Greenpeace icon’s last act of defiance
Captain Peter Willcox of the Rainbow Warrior will not pretend to be nice as long as Earth is in danger.
YOU would expect a man who has devoted 45 years to fighting for the environment to be optimistic about his life’s work. But Greenpeace icon Peter Willcox is a picture of pessimism. A celebrated Earth hero, the 65-year-old is one of the longest-serving captains for the flagship vessel, Rainbow Warrior.
Willcox’s deep relationship with Greenpeace started in 1981 when he was 28 and the organisation only had 200 people. It took just three years on the job for his life to be threatened, a caveat that has become part and parcel of working as an environmental activist.
In 1985, Willcox was on-board the Rainbow Warrior II in New Zealand, en route to campaign against French nuclear testing in the South Pacific, when the ship was bombed by French foreign intelligence services. The attack killed photographer Fernando Pereira who drowned in the sinking.
The memory of what happened to Pereira, his friend and crewmate with two children, is still particularly painful. “They got away with murder,” he says, as he recalls the night of July 10.
Willcox sounds furious that Pereira’s family has not found closure, as the French agents have largely escaped prosecution in the last 33 years.
Despite this and a spate of other harrowing moments – in 2013, Willcox and 27 shipmates were arrested by the Russians on-board the Greenpeace MV Arctic Sunrise during a protest against Arctic oil drilling – he doesn’t show much emotion in his face. He looks serious and thoughtful, but his voice harbours both heartache and disappointment.
Willcox has the countenance of a man who has been out at sea for so very long – his curly hair dishevelled by the salty winds, a full beard that’s grey and white, his body weathered and tanned by the sun, a pair of dolphins tattooed on his left arm, and a ring tattoo on his finger.
The Rainbow Warrior and the seven oceans have been his home for more than half his life, and it shows. When Willcox first meets us on-board his ship, he’s in a Greenpeace T-shirt and jeans. Once the official events are done, he’s back to walking around the cabin in shorts and bare feet.
On the Greenpeace fleet, Willcox has witnessed some of the worst environmental abuses of the century, from killing seals in Canada and whaling in Peru to oil-drilling in the Arctic and nuclear waste-dumping in Japan.
Each disaster is like a knife to his heart. In every conversation he makes with the press and the public, he never misses his chance to plead his case, that there is a desperate need for all of us to take care of our planet.
“Climate change is not a distant problem our children have to deal with,” Willcox stresses. He cites proof of what he’s seen with his own eyes – overfishing, humankind’s addiction to plastics, the burning of fossil fuels and the poisoning of oceans.
The need to protect the world bears repeating, he says. “We’ve lost most of the great coral reefs in the world. We’re gonna lose the oceans. In five to 10 years, there is going to be more plastic in the ocean than fish.”
But beneath his passionate exhortation is also a man frustrated and exhausted by a lifetime of seeming defeats. Despite Greenpeace’s successes – a moratorium on commercial whaling, a ban of nuclear waste-dumping, an end to large-scale driftnet fishing on the high-seas – Earth’s health continues to worsen.
“Fish are dying by huge numbers from eating plastic. Birds are dying by the thousands from eating plastic. Whales are dying from eating plastic. And we’re still dumping more plastic into the ocean today,” he says.
“Earth is not in good shape. The ocean is not going to survive unless we quickly change what we are doing. And I don’t see the incentive to change.”