Greenpeace UK co-founder, Pete Wilkinson: 'Some of the things we did made people’s jaws drop'
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Version 0 of 1. Pete Wilkinson has not mellowed. A single question about the same issues that made him a thorn in the side of the nuclear industry and the Thatcher government of the 1980s will still set him off with a stream of well-articulated argument about ethics and economics. The co-founder of Greenpeace UK and its director for the organisation’s early pioneering campaigns is now 67, but his zeal to change the world for the better is still strong. His autobiography, which receives an official launch on Thursday, is partly the story of his life but includes unabridged diaries from his most successful campaign, the battle to save Antarctica from mineral exploitation and turn the continent into a world park. The book is disarmingly honest about his own failings and equally frank about the shortcomings of some of his colleagues and friends, as well as the organisation he once helped to run, Greenpeace. “It is my story, warts and all,” he said. “I decided to write it after my mother died and I realised I did not have any sort of record of her life, so I thought I should put my diaries of the Antarctic voyages in a book. It was really so my two kids would have some idea what I had been up to.” As a journalist who wrote about these campaigns for the Guardian and who sailed with Pete on several occasions, including three months in Antarctica, the book, for me, is a fascinating insider’s look at an important period in the development of the green movement. The title, From Deptford to Antarctica, gives a flavour of Wilkinson’s astonishment that a misfit 16-year-old from a poor part of London could sail as leader of a campaign to the Antarctic. His series of voyages succeeded in saving the continent from minerals exploitation by rapacious governments, and changed the mind of Margaret Thatcher who had previously been in favour of mining there. There are well-written accounts of audacious campaigns, risks taken and abrasive encounters. Many of the latter were with officials, industry and governments but lots were with his friends and fellow campaigners, who were supposed to be on the same side. He writes too about David McTaggart, then chairman of Greenpeace International, who recruited him and persuaded him against “going straight” as a counter clerk at the Post Office and to run Greenpeace UK instead. McTaggart was an extraordinary man who took on the French nuclear tests in the Pacific and was the driving force behind the international organisation, although he always avoided the limelight. Wilkinson said: “He just came on the phone one day while I was working as a counter clerk and offered me a job. We had furious arguments over the years but he had trust in me and let me live a life of derring-do. We only got paid what we would have got on the dole. How we survived the first eight years on a diet of fags, beer and fish and chips I shall never know. But it was fun, a great time to be alive.” Wilkinson, a working class Millwall supporter, who had worked for Friends of the Earth before Greenpeace existed, left them because he fell out with the “toffs” who ran it. He is honest about this and the personal relationships that took second place to campaigning. Only when he met Gaye his present wife and had two daughters, Emily and Amy, did his chaotic personal life get the anchor it badly needed. Wilkinson’s great strengths as a campaigner remain unchanged. He always was a natural television and radio performer because he had no fear of the camera, a grasp of the facts and a healthy disrespect for authority. For him the public’s right to know is the cornerstone of democracy. “Given all the facts, people will be able to make the correct decisions,” he says. It is this belief in uncovering information and sharing it, so informed decisions can be made, that has kept him in employment since leaving Greenpeace in the 1990s after the Antarctic campaign. He has served on various government bodies trying to address the vexed question of dealing with nuclear waste. He has facilitated tortuous meetings between environment organisations, the nuclear industry and other industrial groups in order to find common ground. While he still works as a consultant, he also continues campaigning. He is director of the Nuclear Information Service, which works on disarmament, and describes the proposed new Trident fleet as a terrible waste of money and any intended use of it as a crime against humanity. He is working hard to stop the plan to build the Sizewell C nuclear plant near his home in Suffolk and at the same time trying to raise £300,000 for a ship to go to the vast floating island of plastic off Cape Verde and work out a way of cleaning it up. Typically, during our discussion he denounced the current Greenpeace board for spending £14 million on a new ship when they could have spent the money on useful campaigns. “I feel they are lacking imagination or a vision. Some of the things we did made people’s jaws drop in surprise, but they are still doing the same things. They should get more bang for our bucks,” he said. His autobiography pulls no punches and I wondered whether many long term and steadfast friends who figure in the book might be offended. He shrugs: “I never seem to have been able to keep my opinions to myself very much.” • From Deptford to Antarctica – the long way home, an autobiography by Pete Wilkinson is published by Fledgling Press Ltd. |