Whales a pawn in a sad game

IF YOU wanted to pick a year in which modern environmentalism got started you could do worse than opt for 1971.

In that year an elderly wooden fishing boat called the Phyllis Cormack set sail from Vancouver heading for Amchitka Island off the Alaskan coast. It was the birth of Greenpeace.

They were sailing to the remote Arctic island because the United States was planning to test a nuclear bomb there. They never arrived. They were arrested on the way and the bomb was detonated. But the voyage was not a failure.