HOW TO CHANGE THE WORLD chronicles the adventures of an eclectic group of young Canadian hippie journalists, photographers, musicians, scientists, American draft dodgers, tree huggers, Buddhists, nudists, – who set out to stop Richard Nixon’s atomic bomb tests in Amchitka, Alaska, and end up creating the worldwide green movement.
Greenpeace was founded and forged in Vancouver in the early 1970s, loosely led by Bob Hunter who pre-social media, pioneered a template for environmental activism which mixed daring iconic feats and worldwide media, or “mind bombs”.
These gung-ho guerilla Greenies famously placed small rubber inflatables called Zodiacs between harpooners and whales, and filmed their exploits. These visuals became visceral in the wider population’s condemnation of the killing of whales.
In seven supercharged years they became a global phenomenon stimulating great conservationist change and awareness. But saddled with large debts and frequent infighting it was sewing the seeds of change within.
The film spans the period from the first expedition to enter the nuclear test zone in 1971 through the first save the whale and stop the seal slaughter campaigns, and ends in 1979, when, victims of their own success, the founders gave away their central role to create Greenpeace International.
HOW TO CHANGE THE WORLD draws on interviews with the key players and hitherto unseen archive footage which brings these extraordinary characters and their intense, sometimes eccentric and often dangerous world alive.
They don’t come more eccentric than psychologist Paul Spong who swears cetaceans spoke to him and spurred him to save the whales.
Somehow Bob Hunter managed to bind together the ‘mystics and the mechanics’ into a group with a single purpose, often at huge cost to himself, both fiscally and physically. Stress and insomnia took their toll and he was prescribed Valium, another drug to add to his cocktail of cannabis, nicotine, and alcohol.
The story is framed by his first person narrative, drawn from his writings and journals about the group, and is voiced with verisimilitude verve by Barry Pepper. Bob’s writings are the film’s backbone– giving a personal, intimate portrait of events, the group’s original members and of activism itself—idealism vs. pragmatism, principle vs. compromise.
In contemporary to camera interviews, many of the Greenpeace founders’ reflections on their own past speak to us about dilemmas, not only of environmentalism, but of all movements for change, and also of the dilemmas of growing up and growing older: the tension between youthful idealism, ego and courage on the one hand, and maturity, pragmatism and political manoeuvring on the other.
The schism between Hunter and Paul Watson began over the compromise of baby seal slaughter in Newfoundland. Watson went on to found Sea Shepherd and in time a reconciliation was reached with Bob accompanying Paul on Sea Shepherd’s ship storming escapades.
Other relationships changed dramatically and diametrically when Patrick Moore became a climate change skeptic and far from making peace with Greenpeace he became an activist against them.
As director Jerry Rothwell acutely observes, “At a time when we need to engage with problems on a global scale, hopefully this story of one small group of people can get us thinking not only about how we act individually but in partnership with each other.”
HOW TO CHANGE THE WORLD may just change your world view and inspire you to change.