The Rainbow Warrior is an environmentally friendly campaigning ship that was built especially for Greenpeace. She is the third Greenpeace vessel to bear that name, and the first one that was purpose-built. She is one of the most environmentally friendly vessels afloat and was first launched in 2011. On 12 August Tony, Christo and I had an opportunity to go aboard (after waiting for hours) while she was moored in the port of Cape Town.
The Greenpeace website describes all the ways that her designers constructed her to use minimal energy other than wind power, and how waste materials and water are treated, recycled and repurposed so that the ship leaves as minimal a footprint as possible. The ship (really a motor yacht) has two A-frame masts and five sails, and an electric drive engine is used when wind power is insufficient. Even the paint on the ship’s hull is carefully chosen to be as non-toxic as possible.
We weren’t allowed belowdecks, as the amount of public interest in boarding the ship had been woefully underestimated and tours were being run quite quickly. We received brief lectures from a couple of crew members, who described the history and function of the vessel. They also explained how there is usually someone on board whose primary role is to write blog posts, make podcasts, take photographs and otherwise publicise and report on the activities of the Greenpeace team while they are at sea. This reminded me of the media-savvy Paul Watson of Sea Shepherd.
We were interested to hear how vigorously the Greenpeace folk on board the ship distanced themselves from the Sea Shepherd campaigns we’ve observed in the Whale Wars series, but to me the actions they described – such as putting themselves in between whales and the harpoons of Japanese whaling vessels – sounded pretty similar to what Paul Watson and company are doing. The differences in philosophy are too subtle for me to appreciate!
