The many phases of Bob Hunter
Precocious high schooler
Born in 1941 in Manitoba, Hunter knew he wanted to be a writer by the time he was in his teens, drawing comic books and writing science fiction short stories. Before graduating from high school, he received an art school scholarship, but instead of attending, he ripped it up and set out for Vancouver. There he wrote his first novel, Erebus, which was nominated for a Governor General’s Award.
Counterculture columnist
Hunter told everyone he got his first newspaper job by walking into the Winnipeg Tribune newsroom and telling an editor that he would consent to lending the paper his talents. Later he would be the only hippie at the Vancouver Sun, growing his hair long and wearing bell bottoms. The paper formalized his role as a “counterculture” reporter just as the anti-nuclear movement was taking off. When he proposed accompanying protesters on a ship that was to sail to a nuclear test blast area in Alaska, he had a world exclusive on the genesis of Greenpeace in 1971.
Activist guru
Somewhere along the voyage, Hunter stopped reporting on and started leading the group, which called itself the Don’t Make a Wave Committee. Shortly afterward, the U.S. announced it would cease all nuclear testing in Alaska and Hunter became the founding president of Greenpeace, the first international ecological organization. In a move no one saw coming, he shifted Greenpeace’s goals and set out to save the whales, which were being hunted into extinction — a loss he believed represented man’s most gluttonous attack on nature.
The quiet years
Greenpeace grew so rapidly that the organization became uncontrollable from its small Vancouver office. Internal power struggles saw Hunter bow out and retreat to a reclusive cabin on the North Shore with his wife, Bobbi, and two young children. Here, he drafted books and columns and paid the bills by writing scripts for The Beachcombers and later Danger Bay. Unable to steer completely clear of politics and the environment, he was hired by various First Nations bands to co-ordinate communications and fight for their treaty rights.
Discovering his roots
Through his work with First Nations, he soon discovered he was himself part aboriginal. Along with Robert Calihoo, another “white person” who found out he was native, Hunter wrote
Occupied Canada, which retold the history of Canada from an indigenous point of view. The book, which was published shortly after Quebec’s 1990 Oka crisis came to a head, rode a public wave of consciousness of aboriginal issues and won the Governor General’s Award for non-fiction.
As seen on TV
After winning a scriptwriting competition, Hunter moved his family to Toronto to attend film school, but was soon persuaded to drop out by Moses Znaimer, who invited him to become Citytv’s first “ecological reporter.” Hunter capitalized on City’s willingness to be experimental by blurring the line between journalist and activist, often participating in the environmental media stunts he was covering, including sending a delegation of aboriginals out to intercept the ships re-enacting Columbus’s discovery of America. Hunter would become best known for his daily news commentary on Breakfast Television, called Papercuts, in which he would dissect the morning papers while wearing a bathrobe in his basement. Marco Chown Oved