Activist escaped Rainbow Warrior blasts

Steve Sawyer, a former executive director of Greenpeace International, narrowly averted injury in 1985 when the environmental group’s ship Rainbow Warrior was sunk by sabotage in Auckland.

While growing up in New England, on the east coast of the United States, Sawyer became a skilled sailor. He used his expertise to help to refurbish an ageing British trawler for Greenpeace in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Rechristened the Rainbow Warrior, it became the flagship in Greenpeace’s efforts to prevent nuclear testing and to promote ecology.

Since the organisation’s founding in 1971,

Greenpeace had cultivated a daring, antiauthoritarian and sometimes confrontational approach to environmental protection. Its members were sometimes called eco-warriors, even though nonviolence was one of the guiding principles of Greenpeace.

‘‘For us, it wasn’t blind idealism,’’ Sawyer told the Toronto Star in 2005. ‘‘It’s hard to tell people who weren’t around then about living in daily fear of crazy old men in Moscow and Washington who had their fingers on the nuclear buttons, and might at any time cause the Big Bang.’’

At different times, Greenpeace activists darted through dangerous waters in small boats to prevent Japanese and Russian whalers from discharging their harpoons. They landed on the coast of Siberia to protest Soviet whaling practices. They handcuffed themselves to drums filled with toxic waste to keep them from being dumped into the ocean. They protected baby seals about to be killed in Canada, sometimes spraying them with green dye to make their white fur worthless to hunters.

Many of these guerrilla-like episodes were caught on film, adding to Greenpeace’s reputation as the renegade pirate outfit of the environmental movement. ‘‘Back then,’’ Sawyer told the Star, ‘‘one of the major requirements was that people who signed up didn’t mind if others thought they were nuts.’’

In 1985, Sawyer was one of about a dozen Greenpeace crew members on the Rainbow Warrior when it embarked on a dual mission in the Pacific. The first was to remove inhabitants from the atoll of Rongelap in the Marshall Islands, which had been the site of US nuclear tests in the 1950s.

Residents had unusually high rates of cancer and birth defects, but US officials ignored their requests to move off the nuclearcontaminated atoll. Over 10 days, Sawyer and the Rainbow Warrior crew evacuated about 300 residents, their livestock and possessions to another atoll about 160 kilometres away.

The second mission of the Greenpeace crew on the Rainbow Warrior was to lead a flotilla to an atoll in French Polynesia, in an

effort to block underground nuclear tests by the French. The Rainbow Warrior was docked in Auckland when two bombs exploded below the ship’s waterline just before midnight on July 10, 1985.

After the first explosion, Greenpeace photographer Fernando Pereira sought to retrieve his camera equipment. and was killed in the second blast.

There may have been greater loss of life if most of the crew members hadn’t been ashore, celebrating Sawyer’s 29th birthday.

In 1986, Sawyer became Greenpeace’s US director, overseeing a rapid surge in membership, donations and global recognition. Two years later, he became the executive director of Greenpeace International, moving to London and later to Amsterdam, where the group maintains its global headquarters.

Over time, Sawyer redirected Greenpeace’s focus toward efforts to fight climate change and develop sources of renewable energy. ‘‘The environment has to rise to the No 1 issue on the world agenda,’’ he said in 1989. ‘‘The dramatic actions we were once known for aren’t always necessary these days to bring things to people’s attention. Sometimes we can just point a finger and it’s enough.’’

Yet, in many ways, he and his organisation were defined by the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior and their defiance in the face of what they called state-sponsored terrorism.

‘‘It was my 29th birthday,’’ Sawyer said in 2005. ‘‘That’s something I can never forget. Every year I’m forced to remember it.’’ Stephen Gregory Sawyer was born in Boston to an engineer father and a mother, who taught the piano.

Sawyer graduated in 1978 from Haverford College in Pennsylvania with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy. While contemplating career options, he met a canvasser for Greenpeace and joined the group. He raised money and did other jobs for Greenpeace, including leading the refitting of the Rainbow Warrior.

He stepped down from day-to-day leadership of Greenpeace in 1993.

He later helped found the Global Wind Energy Council, which he led from 2007 to 2017. He travelled throughout the world to help establish wind energy companies.

In 1988, he married Kelly Rigg. In addition to his wife, survivors include two children; a sister; and a brother.

In 1985, Greenpeace converted another ship and named it Rainbow Warrior II and in 1995, it sailed to the French Polynesian atoll of Moruroa to lead a protest against nuclear testing. When French military commandos boarded the ship, the crew invoked the memory of the photographer who had been killed 10 years earlier. When asked for their identities, they all gave the same name: Fernando Pereira. – The Washington Post

Steve Sawyer environmental activist b July 10, 1956 d July 31, 2019

‘‘It’s hard to tell people who weren’t around then about living in daily fear of crazy old men in Moscow and Washington who had their fingers on the nuclear buttons . . .’’

Steve Sawyer