Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior is known throughout the world as either an extreme annoyance or an environmental warrior. To the French government it was the former so they decided to make it a mission for their secret service to sink. They succeeded and only killed one person in the operation — I’m sure they were pleased with themselves. Eventually the French government was forced to compensate Greenpeace and admit its involvement.
The reason I write about this is because the Rainbow Warrior II — the replacement ship — survived any further murky hijinks French or otherwise and countless environmental missions and confrontations until being retired and given a new life this past November after 21 years of service to Greenpeace. So the question is, what does a storied ship like this do in retirement and what does it have to do with me?
The answer: It goes to the center of the climate change debate, Bangladesh. Located at the foot of the world’s highest mountain range — the Himalayas — this small, overcrowded (160 million), occasionally politically stable (mostly unstable) nation is geographically fuc*ed. There is no other way to write it. If it isn’t the melting of the Himalayan snows from the north, then it’s cyclones from the south or monsoons all over for almost half the year. The country is not much more than a flood plain with a large river running through it that overruns it’s soft sandy banks easily. In the north, many people live on islands (known as chars) that with the water’s ebb and flow change shape — and sometimes completely disappear. The people there are mostly nomadic subsistence farmers without access to health care or education. 
This is where Rainbow Warrior II comes in with a new name — Rongdhonu (Rainbow in Bengali) — and a new mission, to provide health care to people in remote areas of Bangladesh. And, I was lucky enough to be asked to document this new challenge, a new mission for this environmental warrior.
(I’ll put up a new post about my time there every few days and include video clips I filmed.)