74 The EconomistAugust 24th 2019
T
he young manSteve Sawyer briefly met on July 10th 1985 on the
deck of the Greenpeace boat Rainbow Warrior, as it sat in dock at
Auckland in New Zealand, had nothing remarkable about him.
Short, slim, clean-shaven and with light blond hair, he looked like
just another student visitor. He wished Mr Sawyer a happy birth-
day—as it was, with the full works of ice cream and cake—and good
luck with his current campaign, to stop French nuclear testing in
Mururoa. Then he left. At 1am, after a meeting onshore of the skip-
pers of all the protest boats, Mr Sawyer got the call that the Rainbow
Warrior had been sunk. Two limpet bombs placed on the hull had
exploded, driving a huge hole through the engine room, and the
boat’s photographer had drowned while trying to rescue his gear.
The “student”, it turned out, belonged to the French secret ser-
vice. Mr Sawyer had long suspected that the French would try
something. His campaign in Polynesia had been deliberately de-
signed to annoy the hell out of them, so that they would take their
radioactive poison and their vile weapons away from where people
were trying to live. The Rainbow Warrior had already been rammed
by French vessels and the crew beaten up, non-violence met with
violence, so the gritty old re-purposed trawler was used to con-
frontation. This, however, was a whole new level.
And the repercussions shocked him. As he was trying to get to
grips with the situation, people began turning up with bucketfuls
of money. When he went to find a taxi, he was ushered to the front
of the queue. In the baked-potato shop, the man at the cash register
would not charge him. Across the world, people made donations
and joined Greenpeace to protest against oil-drilling, mining,
seal-hunting, whaling and dumping of toxic waste, as well as nuc-
lear testing—anything which, in the words of Aldo Leopold, on
which he had hung since college, destroyed “the integrity, stability
and beauty” of the biosphere. Long before mobile phones, the
bombing of the Rainbow Warriorcreated a media storm aroundhim. The next year he found himself director of Greenpeace usa,
and two years later director of Greenpeace International.
The bombing had filled him, and through him Greenpeace,
with even more defiant purpose. Since its founding in 1971 this had
been a raggedy band, making its point with risky stunts that were
denounced more than praised. It was this hippy-crazy aspect that
had made him, a hippy himself back then, sign up immediately
when a canvasser came to the door. But he found, as a lifelong de-
votee of Tolkien, a strong Hobbit element too. When battered little
boats put themselves between illegal whaling vessels and the
whales, daring them to fire their harpoons, or their crews sprayed
seal pups with green dye to make their fur worthless; when activ-
ists, so tiny against those monsters, scaled oil-rigs in the North At-
lantic to unfurl banners reading “Climate Emergency”, or blocked
pipelines belching toxic waste into the sea, he was reminded of the
brave little group of Bilbo, Frodo, Sam and the rest, who left the qui-
et Shire “to shake the towers and counsels of the Great”. They were
small, shaggy-haired and barefoot, usually unarmed and often
frightened. But they lived, and eventually triumphed, by their
wits. Every problem had a solution, and every battle could be won,
if you thought hard and fast enough.
He taught himself that, deliberately wandering off barefoot in
the woods to have to puzzle his way home. He taught his children
that (giving his son Sam a good Hobbit name). And he taught
Greenpeace, fiercely applying his red pen to press releases and,
when necessary, demanding sharp thinking as loudly as he liked to
play his blues guitar. He became, and was inevitably called, Gan-
dalf, not merely for his grizzled beard, lean sportsman’s height and
philosophy degree, but also for the wise way he managed his ever-
growing crowd of anti-authoritarians. Under him the organisation
gained weight in every sense. Therefore it won battles. The French
abandoned their nuclear testing in Polynesia, besides losing the
damages suit that Greenpeace had filed against their government.
Bugged by small-boat irritation, the United States ceased its test-
ing off Alaska. In 1987 the Montreal protocol curbed cfcdepletion
of the ozone layer, and in 1991 the Antarctic protocol, which people
thought unachievable, barred drilling there for 50 years. By the
time he stepped down, in 2007, he had put Greenpeace at the centre
of attempts to counter climate change.
Under him it also expanded its humanitarian side, sending its
boats to help after typhoons and tsunamis. This was a role which it,
and he, had stumbled into almost by accident in 1985, when he
made a detour on Rainbow Warrior’s voyage to Polynesia to evacu-
ate 300 people, their livestock and parts of their buildings from
Rongelap atoll to another island. Fallout from American nuclear
testing had made the atoll uninhabitable, but the Americans had
declared it clear, despite a horrifically high rate of stillbirths, de-
formities and cancers. Nothing he did afterwards meant more to
him than that rescue, and few things moved him more than seeing
the livid thyroidectomy scars of the women who greeted him. But
one was the thought of what Greenpeace was engaged in: “nothing
less than a fight to the death for the future of the planet”.
His progress in that fight could be traced through the Green-
peace boats. The seaborne aspect of most protests was partly why
he had joined, as someone who had loved to sail from childhood
on the lakes near his home in New Hampshire. In 1981 he master-
minded the refit of the first Rainbow Warrior, putting in bus en-
gines because, appropriately, they had been used in landing craft
on D-Day, and later installing a ketch rig for the Pacific voyage. Its
successor, Rainbow Warrior II, launched in 1989, was a refitted
three-mast schooner; the next, Rainbow Warrior III, was a purpose-
built yacht with no less than 1,255 square metres of sail. By then, as
director of the Global Wind Energy Council, he was working full-
time and worldwide to promote wind power. It was promoted too
through the ever-increasing strength, utility and beauty of the
Rainbow Warriors, risen from the harbour floor in Auckland to take
on the guarding of the Earth. 7Steve Sawyer, leader of Greenpeace for 30 years, died on July
31st, aged 63Hoisting the sails
Obituary Steve Sawyer