Thornton. Allan Thornton.

It has been an extremely busy time recently. Right now we have very intensive work on our illegal-logging campaigns and strategies.

Dave Currey, my codirector in our London office, led a two-year investigation into a billion-dollar-a-year log-smuggling operation from Papua province in Indonesia to China. Our report, produced with Telapak, a leading Indonesian group, was released in mid-February and has resulted in the new Indonesian president launching the biggest crackdown on illegal logging in history, with arrests of the head of the forestry department in Papua, army personnel, police, Malaysian financiers, and the president of a Malaysian company in Papua. They have seized more than 2 million cubic feet of logs, 700 pieces of heavy equipment, 14 boats, 4 barges, 40 chainsaws, etc.

We are also talking to U.S. timber industry representatives to support banning the import of illegal timber; the U.S. industry has estimated they are losing at least $450 million a year due to illegal logging.

We also do a lot of wildlife campaigning. We document commercial hunting of whales, dolphins, and porpoises in Japan, where up to 17,000 small whales, dolphins, and porpoises are still killed each year. We tested the whale and dolphin products we found on sale in Japanese supermarkets and discovered many contained mercury levels ten times higher than legally allowed by Japanese government rules for food for human consumption. We also provided the information to U.S. based subsidiaries of the major Japanese retailers, and over 2,100 Japanese supermarkets and retail outlets have stopped selling whale, dolphin, and porpoise products.

We have a team in Africa tracking illegal ivory trade out of southern Africa; there is an ivory smuggling route that moves poached elephant ivory from Zambia, Zimbabwe, and other countries out of a South African port through Singapore and on to China and Japan. We are working with local enforcement and providing training and enforcement advice. We produced a video on ivory-smuggling techniques that has been released only to government enforcement authorities and the wildlife-trafficking group of Interpol.

Once, we were sailing 80 miles off the coast of Iceland, tracking Icelandic whale hunters looking to harpoon fin whales. They started chasing them and we raced our little inflatable boats across the choppy ocean into their firing line. Two huge fin whales burst up in front of us, swimming for their lives, as the dark figure of the harpoonist crouched over his harpoon gun was silhouetted by the bright summer sun. Everything went into slow motion, and I could see the beautiful pinkish skin of the whales and the fine mist shooting from their spouts against a perfect blue sky dotted with small, wispy clouds. I sensed death about us; then the harpoonist slammed the safety catch back onto the harpoon, and we slipped back into real time. The Rainbow Warrior crew had saved our first whale. But it took eight more years of campaigning before Iceland stopped its commercial whale hunt.

I left Greenpeace in early 1982 and started independent projects. I went to Turkey and documented and exposed the dolphin hunt in the Black Sea, where 25,000 dolphins were being shot each year. I came to Washington, D.C., and with the help of the late Christine Stevens, head of the Animal Welfare Institute, got a letter signed by 36 U.S. senators to the Turkish ambassador asking for the hunt to be stopped. Six weeks later it was stopped -- that was early 1983. That year, I raised funds and bought a boat, and with two friends -- future codirectors of EIA Dave Currey and Jenny Lonsdale -- sailed to northern Norway to film the hunting of minke whales; 1,600 a year were being killed with non-exploding harpoons. Norwegian whaling fleets have killed more whales than any other country in the world -- over 750,000. On that trip, we decided to set up the Environmental Investigation Agency.

We started investigating various whale and dolphin hunts around the world and the mass trade in wild-caught birds sold to the pet trade -- where three out of every four birds die before they reach the person buying them at a pet shop. (The U.S. banned most bird imports in the early 1990s.)

We then began a two-year undercover investigation into the international trade in illegal ivory that took us from the killing fields in Africa -- where 70,000 elephants were being poached each year for the ivory trade. We tracked the trade through the Middle East to Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, and back to the U.S. and Europe. Five Hong Kong-based syndicates controlled the whole trade, and the bigger environmental groups were afraid to name names and told us, "You guys are going to get killed." By the end of our investigations, Dave Currey was looking under his car for bombs, and I was barricading my door every night. We had discovered the involvement of the South African military under the apartheid government, and by the time we moved to our exposé in 1989, we were being followed by agents of the South African military.

When our exposé was released, all hell broke loose, as the conservation establishment had been supporting continued ivory trade despite the rapid decline in elephant populations. In 1989, the international ivory trade was banned -- and Africa's elephants got the breathing space to recover their numbers after decades of massive poaching.

I live in Washington, D.C., now.

Also, the failure of the U.S. timber industry and the government of China to take action against international trade in illegally produced timber.