Rex Weyler

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Rex Weyler

Born 10 September 1947 (1947-09-10) (age 60)
Denver, Colorado, United States
Occupation Author, Journalist, Ecologist
Genres Essays, News, Non-fiction
Official website

Rex Weyler (born September 10,1947) is an American / Canadian author, journalist and ecologist. He has worked as a writer, editor, and publisher at newspapers and magazines, and occasionally as a commentator on Canadian television. In the 1970s, Weyler served as a director of the original Greenpeace Foundation, and as campaign photographer and publisher of the Greenpeace Chronicles. He was a cofounder of Greenpeace International in 1979.

Weyler became known for his books on native rights (Blood of the Land[1]), Greenpeace history (Greenpeace: The Inside Story[2]) and religious commentary (The Jesus Sayings: A Quest for His Authentic Message [3]). In 1982, he co-founded the Hollyhock Retreat Centre[4] in British Columbia, Canada. In the 1990s, he coauthored a U.S. patent for music tuning software and co-founded Justonic Tuning Inc. with his partner Bill Gannon, to develop and market the product. He works as a freelance journalist, appearing in print, broadcast, and on the Internet.

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[edit] Life and education

Weyler was born in Denver, Colorado, September 10, 1947 to Jack Richardson Weyler, a petroleum geologist, and Joanne (Goodwin) Weyler, both from Santa Barbara, California. He spent his early childhood in a Pure Oil Company compound outside Worland, Wyoming. See A Girl Always There[5] for a sketch of his sister and their childhood in the Great Basin region of Wyoming, c. 1952.

Weyler attended Herbert Hoover Elementary School in Tulsa, Oklahoma; Rosco C. Hill Middle School in Denver, Colorado; and Robert E. Lee High School (Midland, Texas), where he completed an honours physics course, ran on the track team, and played on the varsity basketball team. During the summers, he worked as a roustabout in the West Texas oil fields. He attended high school with future first lady Laura Welch Bush and future US Army General Tommy Franks. (See “Tell Laura I Love Her” for a memoir of Midland, Texas, c. 1963-66.[6]) Weyler graduated from Lee High School in 1966.

Weyler studied theoretical physics, mathematics, engineering, and history at Occidental College in Los Angeles, California. In the summer of 1967, at the age of 19, he worked as an apprentice engineer at Lockheed Aircraft Corporation in Sunnyvale, California and possessed his first and only government security clearance.

That summer, during the height of the Vietnam War, Weyler joined the peace movement in San Francisco, participated in student marches to the Oakland Induction Centre, and attended sessions at the Institute for the Study of Non-violence, founded by Joan Baez and Ira Sandperl. There he met an early intellectual influence, Theodore Rozak, and other radical thinkers.

In his work at Lockheed, he learned that neither he nor the engineers above him knew what they were designing, since each engineer only worked on a component part. He grew disenchanted with engineering, which he felt contributed blindly to the war-making industry. Back at university, his interests drifted to journalism and he remained active in the peace movement.

In 1969, Weyler and 41 fellow students were suspended for a semester from Occidental College for staging a sit-in opposing U.S. military recruiters on the campus. The 42 students were charged with “disrupting the normal operating procedures of the college,” and convicted by an administration-teacher-student discipline body. Thirty-six years later, on April 5, 2005, the Urban Environmental Policy Center on the Occidental College campus awarded Weyler and Dennis Zane, a fellow student organizer, the Alumni Community Action Award for their lifetime achievements in peace, ecology, and social justice.

Weyler never returned to university, but traveled internationally and published his first book in 1969 with photographer David Totheroh, I Took a Walk Today, a pacifist discourse with photographs from a winter in California’s Yosemite Valley.

Family: Rex Weyler has three siblings: Kaye Moss, Denver, Colorado; Bruce Weyler, Denver, Colorado; and Doug Weyler, Cortes Island, B.C., Canada. He married Glenn Jonathans in Nijmegen, Netherlands in 1971 and immigrated to Canada in 1972. Weyler and Jonathans divorced in 1980. Weyler married Lisa Gibbons[7] on Cortes Island, B.C., Canada, in 1991. They now live in Vancouver, B.C., Canada. Lisa Gibbons is an artist and special-needs youth educator. Weyler and Gibbons are foster parents, active in the BC Federation of Foster Parents.

Weyler has three sons: Jack Weyler, b. July 1, 1986, a keyboard musician in Victoria, B.C.; Jonah Weyler, b. January 26, 1991, and Liam Weyler, born January 14, 1993, both at Byng High School in Vancouver, B.C.

[edit] Journalism

Weyler began his journalism career in 1973 with the North Shore News in North Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, first as a photographer and reporter and later as Editor and Associate Publisher.

Between 1975 and 1980, Weyler co-founded and served as publisher and editor of the original Greenpeace Chronicles newspaper. The newspaper was one of the first international environmental publications, with stories by writers Robert L. Hunter, Paul Watson, John Lilly, Kitty Tucker, Ben Metcalfe, and David Garrick. The newspaper carried art and cartoons by famed cartoonists Ralph Steadman and Ron Cobb. See Watson’s post of original pages from the early Greenpeace Chronicles[8].

In 1979 Weyler co-founded the Natural Guard, a news sharing and networking group, with other writers, journalists, and activists including Harvey Wasserman, Anna Gyorgy, Sam Lovejoy, Tom Campbell, Kitty Tucker, and others.

In 1980, Weyler’s story in the Greenpeace Chronicles about the nuclear contamination of the Rio Puerco in New Mexico earned a Columbia School of Journalism Award as one of the Top Ten Censored Stories of the year.

Between 1979 and 1982, Weyler served variously as publisher and writer for New Age Journal, Boston, Massachusetts, USA. With other editors Peggy Taylor, Rick Fields, Rick Ingrasci, and Catherine Ingram, he wrote and edited the popular self-help book Chop Wood, Carry Water: Finding Spiritual Fulfillment in Everyday Life (Tarcher, 1984).

In 1998, Weyler and Joel Solomon formed Morphic Media Inc, and purchased and published Shared Vision Magazine in Vancouver, B.C. Weyler served as publisher and editor until 2001. Solomon and Weyler sold the magazine in 2002 to Dragonfly Media. Thereafter, Weyler maintained his monthly column in Shared Vision until 2004.

In 2007, Weyler founded the Institute for Citizen Journalism[9] to help citizens get their stories before the world media.

Weyler appears regularly online in The Tyee, and elsewhere on the Internet. He occasionally appears in the Vancouver Sun and broadcasts religious commentary on the Canadian Omni-10 news show, The Standard.

He has appeared on CBC, BBC, Air America Radio, and other radio networks with commentary on ecology and current events. His stories and photographs have appeared in the Utne Reader, New York Times, National Geographic, The Liberal, and other journals.

[edit] Greenpeace

Rex Weyler and Bob Hunter
Rex Weyler and Bob Hunter

Between 1973 and 1982, Weyler served as a director of the original Greenpeace Foundation, campaign photographer and reporter, and as editor of the Greenpeace Chronicles magazine. He was a co-founder of Greenpeace International in 1979.

In 1975, Weyler sailed on the first Greenpeace whale campaign. His photographs and news accounts of the early campaigns appeared in National Geographic, Smithsonian, New York Times Magazine, and other publications worldwide. He took many of the classic Greenpeace photographs[10] during the organization’s early whale and seal campaigns.

Weyler’s history of Greenpeace, Greenpeace: The Inside Story (Raincoast, Rodale, 2004)[11] is considered by many insiders to be the definitive history of the organization’s first decade.

Since leaving Greenpeace in 1982, Weyler has remained active in environmental and peace. In 1991, he helped draft dioxin emission levels for pulp mills in British Columbia. In 2006, he served as Program Director for World Peace Forum 2006.

Weyler is featured in the documentary, Greenpeace: Making a Stand[12], a history of Greenpeace, including a dramatic modern campaign in Argentina that preserved the forest homeland of the Wichi Indians, threatened by industrial soy plantations.

See Founders of Greenpeace[13], a list of Characters[14] in the Greenpeace history, and the Chronology[15] of the founding of Greenpeace.

[edit] Books by Rex Weyler

The Jesus Sayings: A Quest for His Authentic Message (House of Anansi Press, 2008): a provocative view of Jesus' message and his mission using the latest scholarship applied to the complete range of sources to bring this astounding and important message to the general reader in a way that is entertaining, inspiring, and enlightening.
The Jesus Sayings: A Quest for His Authentic Message (House of Anansi Press, 2008): a provocative view of Jesus' message and his mission using the latest scholarship applied to the complete range of sources to bring this astounding and important message to the general reader in a way that is entertaining, inspiring, and enlightening.
  • Weyler, Rex (2008) The Jesus Sayings: A Quest for His Authentic Message (House of Anansi Press, 2008): a provocative view of Jesus' message and his mission using the latest scholarship applied to the complete range of sources to bring this astounding and important message to the general reader in a way that is entertaining, inspiring, and enlightening.
  • Weyler, Rex (2004) Greenpeace: The Inside Story (Raincoast Books, Rodale, 2004): the definitive history of the founding of Greenpeace in Vancouver, Canada, and the first decade of the organization. [Also: Greenpeace: An Insider’s Account (UK); and Greenpeace: How a Group of Ecologists, Journalists, and Visionaries Changed the World (US).] Finalist, Shaughnessy-Cohen Award for Political Writing, 2004.
  • Weyler, Rex with Bill Gannon (1995) The Story of Harmony (Justonic Tuning Inc., 1995): The history of music technology, from Chinese bamboo to computer software, particularly the history of pure harmonic music, tempered keyboards, and computer solutions to the problem of pure, just intonation of harmony.
  • Weyler, Rex (1986) Song of the Whale (Doubleday, 1986): The whale research of Dr. Paul Spong, and the Greenpeace campaign to stop international whaling
  • Weyler, Rex with Rick Fields, Peggy Taylor, Rick Ingrasci (1984) Chop Wood, Carry Water: Finding Spiritual Fulfillment in Everyday Life (Tarcher); wisdom from the world’s spiritual traditions applied to modern life.
  • Weyler, Rex (1982) Blood of the Land (Everest House, 1982; New Society Publishers, 1992): A history of the American Indian Movement and the Leonard Peltier case, nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, 1982.
  • Weyler, Rex with Robert L. Hunter (1978) To Save a Whale, photographs and commentary from the early Greenpeace whale campaigns (Chronicle Books).
  • Weyler, Rex with Daphne Marlatt and Robert Minden (1975) Steveston Recollected, photographs and oral history of Japanese Community in British Columbia (UBC, Provincial Archives, out of print).
  • Weyler, Rex with David Totheroh (1969), I Took a Walk Today, anti-war commentary and nature photographs (1969, out of print)

Rex Weyler has made contributions to: The Power of the People, ed. Robert Cooney and Helen Michalowski (New Society Publishers, 1987); Beyond Hypnosis by Dr. Lee Pulos (Omega Press, San Francisco, 1990); 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 & Röhring, 2001); The Book of Letters: 150 Years of Private Canadian Correspondence, by Paul and Audrey Grescoe (Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 2002).

[edit] Selected articles and essays

[edit] Film appearances

Greenpeace: Making a Stand (2006) television documentary adaptation of Weyler’s book, Greenpeace: the Inside Story, following on a campaign in Argentina. Omni Films, Leigh Badgley producer; premiere on Global television, Canada, 2006.

Sharkwater, feature documentary by Rob Stewart, 2007; Rex Weyler appears as an environmental expert.

American Warriors, produced by Alison Maclean, Tomboy Productions, 2005; Weyler appears as an author of native American history, featuring his book Blood of the Land.

Icons of the Green Movement: featuring Rex Weyler, Petra Kelly, and Ralp Nader; produced by Justice Vision and Democracy University, 2005.

[edit] Awards and honours

Columbia School of Journalism Award: Top Ten Censored Stories, 1980. Pulitzer Prize nomination for Native American history, “Blood of the Land,” 1982. Finalist, Shaughnessy-Cohen Award for Political Writing; 2004. Finalist, Hubert Evans Award for Non-Fiction, BC Book Awards, 2004. Publishers Weekly, “Best Books of 2004,” Greenpeace: The Inside Story Alumni Community Action Award, Urban Environmental Policy Center, Los Angeles, April 2005.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Blood of the Land - The Government and Corporate War Against First Nations
  2. ^ Greenpeace: The Inside Story
  3. ^ The Jesus Sayings
  4. ^ Hollyhock Retreat Centre
  5. ^ A Girl Always There
  6. ^ Tell Laura I Love Her
  7. ^ Lisa Gibbons Biography
  8. ^ Greenpeace Chronicles - article scan
  9. ^ No Institute for Citizen Journalism
  10. ^ Greenpeace historical photographs
  11. ^ Greenpeace: The Inside Story
  12. ^ Greenpeace: Making a Stand - documentary
  13. ^ Greenpeace founders
  14. ^ Greenpeace characters
  15. ^ Greenpeace chronology

[edit] Additional reading

[edit] External links

[edit] Multi-media resources