Introduction
Mr. Chairman and members of the Subcommittee, thank you for inviting me here today to testify about why nuclear energy is a vital component for America s energy future.

First, let me say a few words about who I am and where I've come from.

Founding Greenpeace
I was born and raised in the tiny fishing and logging village of Winter Harbour on the northwest tip of Vancouver Island, in the rainforest by the Pacific. I didn t realize what a blessed childhood I'd had , playing on the tidal flats by the salmon spawning streams in the rainforest, until I was sent to boarding school in Vancouver at age fourteen.

I eventually attended the University of British Columbia studying the life sciences: biology, biochemistry, genetics, forestry; but it was when I discovered ecology that I realized that through science I could gain an insight into the mystery of the rainforest I had known as a child.

I became a born-again ecologist, and in the late 1960’s, was soon transformed into a radical environmental activist.

I found myself in a church basement in Vancouver with a like-minded group of people planning a protest campaign against US hydrogen bomb testing in Alaska. We proved that a somewhat rag-tag looking group of activists could sail a leaky old halibut boat across the North Pacific Ocean and change the course of history.

President Nixon cancelled the remaining hydrogen bomb tests in the series due to overwhelming public opposition, which we had helped to generate. In retrospect this was a major turning point in the global arms race.

This was the birth of Greenpeace.