Two recent thoughtful comments on my GM update made me think back to my brief encounter with Greenpeace. It was 1979-80 I as living and working in Amsterdam in a 5 star hotel called the Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky. I was dating a Dutch girl named Marejka who worked for Greenpeace and who’s headquarters where in Amsterdam at the time. Marejke was a kind and gentle soul who used to chastise me about cooking lobsters. Being a young man in my early twenties living in Amsterdam I wasn’t into much else except cooking, my art and drinking too many beers.
As a favour Marejke ask me if I would paint some banners for Greenpeace in English.
Up until this point my perception of Greenpeace was a well-meaning organisation that was run by a bunch of peace-nicks out of touch with the real world…but boy was I wrong. Here was a group of highly educated people from various scientific disciplines trying to save the planet from the greed and ruination of companies and governments with no moral compass. As I waited for the painted slogans to dry I got into conversation with several scientists to ask them what this protest was about. First I was shown various types of flat fish (Dover sole, lemon sole and plaice) that had been caught earlier that day. All of them had ugly looking ulcer type growths on them…..you see for some years the German chemical company Bayer had been dumping chemical waste in the Dutch part of the North Sea. Rather than dump this toxic waste inside Germany they had been paying the Dutch Government so many millions of guilders per year to drive it into Holland then onto boats to be dumped in the North Sea.
If this wasn’t bad enough instead of dumping this waste into our ocean in thick
Non-corrosive barrels this toxic yellow soup was pumped into the sea by putting a hose over the side on the boat and switching the pump on.
Now I was outraged, the arrogance of the drug company the duplicity of the then Dutch Government…surely no one thought this chemical waste would stay in just the Dutch part of the North Sea a narrow channel with swift currents?
For my small part I helped were I could and got to party on the fabled “Rainbow Warrior” and also saw it on TV news draped with my English slogans.
I was struck at the time by how big the ship was, at 40 metres long (131ft 3 inches) steel hulled former fishing trawler that weighed 418 tonnes. I was equally dumb struck in 1985 when the French secret service sank it using two limpet mines in a harbour in New Zealand.
