Joel Reynolds
Joel Reynolds is the director of NRDC's marine mammal protection initiative and he co-directed our Campaign to Save the Gray Whale Nursery.
It was not an auspicious beginning.
It was the first week of March 1997. We'd all gathered in San Diego, taken a bus to the airport in Tijuana, and then boarded a chartered DC-3 twin prop airplane from the 1940's -- something right out of a World War II movie. Our destination was Laguna San Ignacio, for a few days of meetings with local communities, whale-watching, and strategizing about how to defeat a proposal by Mitsubishi Corporation, together with the Mexican government, to build the world's largest industrial salt works on the shores of the last undisturbed breeding and calving lagoon for the Pacific gray whale. Our goal on this mission to the lagoon, co-sponsored by NRDC and the International Fund for Animal Welfare, was to raise the profile of the place and publicize the threat.
It was an exceptional group, most having just met each other for the first time, including, among others, Pierce Brosnan and his son, Bobby Kennedy, Jr., and his daughter, Glenn Close and her daughter, Jean-Michel Cousteau, Mexican poet and environmentalist Homero Aridjis and his wife Betty, photographer Robert Glenn Ketchum, reporters from Time Magazine and the Los Angeles Times, FAO Schwarz (NRDC's board chair) and his wife and NRDC trustee Ricky Pereira, NRDC founder and president John Adams and his wife Patricia, and staff from a range of organizations in Mexico and the US, including, from NRDC, my colleague Jacob Scherr and me.
Five minutes after take-off, just as we were settling into the noisy, unpressurized three hour flight, the pilot abruptly turned the plane around. One of the two engines had blown, and we had no choice but to return to the airport. While Karen Ivey from Baja Discovery immediately began a frantic search by phone for another plane, the group waited calmly, some probably wondering if this might be a good moment to fade away and grab a cab back to Los Angeles. A group of us, including Pierce Brosnan, headed over to the main airport terminal and found a bar, open on Sunday morning where for two hours we got to know each other, interrogated Pierce about his latest movie ("Dante's Peak"), and talked about what we were up to together. Finally - fortunately -- we got word that another plane -- this one a spacious, "modern" Convair from the 1960s -- had been found. We quickly boarded and were on our way, and not one person had run for the exit.
In such circumstances, the campaign to save Laguna San Ignacio could easily have faltered. Instead, the five-day mission to the lagoon was a successful step forward in what would become the largest environmental campaign in history. The ultimate success - the abandonment of the salt works project -- was the result not of one single event or one single organization. It was the product of an exceptional international collaboration over a sustained period of years, supported relentlessly by the intense commitment of hundreds of thousands of NRDC members and activists. It is a story that testifies to the power of citizen action as a force for enormous good against the most powerful forces of industrialization and globalization.
