Damage Control (cont'd)

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Prompting Civil Action by Radical Example

If you want people to get involved with the enormous environmental issues related to the industrial weapons complex, Steven Sawyer '78 says you not only have to see the big picture, but you also have to make a big picture -- one that everyone will see and understand.

The former executive director of Greenpeace International, Sawyer has spent most of his post-Haverford days as an activist with the high-profile environmental organization. One of the crew members of the original Greenpeace ship, Rainbow Warrior, Sawyer was on the vessel in 1985 when the French secret service bombed and sunk it. The ship had been scheduled to sail to the Pacific to Morura Atoll to protest French nuclear weapons testing there. One crewmate died in the attack. With that ugly piece of history on his résumé, it is not surprising that Sawyer demonstrates against nuclear weapons production and testing with a passion for setting global examples.

Prior to the bombing in 1985, Sawyer and his Greenpeace crew had sailed to the Marshall Islands to provide aid to villagers suffering from the toxic effects of U.S. nuclear tests carried out in the 1950s. When they arrived they found 320 villagers from the contaminated Rongelap Atoll struggling with a radioactive legacy of cancer, birth defects, displacement and severe financial distress. Once Greenpeace arrived at the atoll, Sawyer says he and his colleagues quickly realized a relief mission was by no means enough. "The idea was that we could visit the island, take them on board, and ship around and look for another place for them to live," Sawyer explains. Suddenly Rainbow Warrior had an additional crew of 320 refugees searching for a new home.

As they sailed the Pacific with this human cargo, the Greenpeace voyage gained international media attention. The issue of environmental remediation of nuclear testing sites was brought forcefully to the fore, as the human saga behind radiation poisoning and America's use of certain villagers as guinea pigs for radiation exposure was dramatized on the world stage. Ultimately, the villagers found a home and, says Sawyer, are gaining self-sufficiency -- something they had lost when their homeland was poisoned nearly 50 years ago.

While John Applegate progresses through grassroots channels to affect change, Sawyer prefers to sail around them to make grand political statements. "None of the things we do would be possible if Greenpeace didn't believe in bringing these issues into the public's consciousness in a tangible way," Sawyer explains. "People have a grasp on us because they see us as more than a concept. People like to see us make a difference on the spot." Sawyer doesn't consider his group radical -- in fact, he says most Europeans don't either -- although he does concede that Greenpeace tends to work from the top down, provoking international incidents and confrontations to garner public support and then providing legal and other resources to grassroots organizations dealing with the same issue.

Just as Applegate talks about his Haverford exposure to Quaker methods, so does Sawyer. "I'm not a Quaker. Nor was the fact that I went to Haverford the reason I got into Greenpeace," he says. "But I must have absorbed some of it because the organization I work for was started by Quakers." Sawyer says the Quaker trait of confrontation and its focus on community education to promote community decisions directly influence and reflect Greenpeace initiatives.

That education of the community takes place primarily through radical examples. In 1991, after the Berlin Wall came down, Sawyer says his group came very close to purchasing a nuclear missile from a member of the Russian army. (Left nearly broke after the breakup of the USSR, army officers apparently took to negotiating arms sales to raise cash.) The plan was to put the missile on a small island in the middle of a lake and alert the media, says Sawyer. "We wanted to show how these weapons were not in safe hands and that any responsibility for them was lost." Although Greenpeace had planned to help the lieutenant leave Russia for the safety of foreign asylum, the plan fell through when the officer disappeared.

Sawyer is now focusing on issues surrounding global warming and runaway climate change in the Antarctic. He has made several expeditions to document the change in temperature. His passions again are intense. "We are running a great uncertified experiment with our life support system," he says, noting that the western Arctic is the fastest warming part of the globe and has seen a vast melt-off of glacier and a dying-off of species. "It may already be too late."