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I thought I had a pretty good idea of what to expect from Russia. They have rotting infrastructure, they have breaking pipes, they have … it’s just one disaster after another with those guys, and they have absolutely no technology to clean up oil that’s spilled into the ice. Mind you, Russia spills every year five times the amount of oil - just in the normal way of doing business - than BP spilled in the Gulf of Mexico in 2011.

They see their future in Arctic Ocean drilling and mineral exploration, and Greenpeace feels that at a time when scientists tell us it’s imperative to leave the fossil fuels in the ground, that their desire of opening up the whole Arctic Ocean for more oil drilling is stupid in the extreme. The Russians are slowly running out of oil in their Siberian fields.

The Russian coast guard intercepts Greenpeace activists. He says he’ll think about retirement when the world has switched over to renewable sources of energy. At age 63, he’s preparing for a new campaign in the Mediterranean to begin next month. Still, he’s not ready to embrace a life as a land-bound recruiter. Part of the point of his book is to convince others to carry the torch he’s kept lit on storm-tossed seas. These are not cautionary tales, Willcox is quick to add. It’s a highlight reel of his time at the helm that includes a thorough, gimlet-eyed recollection of his time - voluntary and otherwise - in Russia and also that time when operatives of the French government blew up his most famous ship, the Rainbow Warrior, in New Zealand in 1985, killing one member of his crew. Willcox shares his stories of a life at sea in his new book, Greenpeace Captain: My Adventures in Protecting the Future of Our Planet, co-authored with Ronald B. “I get paid to make trouble and go to jail,” he tells Inverse. Spending time in holding cells is a feature, not a bug. He’s not a pirate - at least not in any traditional sense - but he is absolutely willing to provoke authorities. Greenpeace ship captain Peter Willcox spent two months in a Russian prison in 2013, accused of being a pirate.