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  • Make it a Green Peace! The Rise of Countercultural Environmentalism by Frank Zelko
  • John-Henry Harter
Frank Zelko, Make it a Green Peace! The Rise of Countercultural Environmentalism (London: Oxford University Press 2013)

Frank Zelko’s book Make it a Green Peace documents the history of Greenpeace from its countercultural beginnings as the “Don’t Make a Wave Committee” in Vancouver, British Columbia, to the start of its rise as an international environmental non-governmental organization. It is a familiar and often-told story as almost all of the key players in the campaign have written their own memoirs. (6) Zelko is largely successful in painting a more nuanced view of these years. However, by ending the book just as Greenpeace was going international, he misses the opportunity to tell the whole history of Greenpeace.

In Chapters 1 and 2, the author explores the intellectual and activist roots of Greenpeace by connecting the intellectual traditional of New York Jewish communities to the Quaker idea of bearing witness and to the intersection of 1960s counterculture and technology including “LSD, the I Ching, and, above all the camera.” (51) Zelko deftly explains how all these elements contribute the foundational narrative of Greenpeace. He does not create caricatures of the “hippy” activists, but instead takes his subjects seriously and creates a credible portrait of the creators of Greenpeace.

In Chapter 3, Zelko devotes himself to a history of place and its role in shaping the origins of Greenpeace. He aptly describes British Columbia as “an unlikely birthplace for a radical new form of environmentalism.” (53) He notes how the reigning Social Credit government “aggressively promoted a virulent form of state capitalism aimed at wringing the utmost from the province’s vast reserves of mineral and timber wealth.” (53) Zelko describes why Vancouver was [End Page 412] a focus of activity, pointing to “the rise of the counterculture, the Vietnam War, American nuclear testing in the Aleutian Islands, and a growing anti-Americanism on the part of many Canadians.” (53) Unfortunately, he keeps to the stereotypical narrative of labour as uninterested in resource conservation or wilderness preservation. Later in the chapter, he notes that the Vancouver District Labour Council was one of the original contributors to the Don’t Make A Wave Committee’s campaign to raise money to sail to Amchitca. He offers no explanation of this contradiction. Despite this, Chapter 3 does a good job of setting the social, political, and cultural backdrop for the foundation of Greenpeace.

Chapter 4 tells the story of the first campaign of the Don’t Make a Wave Committee. Zelko aims to examine the participants in depth, explaining that it is “vital” to see “how the movement’s culture is shaped by the relationships between the key participants.” (79) He does this well and creates a decent character study. However, this is where Zelko’s book inadvertently becomes a great man history of Greenpeace. By only examining a few key players his book becomes the history of privileged white male social movement actors without any acknowledgment of how class, race, and gender shape the dynamics he purports to explain.

Protests against French nuclear testing in the South Pacific are covered in Chapters 5 and 6. Zelko provides a deeper character study of the main protestors but does little to illuminate the rise of countercultural environmentalism. His study suggests the main protestors had only disdain and contempt for counter-culture ideas and practices. For example, Zelko argues that for Ben Metcalfe and David McTaggart, “grassroots democracy, consensus decision making, and egalitarianism were of little interest.” (129) Zelko also notes that McTaggart “seemed more interested in talking about how much money they could make from the publishing rights of their story than he was in the protest itself.” (132) Metcalfe and McTaggart have become larger than life figures in the Greenpeace mythology and Zelko needs a more nuanced analysis to help explain these apparent contradictions.

Chapters 7 through 9 cover the Greenpeace move to anti-whaling protests. Zelko follows the transition of Greenpeace from a primarily anti-nuclear peace group to one concerned with larger issues of ecology. He does a good job of...

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