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Don't Make a Wave Committee

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The Don't Make a Wave Committee was the name of the anti-nuclear organization which later evolved into Greenpeace, a global environmental organization. The Don't Make a Wave Committee was founded in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada to protest and attempt to halt further underground nuclear testing by the United States in the National Wildlife Refuge at Amchitka in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska.[1] The Don't Make a Wave Committee was first formed in October 1969[2] and officially established in early 1970.[3]Cite error: A <ref> tag is missing the closing </ref> (see the help page). An additional member of the committee was cultural geographer Terry A Simmons.

Transition to Greenpeace

During meetings in 1970 Bill Darnell combined the words ‘green’ and ‘peace’,[4] thereby giving the organization its first expedition name, Greenpeace. Many Canadians protested the United States military underground nuclear bomb tests, codenamed Cannikin, beneath the island of Amchitka, Alaska in 1971. In May of the year, the Don't Make a Wave Committee sent Jim Bohlen and Patrick Moore, to represent the Don't Make a Wave Committee in US Atomic Energy Commission hearings in Alaska.[5] The Don't Make a Wave Committee first expedition hired the Phyllis Cormack, a halibut seiner available for charter, to take protestors to the testing zone on the island of Amchitka. The expedition was called Greenpeace I, and included Canadian journalist Robert Hunter. In the fall of 1971, the ship sailed towards Amchitka and faced the U.S. Navy ship Confidence. The activists were forced to turn back. Because of this and the increasingly bad weather the crew decided to return to Canada only to find out that the news about their journey and the support from the crew of the Confidence had generated widespread sympathy for their protest. Greenpeace chartered another ship, a former minesweeper Edgewater Fortune, which was renamed the Greenpeace Too!. Paul Watson, also a co-founder of Greenpeace was selected to crew the 2nd vessel. One day out of Amchitka the United States Atomic Energy Commission conducted the underground 5 Mt Cannikin nuclear test a day earlier than scheduled on November 6, 1971.[6] The nuclear test gained widespread criticism and the U.S. decided not to continue with their test plans at Amchitka. In 1972, The Don't Make a Wave committee changed its official name to Greenpeace Foundation.[7]

On 4 May 1972, following Irving Stowe's departure from the chairmanship of the Don't Make A Wave Committee, the fledgling environmental group officially changed its name to the "Greenpeace Foundation".[8] Later that year David McTaggart would sail his yacht, Greenpeace III, to French Polynesia to oppose the French atmospheric nuclear tests at Mururoa atoll, supported by the new Greenpeace Foundation.

See also

References

  1. ^ Paul Watson, Sea Shepherd: My Fight for Whales and Seals (1981), ISBN 0-393-01499-1
  2. ^ AFP (2005-06-07). "Greenpeace Founder Bob Hunter Dies in Toronto". Oregon PeaceWorks. Retrieved 2010-01-30. [dead link]
  3. ^ "The Founders of Greenpeace". Greenpeace. Retrieved 2010-01-30.
  4. ^ Sean Connolly, Global Organizations: Greenpeace, Franklin Watts, 2008, p. 12
  5. ^ Zelko, Frank (2017). "Scaling Greenpeace: From Local Activism to Global Governance". Historical Social Research. 42 (2). GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences: 321–322. doi:10.12759/hsr.42.2017.2.318-342. ISSN 0172-6404. JSTOR 44234964. forcing the AEC to conduct a series of public hearings in Anchorage and Juneau in the last week of May 1971. Jim Bohlen and Patrick Moore, a young ecology graduate student at the University of British Columbia, represented the DMWC
  6. ^ Captain Paul Watson Biography Archived 2012-05-04 at the Wayback Machine, Sea Shepherd website. Accessed October 4, 2009
  7. ^ Cite error: The named reference GPstory was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  8. ^ Sean Connolly, Global Organizations: Greenpeace, Franklin Watts, 2008, p. 13

Further reading

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