyon wall. The goal was to delay the Russian
ship long enough to muster media attention and, Greenpeace hoped, incite
public protest against drilling in the Arctic.
This time the deft maneuver worked. The authorities boarded the
Greenpeace ship and Willcox, known for his shrug and imperturbable cool,
kept them locked out of the bridge until they threatened to bust a
plate-glass window. Willcox shook his finger at them and unlocked the door.
Greenpeace had made its point.
This time, though, the media coverage was minimal.
“It’s hard to compete for attention when female suicide bombers are on
the nightly news,” Willcox said wryly as we sat at the kitchen table in
front of the woodstove at the Islesboro house. Outside, birds flitted
among the snow-covered spruce. Pretty peaceful out on Islesboro.
Pretty tame.
Willcox was leaving on a Greenpeace trip to Japan, captaining a vessel
with an independent research team that planned to collect data on
ocean-based nuclear fallout from the Fukushima nuclear plant. The 2011
Fukushima disaster was the largest release of radioactivity into the
ocean and ranks with Chernobyl as the top nuclear disaster worldwide.
Evidence of the effects of radiation on the natural environment are
already becoming apparent, according to the researchers.
Captaining a vessel on research trips is a large part of his duties as a
Greenpeace captain, and an important part of the current mission of the
organization. Scientists come from universities and foundations to do
their own research. Greenpeace gives them a ride and provides
non-specialized equipment, asking only that they share their research
findings with the organization and allow Greenpeace to distribute them.
Willcox would return from the research trip just in time for the
release of his book.
Would he stop going to sea? I asked him. Could he see that day coming?
He had spent the better part of eight years ashore after his first
marriage broke up and he was raising his daughters. They were grown now,
but he was also now practically a newlywed. In three years of marriage,
he hadn’t spent much time ashore.
“I’m hoping she’ll come out with me part of the time,” he said. “Maggy
and I met on a boat. That’s how it all started.”
“When the ocean is in trouble, I?can’t refuse the call,” he says in his
book, which ends with a call to action.
“And if the environment isn’t your thing, then do something good you do
care about ... any small gesture you make, or any small difference you
make, will make a big difference in you.”
“Take it from me. It’s not really a sacrifice. It’s a reward.”
_______________________________________________
Sustainablelorgbiofuel mailing list
Sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org
http://lists.eruditium.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel
