The “Mindbomb“ That Was Greenpeace

It is late evening, November 18, 1979, in Amsterdam, and the remnants of the Vancouver cabal that had given birth to Greenpeace eight years earlier have just relinquished control over their beloved organization.

They retire to a bar to conduct a wake of sorts. And to sum up Greenpeace’s legacy.

Although humanity would have embraced ecology without Greenpeace, the change would not have been as quick or as decisive. Whereas pioneers like Henry David Thoreau and Alice Hamilton spoke out as lonely voices, Greenpeace had endowed ecology with a public mythology. Statistics and polemics could not have achieved this. Peaceful insurgents in rainbow ships: that was news. Saving the environment had become heroic … We believed that in the face of society’s psychotic behaviour—slavery, death camps, random murder, the fouling of rivers, decimation of whales and so forth, all common occurrences in our age—someone must stand...