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Greenpeace founding father dead

New York Oct. 18. Ben Metcalfe, the founder of the small environmental group that over three decades grew into Greenpeace International, with 3 million members, died on Tuesday at his home on Shawnigan Lake, Vancouver Island, British Columbia. He was 83.

The cause was a heart attack, the organisation said.

Mr. Metcalfe, the first chairman of the Greenpeace Foundation, formed in 1970, combined an unwavering commitment to the environment with the flair of a campaigner for the cause. A journalist and broadcaster, he turned his personal experience in the trenches of environmentalism into grist for newspapers and television news.

A movement that started with early warnings like Rachel Carson's book ``Silent Spring'' and registered faintly at protests against nuclear tests — for which Mr. Metcalfe was a guiding spirit — gained momentum. He was among the small band of activists who succeeded in focusing the world's attention on environmentalism.

Bob Hunter, who with David McTaggart was another founding father of the movement, called Mr. Metcalfe an original who helped give it coherence.

``These days, every port you go to there is a bar where you can find some founder of Greenpeace,'' Mr. Hunter told The Globe and Mail of Canada. ``But Ben was a giant.''

E. Bennett Metcalfe was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and accompanied his family to England at 16. He joined the Royal Air Force and saw action in India when it was stirring against colonial rule.

Lore has it that he chose to heed Mahatma Gandhi rather than his superiors when, as an aircraft gunner, he and his pilot dropped bombs on empty fields instead of village targets. Later, in North Africa, he served with the British fighting General Rommel's Afrika Korps in the desert at El Alamein. He was a British Foreign Service information officer in Duesseldorf, Germany, and wrote for papers in France and Winnipeg, also working in broadcasting. He travelled widely to gather materials for his articles and with his wife, Dorothy, founded a public relations firm. In 1969, one client made them acutely aware of the impact of an effective public relations campaign, the fledgling suburban Museum of Ecology in Winnipeg. After studying the issues, Mr. Metcalfe made the cause his own.

He coordinated the initial campaigns of the Don't Make a Wave Committee, soon to be renamed Greenpeace, against planned nuclear tests in the Aleutian Islands and for efforts to save the bird sanctuaries of the region. The group argued that an atomic test there, near a geological fault line, could set off a devastating quake and a tidal wave.

The movement became truly international in the next few years, perhaps most famously with the Greenpeace missions skippered by McTaggart to disrupt French atomic tests in the atmosphere in the South Pacific.

In addition to his wife, his survivors include three daughters and 10 grandchildren. — New York Times

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