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The path to answering your question lead us around the world through a tangle of official Greenpeace web sites. First, we poked through the Greenpeace International site, which offered plenty of historical information about the 30-year-old activist organization, but didn't name any founders. David McTaggart's name turned up in several places, as an early leader of Greenpeace and an author of the group's history. However, he didn't start Greenpeace. A frequently asked questions page led to the New Zealand branch of Greenpeace, which explained the group's origins. But that page didn't list the founders either. It did, however, give us the idea to look through all the English-language Greenpeace sites worldwide. Finally, we found the answer on the Australian Greenpeace site. In 1970, Paul Cote, Jim Bohlen, and Irving Stowe formed the Don't Make a Wave Committee to protest U.S. nuclear testing. Their friends Patrick Moore and Bill Darnell joined soon after. Motivated by their vision of a green and peaceful world, Darnell suggested they change their name to Greenpeace. The next year, Bohlen, Moore, and Darnell, along with nine others,
embarked on a ship named the Phyllis Cormack to try and stop U.S. nuclear tests on the small island of Amchitka, near the tip of the Aleutian Islands off Alaska. This attempt sparked a flurry of public interest, and nuclear testing was eventually stopped on Amchitka in 1972. Greenpeace followed this success with more protests against nuclear testing, as well as campaigns against whaling, toxic-waste dumping, and other issues. Because of its high-profile activities, Greenpeace soon became a major influence on global environmental protection.
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