In memoriam: Susi Newborn ’86
1950–2023
By Gregory Stone ’82
I was with Susi Newborn the day a French intelligence diving team placed two limpet bombs on the Greenpeace ship, Rainbow Warrior, and sank her as she lay tied to a pier in Auckland, New Zealand. It was July 1985, and Susi and I were in one of those apartments COA students lived in on Main Street across from Don's (Shop N Save) near the old video rental store. Even though Susi no longer worked for Greenpeace and was studying human ecology in Maine, she was on the phone all day and night with the Greenpeace organization and the international press.
Rainbow Warrior was on its way to protest nuclear testing by France in their South Pacific territories. It was night in New Zealand, and supposedly the ship was not occupied by people. After the first explosion blew a fatal hole below her waterline and she was sinking fast, four people went on board to remove personal items. Five minutes later, the second explosion killed photographer Fernando Per. Three others got off in the nick of time, one was Susi’s first husband, Martini, who I knew. Martini was a Dutchman who—along with Susi and other French, Dutch, and English young people—founded Greenpeace a decade or more before.
The origin of Greenpeace has several different narratives, but this is the one Susi told me. A small group of free-thinking, long-haired young people were trying to change the world in the 1970s, a decade when it became all too obvious the world needed a lot of repair. They bought the Rainbow Warrior with funds from World Wildlife Fund-Europe, who was the lead NGO trying to stop commercial whaling. At that time, there were so few whales left in the oceans because of the failure of the International Whaling Commission to follow its mandate to keep populations of whales at sustainable levels.
Susi, Martini, and the others went to WWF and said they would stop commercial whaling if WWF gave them 50,000 pounds to buy a vessel and start Greenpeace. Greenpeace applied a form of activism called direct action, which was related to the Quaker ethic that wrong moral actions needed to be witnessed, but Greenpeace took it to the next level and used Rainbow Warrior, a 200+ foot ocean-going vessel, to confront the whalers by launching small inflatable Zodiac boats and placing themselves between the harpoon cannon and the body of the whale. They reasoned the harpooner would not fire if there was a chance a person would be killed. That hypothesis turned out to be true most of the time. Greenpeace’s actions gained the attention of the global press and the whaling industry lost what we call today their “social license”, as the public would no longer tolerate it.
Susie’s parents were from Argentina, but she was raised in the UK. To me, a Boston kid who hadn't traveled much, she was a charismatic, energetic, and exotic-looking British woman who respected science and had a moral framework that honored human well-being and international law.
Susi was a legend in Greenpeace culture, and the steady stream of young new GP campaigners who made a sort of pilgrimage to Bar Harbor just to meet her was proof of that fact.
After COA, Susi remarried, moved to New Zealand, and raised a second family of Pacific Islander children, while I was drawn to graduate school and Antarctica. Several years after she moved to New Zealand, I was under contract for the New Zealand government—she gave them my name—to help manage Hector’s dolphin, an endangered coastal dolphin being killed off in the coastal gill net fisheries. I saw her occasionally and gave her name to friends going through Auckland whom she would memorably host. I don’t know all the details of her life there except that she had a wonderful family, and always stayed engaged in making the world a better place for everyone. A life very well lived.
I live in Los Angeles now. The last I heard of her was an online fundraising drive for “a home for Susi,” because she was ill. I contributed, not long after her body gave in to the disease she had been battling. I never got a chance to see her again. I loved Susi... She was a model COA student, an ethical global citizen who changed the world, and someone I will never forget.
