4 --Friday, December 26, 1986 - North Shore News READING about yourself in somebody else’s book can be disconcerting, especially if the author gets it wrong, which, by the way, they usually do. So far, | have found myself quoted and wiitten about in nearly two dozen different books and many dozens of magazines, from Playboy to Maclean’s. It was all mostly as a result of being involved in the ecology thing, although a few of the pieces, thank goodness, had to dc with writing. q ‘The references and portrayals weren't always flattering, as you might have guessed. Six of them were books written about native issues, usually a defence of trap- ping as a lifestyle. A couple of others were volumes on animal rights. And the rest were among the pile of books that came out this year about the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior, supposedly relating my role in the formation of Greenpeace. In the books about natives, ! come out as a total schmuck. It turns out that while readers on ‘the North Shore may know what a drooling liberal I really am when it comes to our oppressed unworking class fellow Cana- dians, the native community across Canada only knows me as one of the machiavellian leaders of the anti-sealing movement. Accordingly, every effort is made to portray me as a hypocritic media manipulator who could care less about the fate of the native culture, In fact, you'd think I was a guy who sneaked around the igloos at night, bashing starving Eskimo babies. Which is all fair enough, 1 guess, My karma. And after all the politicians I have poked fun at, mocked, railed against and accused of everything from treason to idiocy, who am I to snivel when I get a taste of my own medicine? Stil, when I find my own words twisted out of context and things I’ve done inaccurately described, it seems to me f have every right to doubt the author’s credibility. If he’s got his facts wrong about me, he’s probably got his facts about things wrong too. One of the worst examples I've seen of this was in a book simply titled Rainbow Warrior, written by the supposedly prestigious Sunday Times investigative reporting team. ‘With typical British ethnocen- ‘ism they have published a revi- sionist version of the history of the Greenpeace movement that is an insult not just to me, but to the hundreds of thousands of 986-4366 Bob Hunter @ strictly personal ® Real Estate Personal Injury Ardagh Hunter —S_ Turner Barristers & Solicitors #300-1401 Lonsdale Ave., North Vancouver Free British Columbians and other Canadians who helped the various Greenpeace causes over the last 15 years. According to the Sunday Times, the save-the-whales movement, for instance, got started when I phoned a chap named David McTaggart in § London and asked his permission to go ahead with it. In the end, the whales were saved when Greenpeace officials | in the United Kingdom sent a bouquet of roses to the wife of the ther-chancellor of West Germany, getting his country to put pressure on whaling nations to quit. That one took my _ breath away, I must admit. Greenpeace itself, you’ll be in- terested to know, folks, was orig- inally registered as a society in—get this—London! The main battles in the anti- sealing campaign were launched, you guessed it, from the U.K., where the main anti-whaling campaigns also happened to have taken place. Vancouver is treated in this § so-called history as a backwater, where a few minor Greenpace skirmishes took place in the dis- tant past, but the majn game was nearly always played in Jolly Olde England, chaps. Shoddy, Shabby. Untrue. It was a relief, therefore, to pick up a copy of former News reporter and photographer Rex Weyler's just-published book, Song of The Whale, about the tise of the anti-whaling move- ment. The book is mainly a portrayal of Dr. Paul Spong, the enigmatic New Zealand scientist who origi- nally talked me, back in the early '70s, into moving Greenpeace beyond its anti-nuclear raison d’etre, embracing the task of halting whaling, a move which was bitterly fought at the time by antienuke activists inside the organization who wanted all the money to go to their cause, never mind dealing with such insignifi- cant side issues as whales. A lot of these same people now take credit for the anti-whaling campaigns, as well as collecting paycheques from Greenpeace. Weyler, I'm happy to write, got the story right. Song of the Whale is written briskly, with wit and charm, as you would expect from a really | fine journalist. Part of the skill of writing this kind of a book is finding the right moments and events to br- ing to life as in a novel, rather than merely turning in a report of a lot of things happening one after the other. Good work, Rex. Keep the re- cord straight. 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