Crew Profiles Steve Sawyer, Campaigner Previous Index Next     Steve Sawyer has dual citizenship in the United States and the Netherlands, and has been an environmental and peace activist since 1978, most of that time working for Greenpeace. As well as serving as Executive Director of Greenpeace International (1988-1993) and Greenpeace USA (1986-1988), he has worked on a variety of campaign issues in different parts of the world, including: the US and Canada; Europe, the USSR (pre-1991), Central and South America; and extensively in the South Pacific. He has worked extensively with indigenous peoples, particularly in the Pacific. His campaigning activities have required that he adjust Greenpeace’s well-known activities and methods to realities that differ dramatically from the northern and western democracies in which it was developed, and to ‘translate’ the organisation’s mission into terms which have meaning for people whose daily reality is very different than what we are used to in the North and West. He is currently engaged in the third Greenpeace expedition to the Western Arctic, documenting the extreme impacts of human induced climate change (the greenhouse effect) on people and the environment in that part of the world; and opposing offshore oil development in the Arctic Ocean. He sailed on the original Rainbow Warrior in 1980-82 and again in 1985, when it was blown up during his birthday party in Auckland, New Zealand on 10 July 1985. He sailed on the new Rainbow Warrior to Moruroa Atoll to protest French nuclear testing in 1995, and spent a brief time as skipper of the sailing yacht Vega during that voyage.