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When official announcement was made of the first planned nuclear test on Amchitka Island, the response of then-Alaska Governor William J. Egan was to declare that, “I am pleased that we have been selected as the hosts, so to speak, for this test, and I’m sure I speak for my fellow Alaskans.” He stated that 140 previous tests in Nevada had “proven that there is no danger from radioactivity being released in the test area.”
In fact, 56 of those 140 Nevada tests had leaked radioactivity. And so did that first Amchitka test, dubbed Long Shot, which was detonated on October 29, 1965.
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In the process of helping give a tour of the ship the other day to four youngsters from St. Paul--who, it turned out, had been on board a couple times earlier in the day, and whose interest seemed focused only on the snack area they had previously discovered in the mess room--I passed Penny, the bosun, cleaning paint brushes out on the poop deck.
"And here," I said to nobody in particular (because the children, aware that Penny was neither a snack food nor rich in trans fats, had little interest in her), "is an actual crew member doing actual work."
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Last night at around 2300--shortly after a community meeting that was occasionally fractious, but overall highly positive and supportive, and in which one elder in particular spoke with forcefulness and anger about the need to shut down factory fishing--we left St. Paul Island. Today, we have been sailing south from the Pribilofs to return to the Aleutians. Around midnight tonight, we are scheduled to arrive at Nikolski, following which we will conclude our community visits with stops at, in turn, Atka and Adak.
The sea has been flat calm, and while the sky has, of course, been gray, it has at least been clear, with not even a hint of the fog that has followed us everywhere like a morose yet overly-obedient dog. As a result, the day has provided an opportunity to catch up on outstanding tasks, and to prepare for what lies ahed.
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Looked at up close, fur seals seem really improbable animals. Underwater it is a different story: slick and streamlined, they arc gracefully through the element for which Nature intended them. But on a rocky beach on St. Paul Island, those same flippers which propel them effortlessly beneath the waves look like an afterthought, a sick joke on the part of a disinterested creator: “Well, I have these things left over, and I have to use them on something, so I may as well stick them on these seals.”
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I have a slim book with me, by Sumner MacLeish, a Bostonian by birth who for several years in the 1990s lived on St. Paul, where we are now docking. She married an Aleut in a ceremony officiated by none other than our very own George Pletnikoff, who was at the time a pastor with the Russian Orthodox Church. The book, about life in the Pribilofs, is titled "Seven Words for Wind," which she explains in the opening paragraph: "Aleuts have at least seven words for wind, many of which refer to strength. Day after day, night after night, sometimes for weeks on end, the wind pushes across hundreds of miles of open water, across this small plate of land in the Bering Sea."
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kieran_mulvaney
USA
Not that I’m trying to imply anything here, but when I look back on my relationship with Greenpeace, I’m always reminded of Michael Corleone’s anguished cry in The Godfather, Part III: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.” By my reckoning, this voyage on the Esperanza is my fifth stint with Greenpeace. I first joined, as a whaling campaigner for Greenpeace International, in 1989, after two years as founding director of the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society. During that time, I was expedition leader or campaigner on five voyages, all on ships which have long since departed the organization: documenting French drift net fleets in the North Atlantic on board the Sirius in 1991; chasing Norwegian whalers on the Solo in 1992; and, on three occasions, leading anti-whaling voyages to the Antarctic on board the MV Greenpeace. I left in 1995 to become a freelance journalist, and it was while writing for the Discovery Channel and New Scientist, among others, that I accepted an invitation to join the Arctic Sunrise on a global warming tour of Alaska and the Russian Arctic in 1998—an experience that prompted me to move almost immediately to Anchorage, where I lived for seven years. I returned briefly in 2001-2, to lead another Antarctic whaling campaign, and then, in 2005, I moved back to Washington, DC from Alaska to become Senior Communications Adviser for Greenpeace USA. I left that post in May, and yet, here I am again: back in Alaska, on yet another Greenpeace vessel. What can I say? It’s addictive. For me, it’s a return home of sorts: an opportunity to once more experience Alaska, albeit an entirely different part of the state than I have ever before been to. The highlight, for me, is the opportunity to visit Amchitka, the place where, for Greenpeace, it all began, and to pay homage to the organization’s 35 year history of bearing witness to environmental threats.
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September 2007 (1)
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