Treasures from the archive

The letter that started it all

Written in 1970, almost two years before the protest voyage that would give birth to Greenpeace, this letter announces the decision of a local committee of the Sierra Club of B.C. to launch a campaign against nuclear testing in Alaska. “These multi-megaton explosions threaten B.C. with tidal waves, earthquakes and radioactive pollution,” reads the letter, which contains the first known reference to the name “Don’t Make a Wave.”

Button

During preparations for its protest trip, the Don’t Make a Wave Committee would end each meeting with the hippieera salutation “peace.” After a church basement meeting, one member said, “Let’s make it a green peace,” and the organization’s new name was born. The small group of Vancouver radicals funded their first year of operations almost entirely through button sales. In 1971, they sold more than $20,000 worth of buttons, equivalent to about $125,000 today.

Espionage map

When Greenpeace turned its attention to saving whales in 1975, its biggest challenge was to simply find the Russian whalers in the millions of square kilo- metres of the Pacific Ocean. Fortunately, they had a contact at the International Whaling Commission, who covertly communicated the position of the Russian ships to them, allowing the slower protest boats to intercept their targets.

Vancouver proclamation

On Oct. 18, 1981, Vancouver’s mayor, Mike Harcourt, declared a citywide “Greenpeace Day” to commemorate the group’s inaugural voyage 10 years earlier. “Whatever each of us may think of them, there is no question that Greenpeace has grown into one of the largest and most influential ecological organizations across Canada and around the world,” Harcourt said.

Childhood comic book

Long before his activism, Hunter was a budding artist keenly interested in science fiction, and he drew apocalyptic comic books containing his visions of future environmental collapse. In 1971, with the help of a Canada Council grant, he published his first and only comic, Time of the Clockmen.

Unpublished manuscripts

While there are still scores of boxes of Hunter’s archives to be explored, so far nine unpublished books have turned up. Three of them appear to be a trilogy of Canadiana fiction about the fading of French influence in western Canada and the rise of multicultural society, starting with the first novel, Long Way to the Horizon. Thomas Hart, who is organizing and cataloguing the archive, hopes to have the works published before writing a biography based on the material he has discovered. Marco Chown Oved