A philosopher by nature
A decade after the death of Greenpeace co-founder Bob Hunter, a Toronto professor is on a mission to reframe his legacy — not just as an activist and journalist, but also as a revolutionary thinker
Bob Hunter had many public personas, and the one you might be familiar with depends greatly on your age.
If you’re a baby boomer, you will likely remember him as a swashbuckling founder of Greenpeace who steered his zodiac between a Russian whaler and a humpback only to have a harpoon fired right over his head.
But if your parents are the ones with greying ponytails, you might recall Hunter as the old guy in a bathrobe on Breakfast Television in the 1990s and early 2000s, breaking down the day’s news in “Papercuts,” an off-the-cuff media analysis segment.
Because much of Hunter’s career predates the rise of the Internet, few traces of his historic life are found online: none of his columns or television reports, no mention of his Governor General’s Award, not even YouTube clips of him saving seals, sailing into nuclear blast areas or animating a conversation on Citytv’s short-lived Hunter’s Gatherings.
Now, a decade after Hunter’s death in 2005 at age 63, one Toronto scholar has set out to introduce the man to a new generation, not as an environmental activist or a media-savvy commentator, but as a philosopher — perhaps the most important eco-theorist this country has produced.
Thomas Hart, a professor of philosophy at Ryerson University, gained exclusive access to the archive of Hunter’s personal papers and spent much of the past year painstakingly cataloguing the unpublished manuscripts, private correspondence and personal musings collected over more than three decades — material, he says, that shows Hunter had remarkably consistent clarity of thought through the many chapters of his life.
“I realized that I was dealing with someone who was forced by society to specialize as a ‘journalist’ and an ‘activist,’ but in fact was a true public intellectual,” Hart said. “Someone who should have a place in the pantheon of great thinkers.”
Hart describes Hunter’s thinking as a synthesis of politics, sociology, spirituality and ethics that can be found in the comic books he drew in his teens (humans must abandon a poisoned Earth and aliens reject their pleas for help), the novel he published in his 20s (slaughterhouse workers anesthetize themselves to the horrors they must inflict) and his two works of media theory from the 1970s (a Marshall McLuhan-inspired media “mind bomb” can awaken mass consciousness). But it’s also there in action when Hunter co-founded Greenpeace, which would grow into the world’s biggest environmental organization, and his journalism of the ’80s and ’90s, when he recognized early on the threat of climate change and did his utmost to sound the alarm.
“Every time I delve into it, the consistency of thought is there,” Hart said. “He recognized what we do, how it must be changed, and why.”
Hart devoted decades to studying Friedrich Nietzsche, another thinker who was dead long before his importance was recognized, and says the two thinkers share an “anti-specialist” theme.
“It’s about getting past the solipsism, past the fundamental isolation in modern western culture,” he said.
This means not only breaking down the divisions between people through media, but also breaking down the mental barriers between civilization and nature. Hart calls it “the unisolated notion” — the idea, simply, that we are not alone.
“Drop the ego” is how Hunter would have phrased it in his long-haired, mustachioed days. Only then can we bring about a “revolution in consciousness.”
This isn’t an academic exercise, said Hart. It’s really about finding a new way to understand our place in the world — essential if we are to face the existential crisis of climate change.
“Bob is no longer with us. His actions are no longer part of the calculation. What we do have is his words. And I have100 boxes of them. I want to see if we can use his words to ensure our actions are judged positively.”
The Hunter gatherer
There’s a warehouse in Downsview where the University of Toronto Media Commons keeps its archive. It includes shelf upon shelf, row upon row of old Betamax tapes, tins of 35-mm film and countless boxes of scripts, budgets and contracts collected by some of Canada’s greatest media figures.
Moses Znaimer, who revolutionized local television in the 1970s and ’80s, knows all about it because his archives are kept there. That’s why, in the last years of Bob Hunter’s life, Znaimer encouraged him to collect everything.
“He was a guy of prodigious productivity and I knew there were vast amount of materials mouldering away in boxes,” said Znaimer. “I knew him to be involved in a form of environmentalism which caught my imagination . . . He took physical risks . . . He was that classic case of an intellectual in action — that’s rare.”
Hunter donated the first 20 boxes and his wife, Bobbi, added 70 after his death. More material has since come in, but no one took the time to go through it all.
That was until early last year, when Hunter’s family was seeking someone to deliver the 10th annual Bob Hunter Memorial Lecture at the University of Toronto’s school of the environment.
“He was practically Nostradamus” on climate change, said Hunter’s son, Will. “He was treated like Chicken Little but the reality is that everything he was writing is happening now.”
Will wanted someone who could draw together the many facets of his father, and figured only a philosopher would suffice.
“Dad had a big philosophical basis to a lot of his beliefs. He might not have had a university education, but he was constantly talking about Carl Jung, Nietzsche and Gestalt theory and the collective unconscious,” he said.
Will wouldn’t have to look very far. His wife’s brother, Thomas Hart, is an awardwinning philosophy professor who had just returned from years in Utrecht, Netherlands. Ryerson had given Hart a job teaching courses on ancient philosophy and Nietzsche, but teaching was starting to wear thin. So when Will called, asking him to give a lecture about Hunter, Hart seized the challenge. Hart had never met Bob Hunter and knew little about his life. So he began by reading all his published books, from the 1968 novel Erebus and his history of Canada from an aboriginal point of view, Occupy
Canada, to a posthumously published activist memoir, The Greenpeace to Amchitka. “It was after reading The Storming of the
Mind (a 1971 book) that I realized I had come across something that would change my life,” said Hart.
Hart’s lecture, delivered in a packed hall last April, focused on the connectedness Hunter felt with all things: whales and seals as well as whalers and sealers.
That oneness put Hunter ahead of his contemporary ecologists, who tended to see things in terms of good nature versus evil corporation, Hart said, and it allowed him to employ media as a language to translate between individual isolation and the connected universe.
He did so by deploying “mind bombs”: dramatic images that galvanize public opinion in a way no logical argument ever could.
This combination of metaphysical connectedness and tactical media strategy is what makes Hunter’s work so important, Hart said.
Under the fluorescent lights of a research room in Robarts Library last fall, Hart sat beside an aging book trolley, its metal shelf flexing under eight bankers’ boxes.
It was the third batch of boxes he’d gone through and there were 100 boxes to go. Inside each, dog-eared file folders, newsletters and correspondence are interspersed with musings: yellowed pages of stream-of-consciousness typing sandwiched with the newspaper or magazine article that spawned the thought.
“You get one chapter of a novel in one box and . . . there isn’t a period at the end of the last line. And you know that there is a chapter somewhere else,” he said.
“Bob’s work isn’t done and he’s not around to do it anymore. But I’m in a position to bring that work to light, keeping it current and creating a foundation.”
Hunter’s widow, Bobbi, has given the project her blessing. After a long period of mourning, she’s found strength in a group forming around his legacy. British filmmaker Jerry Rothwell has made a documentary from footage discovered in the basement of the Greenpeace International office in the Netherlands, which premiered at TIFF last fall.
“I was afraid that he was going to be forgotten, lost in time,” said Bobbi. “But now I’m not so sure.”
She recounts a story from Hunter’s last months, when she returned home to find him sitting on a bench in the corner of their backyard.
When she approached, the typically upbeat character was in such a morose mood that they sat silently.
“I don’t know if I’ve had any effect,” he finally said.
Bobbi didn’t know what to say, but finally formulated the only possible response.
“Bob, you’re never going to know. The only time that your impact is going to be known is after you’re gone.”
More than a decade later, she adds: “I said that thinking that I would know, and now I realize that I might die not knowing.”
But, she said, “I think he’s going to be discovered as a great intellectual.
“Sometimes it takes a couple of generations before they’re received as they should be.”
“He took physical risks . . . He was that classic case of an intellectual in action — that’s rare.”
MOSES ZNAIMER ON BOB HUNTER “I was afraid that he was going to be forgotten, lost in time. But now I’m not so sure.”
HUNTER’S WIDOW, BOBBI