Integrated Awareness of Life

About rex.weyler

REX WEYLER is a journalist, writer, and ecologist. He was a cofounder of Greenpeace International, and his book, Greenpeace: The Inside Story (Raincoast Books and Rodale Press, 2004) appeared on the Publishers Weekly list, "Best Books of 2004."

Weyler was born in Colorado in 1947, attended Occidental College in California, where he studied physics, engineering, and history. He worked as an apprentice engineer for Lockheed in 1967, but left engineering for a career in journalism. In 1969, he published his first book with photographer David Totheroh, a pacifist discourse with photographs from a winter in California's Yosemite Valley. In 1971, he immigrated to Canada, where he began his writing and journalism career as a reporter and editor for the North Shore News in North Vancouver.

Through journalism, Weyler expressed his passion for wilderness and ecology. In 1975, he sailed on the first Greenpeace anti-whaling voyage, and served on subsequent campaigns as photographer and writer. He served as a director of the Greenpeace Foundation from 1974-1982, edited the monthly Greenpeace Chronicles, and co-founded Greenpeace International in Amsterdam in 1979.

He published a book of Greenpeace campaign photographs, To Save a Whale (1979). His book Blood of the Land, a history of the American Indian Movement, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1982. He is the author of The Story of Harmony (1996) and coauthor of Chop Wood, Carry Water: a Guide to Finding Spiritual Fulfillment in Everyday Life (1984).

Weyler's latest book, Greenpeace: The Inside Story (Raincoast Books and Rodale Press, 2004) is the definitive history of the founding of Greenpeace from the mid-1960s to 1980. The book tells the story of a small group of journalists and activists in Vancouver, Canada, who envisioned and created a global environmental movement. The book was honoured as a finalist for Shaughnessy-Cohen Award for Political Writing, the Hubert Evans Award for Non-Fiction at the BC Book Awards, and was listed by Publishers Weekly among the "Best Books of 2004."

Rex Weyler has contributed photographs, essays, and poetry to many books, including: The Power of the People, ed. Robert Cooney and Helen Michalowski (New Society Publishers, 1987); Shorelines (Kingfisher Press, B.C., 1995); Witness, Twenty-five Years on the Environmental Front Line (Andre Deutsch, London, 1996); Greenpeace: Changing the World, ed. Conny Boettger, Fouad Hamdan (Rasch & Rohring, 2001); and The Book of Letters: 150 Years of Private Canadian Correspondence, by Paul and Audrey Grescoe (Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 2002). His photography and essays have been published in the New York Times, Vancouver Sun, Oceans, Smithsonian, Rolling Stone, Conscious Choice, New Times, National Geographic, and other publications.

As an active ecologist, Weyler worked on water quality issues in the Georgia Strait and helped draft legislation limiting dioxin effluents from pulp mills in B.C. He is a founder of Hollyhock seminar centre on Cortes Island, B.C., and co-developer of music tuning software for Justonic Tuning Inc. In 2005, Weyler received a Social Justice Award, from the Urban Environmental Policy Center, Los Angeles.

Currently, he provides weekly commentary on the Canadian television news show, The Standard, Omni-10 television, writes for the Tyeeonline news, and for print, television, and the Internet. Weyler helped organize the World Peace Forum 2006 in Vancouver and is currently working on a new book about religious history and personal choice. He lives in Vancouver with his wife, Lisa Gibbons, and two of his three sons; his oldest son is a musician in Victoria, B.C.