Greenpeace born at kitchen table
In 1970, antiwar activists Irving and Dorothy Stowe were sitting around their kitchen table brainstorming with their friends Jim and Marie Bohlen.
The American government had announced it was going to conduct a nuclear test on Amchitka Island, off Alaska, and Marie Bohlen offered a suggestion.
“I said casually, ‘Well, why don’t we take a boat up there?’ ” she recalled. “Someone from The (Vancouver) Sun had called and wanted to know what we were doing. Jim on the spur of the moment said, ‘Oh, we’re getting a boat and we’re going up to protest the blast up there.’
“Of course, we had no boat, but that was incentive to get one.”
This was the start of the Don’t Make a Wave committee’s decision to send a protest ship, the first act of the environmental group that became Greenpeace.
After Marie suggested sending a ship to Amchitka, Irving Stowe hatched the idea of a benefit concert to raise the money to charter a boat.
On Oct. 16, 1970, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Phil Ochs and Chilliwack did a concert at the Pacific Coliseum, drawing 10,000 people and raising $18,000.
A ship, the Phyllis Cormack, was chartered and dispatched to Amchitka. It was intercepted by the U.S. Coast Guard before reaching its destination, but the action laid the foundation for Greenpeace’s long history of activism.
Both couples were Americans who had moved to Canada. The Stowes were deeply committed social activists — Dorothy had organized a social workers’ union in her native Rhode Island. On their wedding night, the couple attended a banquet for the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People).
After having a couple of kids, the Stowes were so worried about a nuclear war that they left the U.S. for New Zealand. Then the French announced they were going to do nuclear tests in the South Pacific, so they moved to Vancouver in 1966.
The Bohlens moved to Vancouver in 1967 when one of their sons said he wanted to go to Canada to avoid the draft for the Vietnam War.
“My husband said, ‘Not without us,’ ” said Marie Bohlen. “So we all came.”
A rag-tag group of environmentalists, radicals and journalists coalesced around the Greenpeace banner, including Bob Hunter, Ben Metcalfe, Patrick Moore, Bill Darnell and Paul Cote. Somehow the hybrid of older activists and young hotheads worked — Greenpeace became the world’s largest environmental organization.
“Who knew that four people at a kitchen table could give rise to a movement that has offices in 40 countries?” said Dorothy Stowe.