Category: Greenpeace and Seattle

In Memory of Kay     5-22-22

In my eyes so short-sighted
you were always a granola kid
and from granola we all came
all of us, and one day to granola
we’ll all return to that dust bowl
once filled with daring youth
now with hope that soon we’ll meet
in a heaven filled with toasted oats and nuts
and raisins and reasons to be content
with this place we called our home.

Oh, we wrecked some bad plans together, Kay,
you and the rest of our Greenpeace Pea Pod
stopped those big oil tankers from filling their bellies with crude
and spilling their guts on our once happy Orca trails
and ruining our mighty salmon runs
beyond repair on a Sound turned silent.

Then there’s that day when we took on the Japanese embassy
driving like errant children to a mad hatter’s party
in my decorative ’64 Plymouth Valiant station wagon
when the front hood buckled against my windshield during rush hour
and what a rush that was
as I pulled onto the shoulder to retie the hood
with spare wire and rope and more hope than any of us
could spare.

Or remember that day we brought arms full of balloons
filled with helium to fill the Canadian embassy with our selves.
I still wonder what the Canucks did with all of that
yellow and blue and green flotsam that bobbed around their office ceilings and walls.

I remember the day we both joined the Cause
your first task was to design a button board
mine to sell the buttons at a dollar in the bars.
From button board designs to board of directors
you grew so fast and tall it surprised us all!
Yet to me, you’ll always be that granola kid
who played guitar and sang whale songs
so many years ago in the far away land of youth.

Yet, Kay, all memories aside,
this is your memorial
and our time to reflect.
But who are we to question why
we live awhile and then we die?
Our spirits go off somewhere perhaps
for a well-earned break or nap before returning.
I wonder when and what form you’ll take
a windblown sailor in some storm’s wake
battling against another rusty Goliath
weaving circles around the old coast guard,
or in your garden planting dahlias
where knobby bulbs set deep in soil
turn into wondrous powers of flowers
that last forever days in granola hours.

My first vivid memory of Kay was from my first days in my Greenpeace career that later spanned 13 years ending up as Director of the global toxics campaign for Greenpeace International in Amsterdam.

It was 1985 and I was an aspiring film maker in Eugene, Oregon who refused to make it big in Los Angeles.  But I did concede to go to the big bad City of Seattle to seek my film fortunes.  My girlfriend, Kit, came with me and between us we had many a dubious job to pay the rent on our West Seattle bungalow.  Somehow one day she learned that a buck could be made canvassing for Greenpeace Northwest.  I tried it.  I was good at it.  I was already a hardcore environmentalist from my early days growing up in LA — even doing my own direct actions when, as a 12 year old,  I used to pull out the surveyor stakes to slow down the hill raping developments near my San Fernando Valley home.

Canvassing was fun.  You could work at night, leaving the days free, summer nights would find us  skinny-dipping in Lake Union afterwards.  I was good at canvassing and could make a living at it, but I became increasingly intrigued with the campaigns at Greenpeace.  And for some reason I was drawn to the new anti-pollution campaigns being organized by Jon Hinck.  But before I became the Toxics Campaigner of Greenpeace Northwest, and began to forget my cinematic dreams, I became Greenpeace Northwest’s Canvass coordinator. It was Kay who hired me following an “all-thumbs-up” consensus decision of the steering committee.  I was very grateful for her trust in me and was taken by her “no nonsense style”.

That summer I hired a certain very tall, blond and charming canvasser from California.  I will call him Edwin because that was certainly not his name.  Before long we began to detect a concerning trend where Edwin would be late to the pick-up point and come back on those nights with very few collected funds. Him being late kept all of us back and was highly annoying.   He would say, “sorry I got to talking with a lady.”   It was not long after that, that I fielded a complaint from somebody Edwin had “canvassed”.  She accused him of “inappropriate aggressive womanizing.”  What I had earlier guessed became clear — his approaches to ladies and the resulting delays went far beyond “talking”.   I confronted him about it and he told me it was none of my business if he had conversations with women on the beat and as we paid by commission it was not a problem if he did not make money any given night.

Now this was way back in the mid 80s, years before the paradigm shifting “me too” movement, but it was obvious to me that Edwin was a not only a walking time-bomb for some woman out there, but also for Greenpeace Northwest, which I was becoming very fond of.  I told him that since it was clear he was not willing to change his ways, he was done and he could turn in his clipboard.

Of course, it’s never that simple and very soon Edwin had rallied a rebellion among my troops, my former canvass mates, most of them took on his cause making the case that the new boss role had gone to my head and I was accused of unfair termination. It was embarrassing but I was forced to defend my hiring/firing decision before the Steering Committee, and the canvassers lined up to testify, with Kay presiding.  For a newbie to the organization it felt like a big deal.  And, with a progressive group like Greenpeace, there was a good chance I would be found in the wrong.

First the canvassers brought forth their signed statement and each one stated in turn that I had overstepped and wrongfully terminated Edwin without due process.  Next it was my turn.  I was nervous.  So I recall very softly explaining the decision I made and the how I had arrived at it.  Edwin was not repentant and I felt he represented too high a risk.  If a sexual harrassment scandal or lawsuit were to rock the office in a town like Seattle I believed it would be just a bit of a problem.  The Steering Committee heard both sides out and then after a pause Kay looked around the room and then took the floor.

“Thank God we hired you,” she said.  “You did absolutely the right and intelligent thing and likely saved us from a lot of shit.  We in the office don’t really know what goes on out there in the canvass but now we can have faith that our door-to-door representatives are good ambassadors to our cause.”  The rest of the steering committee roundly concurred, and I was a momentary hero with a tiny tear in my eye, rather than a mean, callous manager.

I had many other dealings and discussions with Kay over the years that followed, until we lost her.  Lost her to toxic pollution.  In my work I like to think I am defending Kay among others, as I am still working on toxic pollution.  Her advice was always good advice, always helpful, her way was always cutting straight to the chase, egoless, unafraid, always calling out the BS in everything, suffering no fools, but always willing to suffer for the good — in people and mother earth.  We all miss her.

Forty years ago today, on 1/24/81, Kay Treakle led what was arguably the most successful protest organized by Greenpeace Seattle.  She was arrested by the Coast Guard, and jailed for blockading a supertanker in the Strait of Juan De Fuca, between the Olympic Peninsula and Vancouver Island.

The Alaska Pipeline, built to bring crude oil from the North Slope on the Arctic Ocean to coastal waters in the south, was nearing completion.  There were plans to ship much of the crude on massive supertankers, through the Strait, to refineries here, to pipelines under Puget Sound, and to on-shore destinations as far away as Minnesota.  Though tankers already brought oil through local waters, they were smaller, more maneuverable, and the volume of traffic was vastly smaller than the number of supertankers the Alaskan oil would bring.  And of course any tanker accident or spills would be disastrous for the confined waters of the Salish Sea.

So to allay concerns, the Coast Guard staged a stunt.  They scheduled a “maneuverability trial” to demonstrate that supertankers were safe in our waters.  We turned it into a circus.

That’s Kay, in the middle, on the inflatable.  They were circling the tanker, after parking under the bow, which forced the behemoth to stop.  A Coast Guard cutter had chased them away, so they went around the vessel for another go at it.  The dance went on for a couple of hours, together with two other GP inflatables, forcing the tanker to halt, and the Coast Guard to chase the protesters, all the way up to the Canadian border and back.  It drew press attention.

Greenpeace Vancouver had already disrupted the Coast Guard’s stunt the day before, so there was a ton of media in boats and planes to cover the Seattle office’s confrontation on the 24th.  Our intent was to publicize the oil industry’s plans to bring crude into the Salish Sea, and to rally local opposition.

It worked.  The governor received 700 hand-written letters opposing the traffic, which was a lot, back in the rotary-dial phone days.  Governor Spellman subsequently denied a permit for a superport for Alaskan oil on the Peninsula, including a 50-mile pipeline under the Sound to existing refineries.  Washington Senator Warren Magnuson sponsored federal legislation which banned supertankers from our waters.  This success primarily derived from years of work by local groups and tribes, educating and lobbying authorities at the city, county, state, and national levels.  But the visibility of the action pushed some decision-makers to choose protecting the environment, rather than oil.  Bottom line: eight years later, the supertanker Exxon Valdez tragically spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil into Alaskan waters, not here.

But Kay.  I said she led the tanker action.  Well yes, and no.  She was never The Boss.  Didn’t want to be.  But she recruited participation.  She did research.  She facilitated decision-making, both in Seattle and on the Peninsula, strategically, and immediately before the action.  She did logistics.  Her clarity, energy, and humor inspired everyone.  You know what I’m talking about.

And she was in the boat.  On the water.  In prep runs on Lake Washington, at the helm of the zodiac, she beamed and exclaimed “this is fun!”  She liked the speed, and the control.  Said she felt like she was driving the Millennium Falcon.  Yeah.  That’s when I took this picture.

Fun is being more maneuverable than the 42-foot cutters chasing you.  They were WAY faster, but the zodes could turn on a dime.  The cutters couldn’t.  The Coast Guard threw out life preservers, trying to foul the propellers on the outboard.  Didn’t work.

The only role Kay never liked was doing media.  I don’t think she felt she was formidable enough for that job.  Hah!  And yet during her arrest, she got the best line of the action, which of course, drew more coverage.

As she was being taken away by the guy on the left, a TV reporter asked her “What’s next?!?”  She held up her manacled hands, pointed at the sheriff, and said “Ask him!”  Of course they ran the snarky comment on TV.  Her dad saw it on the news that night, and smiled with pride.

While we in GP never did, in fact, get our shit together, this was a very fine attempt.

Kay coordinated the first Greenpeace International campaign I was a part of, when we tried to sail a hot air balloon into the Nevada Test Site to stop an underground nuclear weapons detonation. It was an inspired and, we would come to learn, deeply flawed idea, but we were young and committed and passionate and, it’s easy to forget, desperate. For those who didn’t grow up with the day to day reality of “duck and cover” in fallout shelters, of news stories of geese being mistaken for missiles and triggering red alerts, of hair-trigger radar systems capable of launching the obliteration of whole cities in seconds, it’s hard to imagine just how fragile the world seemed, and how important the mission to throw everything we had at stopping a nuclear apocalypse. Kay was the first of many Greenpeace women that I worked for, and she brought a level-headed outrage and deeply compassionate leadership style that was utterly at odds with so much of the organization’s testosterone-fueled chest thumping of those days.

The campaign was a time both magical and cursed. It was training flights over the sagebrush of the Santa Monica hills, flying over hawks and rabbit in the dawn sunlight. It was long hours working in the shadow of sensing we were being watched, fearing we might be infiltrated, and knowing we were up against the mightiest military force on the planet. It was staring into the abyss of the nuclear threat, it was the camaraderie of hope. It was logistical nightmares and tactical arguments and all the day to day conflicts of a group of people, who, in Bob Hunter’s words,  were “men and women, young and old, not all of them brave or wise, who found themselves face-to-face with the fullest ecological horrors of the century …”

Through it all Kay was exactly the kind of quick-witted empathetic leader you need when chaos is swirling. She brought out the best in a motley team and kept us moving forward even after a spectacular setback – a balloon crash that garnered all the wrong kinds of press and which a lesser leader would have turned into a blame game. She picked up the pieces, dusted off our egos, waited for bones to mend, and put us all back on track.

She was rock. She was laughter. She was quiet wisdom, humble optimist, sparkling inspiration. Wonderful storyteller. Champion hugger. Deeply missed.

This picture was taken from a documentary screened on my TV, and shows the 1979 meeting in England when Greenpeace International was formed.  David McTaggart, shown on the right, had brokered the end of the lawsuit between Canada and the US, after which representatives from all the countries came together, and agreed to join a unified organization located in Amsterdam.  Kay, shown on the left, had been chosen to represent the US offices.

Her enduring comment on the meeting was “I couldn’t believe all the women who were getting coffee for the men”.

I always loved working with Kay, she always had thoughtful comments about our work. And I’ll really miss her kindness and caring.