Polar bear mojo for Greenpeace captain’s environmental thriller

 

A pensive Peter Willcox at a detention hearing at the Kalininskiy Court in Saint Petersburg in 2013 before being set free. Originally charged with "piracy" with a penalty of up to 15 years, Willcox faced the prospect of languishing in a Russian jail for the rest of his life. Image: Igor Podgorny/Greenpeace

Review by David Robie

WHEN Anote Tong, the former president of Kiribati, a collection of 33 tiny atolls sprawling across the Pacific equator in the frontline of climate change, believed he wasn’t being listened to, he thought of a simple strategy – polar bears.

By comparing himself and his country’s meagre population of 102,000 to the endangered creature, he suddenly got more headlines.

The endangered polar bear … anecdote for former President Tong,
FB mojo for Peter Willcox. Image: Still from Greenpeace video

And he got the idea after having just seen a polar bear in the wild.

“I drew a comparison that what happens to polar bears will also be happening to us in our part of the world,” he explained.

Tong feared that the bears in their Arctic habitat, like the people of Kiribati in the Pacific, were in danger of losing their homes in the near future.

Today the polar bear is the mojo adopted by Greenpeace skipper Peter Willcox on his Facebook page.