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Subject: Bob Hunter " Counter culture "journalist who brilliantly showed Greenpeace how to exploit the media .
Date: 23 Jun 2006 13:11:40 -0600

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BOB HUNTER , who died 2005 age 63,was the flamboyant Canadian journalist responsible for turning a tiny anti-nuclear protest group into " Greenpeace ", the most powerful environmental lobby group in the world .
A "Counter culture" columnist with the "Vancouver Sun" who sported headband , long hair and flared trousers , Hunter joined 11 men setting out in an elderly fishing boat to demonstrate against testing in the northern Pacific in 1971.
The boat was too slow to keep up with the Americans, who threaten to arrest them , and they never reached the test ground on Amchitka one of the Aleutian islands .But Hunter filed regular reports over the boats` telephone ,and a CBC radio reporter sent daily broadcasts.

As a result the public , already stirred by the uninhibited mixture of sex, drugs and drink which was seeping up from San Francisco , became hooked on the issue. Coast Gaurds wrote a public letter supporting the demonstrators ; British Columbia`s Social Credit Premier took part in a march ; President Nixon fumed .By the time the boat returned to Vancouver, after it`s 45- day journmey, public opinion had changed so much that the island was turned into a wildlife sanctury.

Hunter admitted that he had dropped any attempt to maintain journalistic independence ."In reality, I wound up on the first watch", he recalled With his head full of beat poets ,French philosophers and Marshall McLuhan`s musing on the "Global village" , he demonstrated a brilliant grasp of the way news media could be now be manipulated .After insisting that the groups name be changed from "Don`t"Make a Wave Committee"to Greenpeace , which could be easily fitted into a headline , he became the the foundation`s chairman as member "Number ooo ".

As the disparate membership of hippies , draft dodgers and middle aged Quakers mushroomed , there was considerable heart-searching about whether the organisation should take up other causes .But Hunter insisted it must do so , grandly proclaiming ; "The media is a courtroom .There is stark justice at work" .

He remained in Vancouver to mastermind coverage when Greenpeace`s ship was sent down to protest against French nuclear test in the South Pacific . Later he led the demonstrations against the Newfoundland seal hunt , the dumping of toxic waste in European waters as well as whaling expeditions . But for all thier success, he could see that it was possible to take the cause too seriously .

To make his point he took on the job as latrine officer when an old minesweeper staged an anti-whaling demonstration.When the ship placed itself between whales and Russian boats , a flight of harpoons was launched, one of wich was photographed passing through his long hair.

The son of a truck driver , Robert Lorne Hunter was born at Saint Boniface, Manotoba, on October 13 th.1941.Even as a school boy he was obsessed with authorship, ignoring lessons to write books, for which he would make special covers adorned with critics`comments, such as "Hunters` best yet". On leaving school ,he did odd jobs , then set out on a trip around the world. He got as far as Los Angeles , he returned home and then headed for Paris, where he took a room on the left bank, to find he had nothing to write about .

He had more satisfaction in London, where he became an admirer of Bertram Russell and the campaign for Nuclear Disarmament , and he met his first wife Zoe,with whom he was to have two children.

Returning home again , he found a job on the Winnipeg Tribune . But after a year, he felt the lure of the west coast again and moved to Vancouver , where he found he had been hired as a copyboy, not as a reporter,on the Province .But when "Erebus, his gimly comic novel about a boy working in a slaughterhouse , recevied favourable reviews, and was nominated for a Governor General`s award he was given his column in the Sun.

Although few readers can initially have agreed with a "hippy- trippy long haired freak`s" views on the way ecology would change perceptions of science, politics and phiosophy, Hunter proved compulsive reading.

He was temperamentally unsuited to any managerial role , but recognised that the public perception of Greenpeace was changing , so that exaspereted governments now considered it politic to show respect .

He cut his hair and started to wear suits, though when he marriied his second wife Bobbi, with whom he was to have two children ,it was in a Buddhist ceremony.With self-conscience parody,he described himselfd as, "an apocalypticist", urging audiences to "save the three legged salamander from southern Saskatoon"and bewailing "My God,the planet is being destroyed while I lie on my waterbed, I must do something".

Although it was a wrench, Hunter resigned his chairmanship after the foundation of Greenpeace International in Amsterdamin 1979 and returned to writing .There were scipts foe television programnes and books about the enviorment ,as well as lectures and freelance articles, though some environment journalist felt his partisanship did not always aid the cause.

His later books included, Occupied Canada ; a young white man man discovers his unsuspected past, which won a Governor General`s award and Zen and the art of International freeloading .The last,2030 ; confronting the Armageddon in our lifetime, so impressed a grandmother in her seventies that she drove from Vancouver Island to Ottawa, in a low emission car in order to deliver a copy to every MP along the way.

After moving to Ontario, Hunter was singled out by "Time magazine"in 2000 as one of the eco-heroes`of the past century . By the following year he had become so respectable that he stood as a liberal in a by-election for the provincial parliament. When his socialist opponents read out some pornographic passages from a travel book published more than decade earlier, he protested that it was not an autobiographical work and threaten to sue his triumphant rival.

Finally,Hunter covered ecological storiesfor local television stations , and a programne in which a camera crew filmed sitting at home in his bathrobe at 5.30 am, as he reviewed the morning`s newspapers and critised the news values of thier edtors.

Article from the Daily Telegraph 05/05/2005 .



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