Greenpeace Founder McTaggart Dies

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Friday March 23 6:08 PM ET

Greenpeace Founder McTaggart Dies

By CANDICE HUGHES, Associated Press Writer

ROME (AP) - David McTaggart, one of the founders of Greenpeace International, who piloted boats into the teeth of the French navy to disrupt nuclear testing, was killed Friday in a head-on car crash on a country road in central Italy. He was 68.

Police said McTaggart was alone in his car. The driver of the other car also died and his wife was injured, police said. The accident happened in Umbria, about 20 miles from Perugia.

``Greenpeace would be unimaginable without his force of personality,'' Gerd Leipold, the organization's interim international executive director, said from Amsterdam, Netherlands.

McTaggart, a native of Canada, had lived in Italy for many years and had an olive farm in Umbria.

He galvanized the international environmental movement in 1972 by leading protests against French nuclear-testing in the South Pacific.

He went on to stir up support throughout Europe for Greenpeace, forging an alliance in 1979 among separate factions of the organization and uniting them under his chairmanship as Greenpeace International. He was chairman until 1991.

In a separate incident in 1995, McTaggart and two companions slipped onto the Mururoa atoll in the South Pacific in an inflatable speedboat to disrupt planned French nuclear tests and remained their for two weeks playing cat and mouse with French authorities. As they infiltrated the atoll, French commandos stormed their main vessel, the Rainbow Warrior II.

Repeatedly detained by French authorities, his reckless confrontations with authority helped establish Greenpeace's reputation for fighting for the environment.

``He was the last medieval knight, capable of great symbolic acts for the environmental cause,'' said Gianfranco Bologna, a spokesman in Italy for the World Wildlife Fund.

Grazia Francescato, president of the Italian Green Party, called McTaggart ``a figure of extraordinary force'' and ``an example for all of us.''

In a 1991 article, Forbes magazine depicted him as a masterful manipulator and myth-maker who turned Greenpeace into one of the largest environmental organizations in the world and a booming business.

Under his leadership, it said, Greenpeace mastered ``the tools of direct mail and image manipulation'' and indulged ``in forms of lobbying that would bring instant condemnation if practiced by a for-profit corporation.''

McTaggart, sometimes dubbed ``the shadow warrior,'' was ``a very difficult person because he was extremely stubborn, extremely tough,'' said David Newmann, ex-director of Greenpeace Italy, adding he was ``a person of enormous courage and determination.''

Born in Vancouver, British Columbia, McTaggart worked in the construction business for 20 years, then moved to the United States in the 1960s where he became a successful contractor and developer.

He retired after an explosion destroyed a resort his firm had built and sailed the Pacific for pleasure. In 1971 he became outraged with the French government's decision to cordon off a vast swath of international waters in the Pacific for nuclear tests.

McTaggart was also a driving force behind Greenpeace campaigns to save the whales, to stop the dumping of nuclear waste in the ocean, to block the production of toxic wastes, to end nuclear testing, and to protect the Antarctic continent from oil and mineral exploitation.

There was no immediate information on survivors or funeral arrangements. McTaggart had been married several times.

-- (in@the.news), March 24, 2001

Answers

Right whales and all right-thinking whales will hold a harmonic convergence celebration for our brother David at 2:00PM on Sunday in Puget Sound.

-- (Shamu@Sea.World), March 24, 2001.

Add another name to the Bush Body Count list.

-- Dubya the antichrist (world going @ down. shitter), March 24, 2001.

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