A green pioneer

Rex Weyler is a prominent environmentalist but he hasn’t always been. “I remember not knowing what the word “˜ecology’ meant and having to look it up,” he says, looking back at his days as a university student.

Forty years have passed since then. Weyler is much more aware of environmental issues today, and so are the rest of us.

Weyler entered Occidental College in Los Angeles in the late ’60s with his sights set on an engineering degree. Environmental issues weren’t on his radar until June 1969, when he saw a photograph of Cuyahoga River in flames. An oil slick and debris had caught fire there.

Reporting on the incident in Ohio, Time magazine described the polluted river as one that "oozes rather than flows" and in which a person "does not drown but decays.” The photo drew national attention to environmental problems, and galvanized Weyler.

When I saw that image I thought, “There is something big happening here and we have to address it. I had distinct sense I was witnessing the issue of my time. I knew this issue would dominate my life,” he says.

At the time, Weyler’s peers were more concerned with civil rights, women’s rights and the peace movement. They sometimes talked about the perils of nuclear weapon testing and littering, but they didn’t talk about the environment per se.

“If you had asked a hundred university students, only two or three would have known what the word ecology meant.”

Regardless, Weyler started devoting more time to environmental causes. When school administrators announced plans to tear down a group of trees on campus to build a parking lot, Weyler took action. He helped organize a sit-in to protest the move. The trees are still standing today.

Weyler believed protest would have an immediate impact on the environment just as it had on the civil rights movement. But he soon realized that wouldn’t happen, in part, because it’s more difficult to see tangible results from environmental initiatives than from other initiatives (e.g. civil rights campaigns).

Not long after he helped save those trees at Occidental, Weyler took part in a sit-in opposing the presence of U.S. military recruiters on campus. He and a few dozen other students were suspended for a semester. Weyler never returned.

Later that year, he published his first book. I Took a Walk Today was a pacifist discourse with photographs taken in the winter at California’s Yosemite Valley.

Weyler came to Canada as a draft resister in 1972. He settled in British Columbia, which he remembers as having “a fairly active ecology movement.”

Weyler threw himself into writing and environmental activism. Before long he got involved with Greenpeace, an organization that works for environmental conservation and the preservation of endangered species. He took over as director in 1974.

A year later, Weyler sailed on the Canadian organization’s first anti-whaling campaign. He chronicled the event with photographs and stories that appeared in National Geographic, Smithsonian, New York Times Magazine and other publications.

Buoyed by the inroads Greenpeace had made in heightening awareness of environmental issues, Weyler helped found Greenpeace International in 1979.

Today, it’s one of the biggest environmental organizations in the world with an international membership of over five million and offices in over 20 countries. It helps draw attention to global warming, the scarcity of fresh water and other pressing issues.

Weyler left the organization in 1982, but continued his work as an environmentalist and peace activist. To date, he has written nine books on subjects ranging from music to Aboriginal populations and, of course, the environment.

He now lives in Vancouver with his wife and two children, whom he encourages to be environmentally aware. “We try not to be reckless consumers in our home,” he says. “We try to live in the waste stream of our community.” To that end, Weyler has furnished the home with second-hand furniture and he urges family members to wear second-hand clothing.

“We have worked hard to educate our children about consumption, and we try to make them understand that more stuff doesn’t equal happiness,” Weyler says. “But it can be challenging because kids want things.”

The problem is, most people want things.

“The truth is, economic growth has trumped ecological considerations or responsibilities for the past four decades,” Weyler says. “We want to change the environment without changing economic strategies. We will find that is impossible. We cannot just grow forever. We are in the process of discovering that now.”