“Ninety per cent of history is being in the right place at the right time.”

So echo the words of Greenpeace co-founder Robert Hunter, whose death 10 years ago May 2 was marked Sunday at Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Film Festival, with the Toronto premier of How to Change the World.

The writings and heretofore-unseen Greenpeace footage of Hunter, the quietly charismatic journalist-cum-activist and Greenpeace’s first president, form the fulcrum over which this compelling documentary unfolds.

Hunter describes the “strange brew” of historical events and colourful characters that swirled into the formation of the Vancouver-spawned Greenpeace, now one of the largest environmental organizations on the planet, with over three million members and a presence in over 40 countries around the world.

As Hunter observes, Vancouver in 1971 was home to “the biggest concentration of tree huggers, draft-dodgers, s--t-disturbing unionists, radical students, garbage dump stoppers, freeway fighters, pot smokers, vegetarians, nudists, Buddhists, fish preservationists and back-to-the-landers on the planet.”

“And we were all haunted by the spectre of a dead world.”

As the film details, the catalyst for the movement was the planned underground detonation of a five-megaton nuclear bomb in Amchitka, a windswept island in the Alaskan Aleutians where two previous nuclear tests had been staged. A columnist for the Vancouver Sun at the time, Hunter volunteered to join a small group of activist mariners dubbing themselves the “Don’t Make a Wave” committee on a dubious “voyage into a bomb” in an effort to curtail, or at least complicate, the scheduled detonation.

Though the effort to stop the blast was unsuccessful, the resulting publicity and widespread public interest led to what Hunter termed a “mind bomb,” a type of pre-Internet “going viral” of an idea that rapidly ripples across the consciousness of a wide swath of human minds simultaneously. It was in the fallout of such a “mind bomb” that the idea of Greenpeace was born, uniting a concern for peace and a passion for the earth.

Like geneticist David Suzuki, who shifted from academic research to public engagement owing to the urgency of the eco-crisis, Hunter was also compelled to segue from paid chronicler to front-line activist owing to the urgency of the times.

For the film’s director, Jerry Rothwell, one surprising response to the film (which won an editing award at the Sundance Film Festival and will be available for theatrical release in Canada this summer) is how many viewers said they “didn’t expect to enjoy the film, but did.”

This mirrors a discovery Rothwell made during the seven years of filming. In a recent conversation, he mentioned that one thing all the people he interviewed shared was “a love of Bob Hunter,” despite wide ideological and political differences. Hunter’s non-ego-driven, self-critical approach helped equip him with a “unique talent” to bring diverse people together for a common cause.

But his spiritual sense of interconnectedness might also have had something to do with it.

Years ago, during a stint as guest on his City TV show, Hunter’s Gatherings, I chatted with Hunter about his own sense of interconnectedness of all reality, a spiritual sense of unity that marked his life and activism.

According to Emily Hunter, Robert and Bobbi Hunter’s youngest child and a dynamic eco-journalist and filmmaker in her own right, her dad was “always spiritual.” Though raised in an agnostic household, Emily observed that her father explored Buddhist and other Asian spiritual traditions in order to help “tame the ego.”

Seeing the devastating effects of unbridled egos in both Greenpeace and beyond, Robert Hunter’s humility spoke to an understanding of humans not being superior to, but in deep connection with, other species, such as whales, whose protection became a key organizing focus for the group, and whose actions helped lead to the banning of commercial whaling.

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The question remains: Was it Hunter’s deeply spiritual sense of interconnection that enabled him to successfully navigate the choppy waters of fame and celebrity— whirlpools that continue to capsize so many?