Commemorating 30 years since the Rainbow Warrior

Commemorating 30 years since the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior

It was an event that changed New Zealand for ever. On 10 July 1985 two bomb blasts ripped through the Rainbow Warrior, sinking the Greenpeace ship and killing crew member Fernando Pereira.

The images of the crippled Rainbow Warrior at Auckland’s Marsden Wharf are still clear in people’s minds. Now, thirty years since the terror attack, the University of Auckland is hosting a public lecture to discuss how the bombing impacted the environmental movement.

Dr Ryan Tucker Jones, of the University’s Faculty of Arts, along with Steve Abel of Greenpeace International, will be joined by Sue Taei of Conservation International and Alexander Gillespie, University of Waikato.

Under the title “Thirty Years after the Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior: The Past and Future of Pacific Environments and Environmentalism” they will assess:
What is the meaning of the Rainbow Warrior in the history of Pacific environmentalism?
How have Pacific environments rebounded or worsened in the last 30 years?
How have the ecological challenges facing Pacific people changed since 1985?
What role can environmentalism play in the Pacific today?
“When French terrorists bombed Greenpeace's Rainbow Warrior 30 years ago, they tried to smash the environmentalist movement's radical challenge to politics in the Pacific,” Dr Jones says.

“With this forum we want to keep going the conversation that Greenpeace started. Rather than ending the environmentalist movement, the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior is still raising people’s consciousness about environmental issues here in New Zealand and around the Pacific. It’s a really wonderful legacy from a very tragic event.”

The lecture is at 5pm on Friday 10 July at the Fale Pasifika on the university’s City Campus.

ends

© Scoop Media