Warrior

Pete Wilkinson, one time Director of Greenpeace UK and leading environmental campaigner, is the Warrior of the title. He largely created the crusade that brought Green issues to the minds of the nation - and the world - through a series of imaginative demonstrations and direct actions with Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace. This book is a personalised history of the development of environmental activism, but it does not confine itself to the glorification of the achievements of the major forces within the Green Lobby. The dramatic action of those early campaigns is here, but so is a revealing warts-and-all inside look at Greenpeace - its origins, its early history and current dilemmas. This is compulsive reading, exposing the politics and power-struggles within the environmental movement, and cutting through the red tape and bureaucracy that beset the Green movement today. The author brings to life the eye-catching campaigns that characterised the early days of Greenpeace: dressing up as giant plastic bottles; climbing the tower of Big Ben; dumping radioactive mud outside the Department of the Environment. All these stories are conveyed with humour and incisive (sometimes biting) wit. In powerful prose, the author carries us over the oceans to Antarctica, to marvel at this most beautiful and little-known continent - a region which has become a veritable dump for the rubbish left by explorers and generated by the permanent bases there. The drama and excitement of the battles between Greenpeace vessels and Japanese whaling ships is conveyed here, in a way that makes Warrior as involving as it is informative. Warrior is essentially a personal account of a life spent within a movement which represents the outstanding preoccupation - and perhaps the most important impulse for survival - of our era.