Greenpeace exec who survived attack
Steve Sawyer, a former executive director of Greenpeace International who narrowly averted injury in 1985 when the environmental group’s ship Rainbow Warrior was sunk by sabotage in New Zealand, died July 31 at a hospital in Amsterdam. He was 63.
The cause was lung cancer, Greenpeace said in a statement. The Americanborn Mr. Sawyer was an Amsterdam resident.
While growing up in New England, Mr. Sawyer became a skilled sailor. He used his expertise to help refurbish an aging British trawler for Greenpeace in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Re- christened the Rainbow Warrior, it became the flagship in Greenpeace’s efforts to prevent nuclear testing and to promote ecology.
Since the organization’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.
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 guerrillalike episodes were caught on film, adding to Greenpeace’s reputation as the renegade pirate outfit of the environmental movement. “Back then,” Mr. Sawyer said in 2005, “one of the major requirements was that people who signed up didn’t mind if others thought they were nuts.”
In 1985, Mr. Sawyer was one of about a dozen Greenpeace crew members aboard 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 U. S. nuclear tests in the 1950s.
Residents had unusually high rates of cancer and birth defects, but U. S. officials ignored their requests to move off the nuclear- contaminated atoll. Over 10 days, Mr. Sawyer and the Rainbow Warrior crew evacuated about 300 residents, their livestock and possessions to another atoll about 100 miles away.
The second mission of the Greenpeace crew aboard 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, New Zealand, when two bombs exploded below the ship’s waterline just before midnight on July 10, 1985.
The Rainbow Warrior was damaged beyond repair and listed to one side, halfsubmerged in the harbor. After the first explosion, Greenpace 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 Mr. Sawyer’s 29th birthday.
New Zealand police quickly arrested a man and a woman who claimed to be Swiss citizens on vacation. Further detective work revealed that they were French undercover agents who had planted the bombs on the side of the ship.
After an international outcry, the two agents were sentenced to prison, and a coverup scandal tainted the French government. With the legal help of onetime White House counsel Lloyd Cutler, Greenpeace sued the French government and ultimately received a settlement of about $ 8 million.
“I was generally sympathetic to Greenpeace’s environmental goals,” Mr. Cutler said in 1989, “and as I started working with them, I came to admire them tremendously.”
In 1986, Mr. Sawyer became Greenpeace’s U. S. 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, Mr. Sawyer redirected Greenpeace’s focus toward efforts to fight climate change and develop sources of renewable energy.
Yet, in many ways, he and his organization 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,” Mr. Sawyer said in 2005. “That’s something I can never forget. Every year I’m forced to remember it.”
Stephen Gregory Sawyer was born July 10, 1956, in Boston and grew up in Antrim, N. H. His father was an engineer, his mother a piano teacher.
Mr. Sawyer graduated in 1978 from Haverford College in Haverford, Pa., with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy. While contemplating his career options, he met a door- to- door canvasser for Greenpeace and soon joined the group.
He stepped down from day- to- day leadership of Greenpeace in 1993 but remained closely allied with the organization. He later helped found the Global Wind Energy Council, which he led from 2007 to 2017, and traveled to help establish wind energy companies globally.
In 1988, he married Kelly Rigg. In addition to his wife, survivors include two children, a sister, and a brother.