Activists launch third Rainbow Warrior
Source: Agencies |
October 15, 2011, Saturday
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Print Edition
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GREENPEACE yesterday launched a new Rainbow Warrior, a US$33 million schooner that replaces the battered 50-year-old boat that has suffered numerous encounters with whalers, seal hunters and illegal loggers.
The new schooner's first mission will probably be in the United States to campaign against the burning of coal for electricity. It will then head south to the Amazon to draw attention to rainforest destruction.
The 58-meter ship, with two A-frame masts soaring almost as high over the deck, is equipped with a heli-copter pad and rapid-action release system for its inflatable boats, which in the past have carried activists into confrontations at sea.
Melina Laboucan-Massimo of the Cree nation in Canada blessed the ship with a prayer in her native tongue, using smoke from sage and braided sweetgrass. The 30-year-old Greenpeace activist later broke a bottle of champagne over the hull.
The name Rainbow Warrior is drawn from a Cree prophesy that in the days when the Earth faces man-made devastation, mankind will join together to heal it and will be known as "warriors of the rainbow."
Those dark times "are upon us," she said at the shipyard naming ceremony.
"Until my generation, my family was able to live sustainably off the land," she said, adding that now northern -Alberta's watershed has been polluted, its air poisoned and its land destroyed by tar-sand mines.
Greenpeace's flagships bear the name of the first ship that was sunk by French intelligence agents in 1985 to prevent its use in opposing nuclear testing. The second Rainbow Warrior was retired this year to become a hospital ship in Bangladesh. Its last mission was to conduct radiation tests off the Japanese coast following the Fukushima nuclear reactor disaster.
The new schooner's first mission will probably be in the United States to campaign against the burning of coal for electricity. It will then head south to the Amazon to draw attention to rainforest destruction.
The 58-meter ship, with two A-frame masts soaring almost as high over the deck, is equipped with a heli-copter pad and rapid-action release system for its inflatable boats, which in the past have carried activists into confrontations at sea.
Melina Laboucan-Massimo of the Cree nation in Canada blessed the ship with a prayer in her native tongue, using smoke from sage and braided sweetgrass. The 30-year-old Greenpeace activist later broke a bottle of champagne over the hull.
The name Rainbow Warrior is drawn from a Cree prophesy that in the days when the Earth faces man-made devastation, mankind will join together to heal it and will be known as "warriors of the rainbow."
Those dark times "are upon us," she said at the shipyard naming ceremony.
"Until my generation, my family was able to live sustainably off the land," she said, adding that now northern -Alberta's watershed has been polluted, its air poisoned and its land destroyed by tar-sand mines.
Greenpeace's flagships bear the name of the first ship that was sunk by French intelligence agents in 1985 to prevent its use in opposing nuclear testing. The second Rainbow Warrior was retired this year to become a hospital ship in Bangladesh. Its last mission was to conduct radiation tests off the Japanese coast following the Fukushima nuclear reactor disaster.
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