Victoria — Ben Metcalfe, founding member of Greenpeace and possibly the first environmentalist to understand the political and publicity potentials of modern media, has died.
He was 83. Mr. Metcalfe had a heart attack while walking to the door of his Shawnigan Lake residence on Tuesday evening, said his wife, Dorothy Metcalfe, in a telephone interview. The couple were separated but remained close to the end.
A veteran of the Second World War, a British foreign service officer, journalist and broadcaster, Mr. Metcalfe is most famous for being the first chairman of the Greenpeace Foundation formed in 1970.
Colleagues and friends said what set Mr. Metcalfe apart from other environmentalists was his intuitive understanding that an intelligent media campaign could set the political agenda and force change.
Many people in the 1960s had read Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, but Mr. Metcalfe put the environment on the evening news, in the public mind and forced politicians to act.
“He was an original. He just brought a new synthesis to the movement,” said Bob Hunter who, a few years after Mr. Metcalfe's chairmanship, became the first president of Greenpeace.
“These days every port you go to there is a bar where you can find some founder of Greenpeace. But Ben was a giant,” said Mr. Hunter, in a telephone interview from Toronto.
Rex Weyler, a Vancouver writer now working on a history of Greenpeace, said Mr. Metcalfe was born in Winnipeg and early on wanted to learn to fly.
Still in his teens, he left home and worked his way across the country and eventually to England where, at the age of 16, Mr. Metcalfe joined the Royal Air Force. He was posted to India as an aircraft gunner during the early years of the independence movement.
According to Mr. Weyler, Mr. Metcalfe was more influenced by Ghandi than his superiors. Ordered to drop bombs on villages, he and his pilot always disobeyed and dropped them in empty fields.
Later his service took Mr. Metcalfe to North Africa. He served in the desert fighting against the Germans, who were led by Erwin Rommel, and took part in the Battle of El Alamein.
After the war he worked as a journalist in France until coming back to Canada in 1951 to work for the Winnipeg Free Press as a reporter. It was there he met his second wife, Dorothy. Later he was recruited to work for the Province in Vancouver where he also worked in broadcasting.
During the 1960s, he and Dorothy formed a public relations company. And it was in 1969 that Mr. Metcalfe first came to understand how modern media could work on behalf of the environment.
Their firm was hired by a man who wanted to put a Museum of Ecology in suburban Burnaby, B.C. Mr. Metcalfe created a billboard campaign using the words “Ecology? Look it up, you're part of it.”
Ms. Metcalfe is still amazed at the brilliant simplicity of Mr. Metcalfe's campaign. At that point, Mr. Metcalfe became determined to work on publicity campaigns on behalf of the environment.
When a campaign named “Don't Make a Wave” kicked off a protest against nuclear testing in Alaska, Mr. Metcalfe co-ordinated the publicity.
Mr. Metcalfe needed someone to skipper a boat into the South Pacific in 1972 to try to stop the French testing nuclear bombs. He hired David McTaggart, the man become famous for being a founder of what eventually became Greenpeace International.
Mr. Hunter, who later became Greenpeace's first president after another organizational shift, said Mr. Metcalfe stepped back as the group changed direction.
As a veteran of the Second World War, Mr. Metcalfe was motivated largely by his commitment to peace and a horror of nuclear weaponry. But younger Greenpeace members were committed to stopping commercial whaling or the seal hunt.
Mr. Metcalfe leaves his wife Dorothy, and their daughter, Michelle and her two children. Mr. Metcalfe also had two sons, both now dead, Christopher was killed in 1980 and Michael, the father of two children, died in 2001. Mr. Metcalfe's two daughters from his first marriage, Charlotte and Sophie, live in France. A funeral service is being planned, but details have yet to be finalized.
