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IRVING STOWE

Irvine Stowe and his wife Dorothy exiled themselves from the United States in 1961, leaving for New Zealand. "We thought there might be a chance of survival if there was a holocaust in the northern hemisphere, and. . . we really didn't want our children subjected to the terror of bomb drills," recalls Dorothy. In 1966, they moved to Vancouver, where Irving, a Yale-educated lawyer from New England, soon found an outlet for his strong anti-war sentiments in the Georgia Straight, an underground newspaper.It was Irving who introduced another prominant founder member of Greenpeace, Jim Bohlen to the Quaker religion. Quakers believe in a form of protest known as "bearing witness" - a sort of passive resistance that involves going to the scene of an objectionable activity and registering opposition to it simply by one's presence there.

Bohlen and Stowe had also become active members of the Canadian branch of the Sierra Club, an American conservation group, and in 1969, after fighting a number of local environmental battles, they focused their attention on the threat to Amchitka.