RainbowWarrior

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Peter Willcox is a Rainbow Warrior.
Willcox is the captain of the Rainbow Warrior II, flagship of the Greenpeace organization's fleet and a floating symbol for environmental activists, and much of the impetus that propelled him into high-profile environmental action came to him in Norwalk, his home town.
Willcox, 49, has been with Greenpeace 21 years, and had a part in virtually all the environmental group's high profile activities. His almost larger than life-size environmental resume includes lots of run-ins with the authorities-and, most famously, having the French government sink his ship, the original Rainbow Warrior, on July 10, 1985 in Auckland, New Zealand. He's harassed whalers off California, helped save baby harp seals in Greenland, protested French nuclear bomb tests in the South Pacific, helped stop Russian dumping of radioactive waste off Japan, fought the use of mile-long drift nets by commercial fishermen -the list is a lengthy one, and growing.
Philosophically, though, it's not so far from the Village Creek neighborhood he grew up in.
"It was a pretty exciting place to grow up in," Willcox said late last month from Italy, where his ship was hindering the delivery of tropical hardwood to the port of Salerno. "It was a multiracial, multiethnic community where political activism was sort of the norm. That's undoubtedly why I am here."
It's easy to see Village Creek as the incubator for the activism that Willcox pursues these days. It has the twin heritage of being developed by sailors and social activists. Willcox' father, Roger Willcox, and his sister still live in the community in the houses he grew up in, on a bluff overlooking the Sound.
The senior Willcox said the neighborhood was the first intentionally integrated community in Connecticut. In 1965 Roger Willcox was organizing integrated housing communities for low-income people. Along with staff members of his organization he, and Peter, went to Alabama for the Selma to Montgomery march-an historic moment in the Civil Rights movement.
During the Selma marches hundreds of marchers were jailed and injured. Two Northern whites participating in the march were murdered and a minister was beaten to death in the streets of the town.
Peter "was by many years the youngest white person in the audience for the penultimate meeting in Montgomery's city square, where Martin Luther King and others set forth their philosophy of nonviolent social action," the elder Willcox said. "When Peter got back here he held a one-boy news conference on what he had done down there. At the age of 12 years old he had been exposed to social action activities personally."
The news conference, he said, was Peter's idea.
"He thought people ought to know about it," he said.
"That was a pretty amazing experience," Peter Willcox said. "I'm not saying that was what completely whetted my appetite for political activism, but it certainly didn't hurt. Growing up in an environment like Village Creek is what made that possible."
Peter Willcox credits his mother with much of the inspiration for his career. Elsie Willcox was a science teacher at Roton Middle School. She started PYE (Protect Your Environment), an ecology club, and opened up an open-air classroom at the back of the school. She's commemorated on a plaque today at the school.
Life in the house on the bluff was occasionally chaotic, the elder Willcox said. He and his wife clashed and eventually moved to separate, neighboring houses. Peter, he said, found it difficult to concentrate on his homework in the turmoil. By sixth grade Peter had attended five public or private schools.
In sixth grade, Peter Willcox' native activism arose again. Enrolled at St. Luke's Academy in Wilton he came home with a crushing load of homework one December.
"The whole sixth grade class got behind in their homework assignments. The teachers weren't following the manual too closely," Roger Willcox said. "Peter came home with a pile of homework that would have had him working all night long if he did it. My wife was a junior high school teacher, she looked at that homework and said that was absolutely impossible, nobody should be asked to do this, it's crazy. She said this right in front of Peter. Any one of the assignments was pretty steep but when four or five of the teachers did it, it was an impossible assignment. She told Peter to forget it, to go to sleep."
"Peter was not told to do what he did next," he said. "What he did the next day, he went to his classmates and said 'Look, my mother is a schoolteacher, she saw the assignments we all got and she said they were absolutely cockeyed. Let's get together and go see the principal.' So he got the entire sixth grade to go see the principal."
The principal expelled him.
After that Willcox attended boarding schools and his academic career stayed on track through high school.
Peter made another tack toward the sea a few years later. His father, a sailor of no mean repute, himself, crewed on various ocean sailing races over the years. On the return leg of one such race, from Bermuda to Norfolk, Va. Peter, 14, accompanied him.
"Peter made such an impression on the owner (of the boat) that the owner hired him to run the boat at the age of 15," Roger Willcox said. "For the next two years he ran this $200,000 racing machine. He became a paid maintenance man and captain, if you will, of this $200,000 racing machine. He raced all up and down the coast and won a North Atlantic Cruising Championship in the 60s."
After high school-well, there was the Vietnam War, a family friend named Pete Seeger, and the sailing he'd been doing all his life.
"When the draft (lottery) was announced, he was 18 years old and a student at Amherst, a freshman. His birthday was drawn No. 1. If they had drafted anybody, he would have been one of the first," said Roger Willcox. His son, he said, "was not inclined to serve in the army, period. He dropped out of college and never went back."
But he did go to work, or rather continue his maritime career. Folksinger Pete Seeger, who helped found the Clearwater Foundation, was taught to sail by Roger Willcox at Village Creek. The Clearwater Foundation operates the Hudson River sloop Clearwater as part of its environmental education and cleanup efforts. Through Seeger, Peter Willcox got a job on the sloop.
Willcox said he went to work on the Clearwater thinking "I'd take a year off from college to try that and somehow I just never made it back."
The Seeger connection, a few breaks-and a facility for growing facial hair-launched the younger Willcox's career as an activist afloat. He became captain of the Clearwater at 19.
The beard helped, Roger Willcox said. "He couldn't possibly have been able to hold that job down except he could grow a full beard at 19," his father said. "He had a handlebar mustache at 14 and a full beard from about 17 on and nobody could tell how old he was. He hated the beard but he had to have it, otherwise nobody could believe he could be the ship captain."
The beard though, wasn't the only reason, Peter captained the Clearwater for five years, a job nobody had held for more than six months previously. He continued racing in southern waters during the winter, while running the Clearwater in the summer months. Roger Willcox said his son has more than 40,000 miles of accumulated ocean racing experience.
In the continuum between ocean and activism, Peter Willcox' axis tips toward activism when he describes his calling.
"I do make my living (at sea)," he said. "I've been working for nonprofit environmental organizations 26 out of the last 30 years and I've been doing it on boats because that's what I enjoy doing. I could certainly make more money and have an easier lifestyle working for the merchant marine type things."
But, he said, "I'm an activist first. I'm the father of two daughters and I'm dearly concerned about what sort of world they're going to have left to them if we don't change some of the things we're doing now."
It's a job, he says that "sometimes seems hopeless." Oddly, perhaps, one of the darkest hours, the Rainbow Warrior's sinking, provided a form of reaffirmation for Greenpeace's mission.
"A lot of time you feel like you're jousting at windmills, nobody's listening, everyone thinks it's rather silly," he said. "But when a First World government spends millions of dollars to blow up your boat because they're scared of what you're saying you begin to think maybe you're having some effect.
"That's what the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior did to us. It was tragic that the one crew member with two children was the one that was killed, our ship's photographer Fernando Perreira." But, he said, "It was just disbelief at first to find out it was the absolutely highest levels of the French government that approved it; that they had used a nuclear submarine in the operation; that they had agents and agents and agents all over New Zealand planning things, delivering bombs, that sort of thing. All because they didn't want us to go and protest (nuclear arms testing) at Mororua. Well, we went anyway. And it was certainly not a good day for them."
Willcox took a year and a half off after the bombing. "I took some courses to catch up on things, saw friends, hung out for a while" and let his shakes subside.
The incident has subsequently been made into two or three movies. Jon Voight stars as Willcox in one of them. Despite that, he said, celebrity hasn't really touched him.
"I'm not recognized, nobody knows what I look like. I don't have to worry about that. A lot of people have heard of the captain of the Rainbow Warrior but very few associate the name Peter Willcox with that. That's really just fine. I don't think the celebrity issue is worth talking about. I really enjoy being a part of what I do." And at home, he said, celebrity status "doesn't help at all" when it's his turn to do the dishes.
Willcox is very involved in planning the actions run from the Rainbow Warrior II, not as much in the overall organization's strategizing. In an e-mail message from Italy two weeks ago, Willcox said he was resting after successfully delaying a ship loaded with tropical hardwoods from Liberia from docking, and drawing a lot of European press attention to the issue.
"It's been about a week since I had a good night's sleep," he said. "We just finished an action down in Salerno. We're still on standby waiting for the boat to come into the next port but I'm afraid he knows we're here and he's not going to show up."
Tropical logging is the agenda for this trip through the Mediterranean. Willcox said the Greenpeace actions in Salerno and other ports have draw attention to a serious problem.
"Eighty percent of all the Earth's original forests have been chopped down," he said. "We're down to our remaining 20 percent.
"We feel it's critical at this time to start paying attention to what we're doing to the planet. There have already been predictions that a number of species: chimpanzees, mountain gorillas, etc. will be gone from Africa within 10 years if we don't change our policies. I think as First World consumers that's our responsibility.
"I think it's our job to act as responsible consumers. There is a meeting coming up in the Netherlands where the governments are going to get together and I think it's just critical for them to finally take some positive action to address this issue. We just can't go on in our typical fashion.
"It was particularly galling and concerning to me to see what was going on in Liberia where the country is just being sold down the river by a corrupt dictator so he can put hundreds of millions more dollars in his bank account. That's what's happening and we're the ones supporting it. We're buying the wood. Greenpeace feels that our governments now have to take some leadership and shut this traffic down."

Peter Willcox is the man in Charge:
The Rainbow Warrior

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