I moved to Toronto in October 2001, and my husband used to keep CityTV's BT (Breakfast Television) on in the mornings to listen to the traffic and weather reports before work. I don't watch a lot of tv, but I'd watch friendly suspender-clad Kevin Frankish doing a run down of the day's top stories, we'd both laugh and wink at each other when Mika the sexy transit reporter came on for a few seconds, mute the tube when Liza Fromer, the station bimbo giggler came on and didn't pay much attention to anything else. Then came the day I caught a glimpse of this old hippy in a kimono bathrobe scanning a stack of newspapers with a highlighter on a segment called "Papercuts", so I turned up the volume and gaped.
That was my first introduction to Bob Hunter, and I became a devotee. Bob, with his receding, ponytailed hair, sporting the groovy bathrobes and reading through and commenting on a variety of reports from the morning papers, is responsible for enlightening me on a wide variety of subjects, including the Kyoto Protocol, global warming, oil supply politics, activism, nuclear power issues, eco-journalism, as well as internal Canadian, US-Canada, and global politics. I watched Papercuts for many months before googling Bob's name, and was amazed to discover that he was a co-founder of Greenpeace, and largely responsible for the organization's media savvy. He is noted not only for his eco-activism, but for his journalism. To read some of Bob's articles, check out his contibutor section on Eye.net. He has authored many books:
Erebus; The Enemies Of Anarchy; The Storming Of The Mind; Greenpeace; Greenpeace III: Journey Into The Bomb; To Save The Whale; Warriors Of The Rainbow; The Greenpeace Chronicle; Cry Wolf; On The Sky: Zen And The Art Of International Freeloading and 2030 : Confronting Thermageddon in Our Lifetime
I had noticed that Bob's Papercuts segment had disappeared from BT's daily broadcasts, but I was stunned to hear that he had passed away on May 2nd after a fight with prostate cancer. His funeral is set for May 15th, and I hope the media covers it to the hilt so that the world will know what kind of hero we've lost. He was one of a kind, and meant a lot to me.
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