Words he lived by

A flower is my brother.

Hunter learned, on a muskeg-covered hill overlooking the Bering Sea, on the way to the nuclear test site at Amchitka, that talk about human connectedness to nature implies an unconsciously acknowledged separation from nature.

The ecology movement was in large part about convincing people there are two worlds, the natural and the human. And as a successful, creative, rational species, we have a responsibility to “shepherd” the natural. Lying in the muskeg, naked and unprotected, he felt the land breathe in concert with him; there was one breath, one life, one family. It was then that he realized that we are part of nature no matter how much we resist the notion. When nature is sick, and sick it is, humanity cannot be healthy, and healthy it is not.

Minds can’t move mountains, but they can stop ships.

This thought calls to mind both the creation and use of the mind bomb, and the call for a revolution of consciousness. On the first sealing campaign, Hunter placed himself in front of a processing ship plowing through the ice. His back to the bow, he didn’t flinch. His will was steeled, his body and mind rigid. The image itself is a classic mind bomb. But it also explains the revolution he sought. Hunter realized that the press coverage, the meetings with local sealers and the disputes with other members of Greenpeace had created awareness that the wholesale slaughter of the seal population was neither necessary nor desirable for anyone. He knew that he, the ship’s captain, and the public had come into one consciousness that made it impossible for the ship to move through the mental and moral space it was headed for.

I am never the most important thing in the room at any given time.

Hunter believed one of the great challenges to the view that “a flower is my brother” was the western concept of the sovereignty of the self, the radical individualism that keeps people from understanding how they relate to one another.

From very early in his thinking about the state of society, he believed that the reductionist attitude, the idea that understanding any object is only achieved through an understanding of its component parts, had infected consciousness.

At the nucleus of the infection is the constant affirmation that “I” am sacrosanct, that “I” must be self-sufficient, that “I” control destiny. But Hunter understood that “I” does not exist if there is no “we” and it is through this “we” that reality is made livable. Nature has no “I.” It only has an “is.” It’s a verb, a relation of objects, not the objects themselves.