David Fraser McTaggart 1932 - 2001 Founder, Greenpeace International

When the history of these times comes to be written, David McTaggart will emerge as far more significant than most politicians. Certainly he achieved more for the environment than any politician alive or dead.

McTaggart lived his life at a time when the human world was destroying its home, the natural world, at an unprecedented rate and to a suicidal degree. Many others also saw the need for action but nobody took action like McTaggart. Some politicians denounced him, others admired him, but far more were influenced by his creation. The first global environmental organisation which was effective as a movement, as a name and as a catalyst to achieve change for the good, while opposed by big business and big politics.

It is easy to exaggerate the power of Greenpeace, but no one should underestimate McTaggart's accomplishment in converting it from a disparate fleet of local organisations into an international entity with a culture, public proposition, operating system and capabilities which enabled it to act globally, proactively, effectively and with public support.

Greenpeace has been a phenomenal success as a communicator because it has been able to express widely shared values and feelings, in concrete visible actions. It has been able to convey emotion and to connect with people's gut instincts as well as their rationality, about big issues, through small moving acts of human endeavour. McTaggart was one of those who inspired this in Greenpeace by his personal actions, such as sailing on his little ship the Vega to oppose the last atmospheric nuclear test in the world, in the Pacific. But McTaggart went further.

Largely unknown to anyone outside Greenpeace, he applied his personal charisma, charm, bullying and energy to engineering and sustaining an organisation able to take its core values of non-violence and internationalism, and deploy that to devastating moral effect.

McTaggart's tally of environmental achievements is impressive in a conventional sense.

Nuclear testing: facing down the French State in their courts after they rammed him, beat him up and almost blinded him in the Pacific.

Whales: adding twenty countries to the alliance to protect whales while working at the International Whaling Commission with the British conservationist Sir Peter Scott.

Pushing for an Antarctica World Park with a combination of challenging world powers on the spot, on the frozen continent and working behind the scenes with a host of world leaders to get the job done.

Setting up Greenpeace in Moscow: the first international non-governmental organisation in cold war Russia.

McTaggart brought a style and system to Greenpeace which enabled it to conduct televisual political opera that again and again, forced governments and corporations to uphold the public interest rather than private gain through planetary damage. His real genius was in creating a Greenpeace that others could support, lead and find their own rewards from while doing good.

Following the Greenpeace struggle to prevent Shell dumping its redundant Brent Spar oil installation in 1995, one journalist wrote that it was "an incident crammed with dramatic polarities and symbolism of the most unsubtle kind, it seemed a small but perfectly formed victory for sanity, for people against machines and moguls."

What he described was a result of the campaign machinery, strategy and logistics inspired and founded by McTaggart. It is typical of the man that in that summer of 1995 undertook yet another trip into the French nuclear test zone, where he spent his 63rd birthday hiding out from the French and delaying their last atoll-splitting nuclear explosions.

McTaggart was an empire builder, though he disdained all of its trappings for himself. Not a military or criminal or business empire, but an empire of the soul, of devotion to nature above nationalism or material greed.

McTaggart inspired his followers to follow Greenpeace, not himself.

He was above all a strategist, described by one former Greenpeace director as 'cold but majestic', but at the same time he is remembered by close friends as having an incredible capacity for personal compassion. Many who met David remarked on his piercing blue eyes which were unnervingly laser like rather than twinkling.

As a former successful businessman and sportsman, McTaggart was intelligent and worldly enough to realise that you did not inspire change through intellectual argument but through action and symbols. He deployed science and ethics like an intelligencer and an alchemist. The result was loved by the public and hated by Greenpeace's critics.

All empires wax and wane and Greenpeace already operates in a changed world from the days when McTaggart first sailed his yacht against French warships, that voyage has played a big role in convincing most people that humanity must transform its ways. The attitude of America to climate change shows, however, that there are still dramatic polarities, and need for sanity and new victories in people's fight against moguls and machines.

If anyone deserves to rest in peace it is David McTaggart, but if one thing is certain, his spirit will be out there, wandering the seas and looking over the forests, urging more action until the world is genuinely both peaceful and green. McTaggart could say "I told you so" but he would say, "I showed you so".

Steve Sawyer, friend and colleague