Greenpeace is a
non-governmental organization
for the protection and conservation of the environment. Greenpeace
uses
direct action,
lobbying and
research to
achieve its goals. Greenpeace has a worldwide presence with
national and regional offices in 46 countries, which are affiliated
to the Amsterdam-based Greenpeace International. The global
organization receives its income through the individual
contributions of almost 3 million financial supporters.
Greenpeace
evolved from the peace movement and anti-nuclear protests in
Vancouver
, British
Columbia
in the early
1970's. On September 15, 1971, the Don't Make a Wave Committee sent
the eighty foot halibut seiner Phyllis Cormack, renamed
Greenpeace for the protest, from Vancouver, to oppose
United
States
testing of nuclear
devices in Amchitka
, Alaska
.
While the boat never reached its destination and was turned back by
the US military, this campaign was deemed the first using the name
Greenpeace. The organisation itself dates its birth to the first
protest. The focus of the organization later turned from
anti-nuclear protest to other environmental issues:
whaling,
bottom
trawling,
global warming,
old growth,
nuclear power, and
genetically modified
organisms.
Campaigns of Greenpeace have raised environmental issues to public
knowledge and influenced both the private and the public sector,
but the organisation has also received criticism for it's methods
and motives.
On its official website, Greenpeace defines its mission as the
following:
History
Origins
In the
late 1960's, the U.S.
had plans
for an underground nuclear weapon
test in the tectonically unstable island of Amchitka
at Alaska
.
Because of the
1964 Alaska
earthquake the plans raised some concerns of the test
triggering earthquakes and causing a
tsunami. Anti-nuclear activits protested against the
test on the border of U.S. and Canada with signs reading "Don't
Make A Wave. It's Your Fault If Our Fault Goes". The protests did
not stop the US from detonating the bomb.
While no earthquake nor tsunami followed the test, the opposition
grew when the U.S. announced they would detonate a bomb five times
more powerful than the first one. Among the opposers were
Jim Bohlen, a veteran who had served the U.S.
Navy during the
bombings of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki and
Irving and Dorothy
Stowe, a quaker couple. As memembers of the
Sierra Club they were frustrated in the lack of
action by the organization. From Irving Stowe, Jim Bohlen learned
of form of passive resistance, "bearing witness", where
objectionable activity is protested simply by mere presence. Jim
Bohlen's wife Marie came up with the idea to sail to Amchitka,
inspired by the anti-nuclear voyages of
Albert Bigelow in 1958. The idea ended up in
the press and was linked to The Sierra Club. The Sierra Club did
not like this connection and in 1970 Jim and Marie Bohlen, Irving
and Dorothy Stowe and Paul Cote, a law student and peace activist
founded The
Don't Make a
Wave Committee. Early meetings were held in the
Shaughnessy home of
Robert and Bobbi Hunter. The
first office was opened in a back-room, storefront off Broadway on
Cypress in Kitsilano, (Vancouver).
Don't Make a Wave Committee chartered a ship,
Phyllis Cormack owned and sailed by John
Cormack. The ship was renamed Greenpeace for the protest after a
term coined by activist Bill Darnell. In the fall of 1971 the ship
sailed towards Amchitka and faced the U.S. navy ship Confidence.
Even though the crew of the Confidence supported the cause of
Greenpeace the activists were forced to turn back. Because of this
and the increasingly bad weather the crew decided to return to
Canada only to find out that the news about their journey and the
support from the crew of the Confidence had generated widespread
compassion for their protest. After this Greenpeace tried to
navigate to the test site with other vessels, untill the U.S.
detonated the bomb. The nuclear test gained widespread criticism
and the U.S. decided not to continue with their test plans at
Amchitka. In 1972 The Don't Make a Wave committee changed their
official name to
Greenpeace Foundation. While the
organization was founded under a different name in 1970 and was
officially named Greenpeace in 1972, the organization currently
dates it's birth to the first protest of 1971.
First campaigns after Amchitka
After the
nuclear tests at Amchitka were over, Greenpeace moved it's focus to
the French atmospheric nuclear
weapons testing at the Moruroa Atoll in
French
Polynesia
. The
young organization needed help for their protests and were
contacted by
David McTaggart, a
former businessman living in New Zealand. In 1972 the yacht Vega, a
ketch owned by
David McTaggart, was
renamed Greenpeace III and sailed in an anti-nuclear protest into
the exclusion zone at
Mururoa to attempt to
disrupt French nuclear testing.
This voyage was sponsored and organized by
the New
Zealand
branch of the Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament. The French Navy tried to stop the protest
in several ways, for example by assaulting David McTaggart. After
the assault came in to publicity, France announced it would stop
the atmospheric nuclear tests.
In the mid 1970's some Greenpeace members started an independent
campaign, Project Ahab against commercial
whaling, since Irving Stowe was against Greenpeace
focusing on other issues than nuclear weapons.
After Irving Stowe
died in 1975, Phyllis Cormack left from Vancouver
to face Soviet whalers in the coast of California
. Greenpeace activists disrupted the whaling
by going between the harpoons and the whales and the footage of the
protests spread across the world. Later in the 1970's the
organization widened their focus to
toxic
waste and commercial
seal
hunting.
Organizational developement
Greenpeace evolved into a less conservative and structured
collective of environmentalists who were more reflective of the
counterculture and
hippie youth movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The
social and cultural background from which Greenpeace emerged
heralded a period of de-conditioning away from old world
antecedents and sought to develop new codes of social,
environmental and political behavior. Historian Frank Zelko has
commented that "unlike
Friends of
the Earth, for example, which sprung fully formed from the
forehead of David Brower, Greenpeace developed in a more
evolutionary manner."
By 1977 there were 15 to 20 Greenpeace groups around the world.
After the incidents of Moruroa, David McTaggart had moved to France
to battle in court with the French state and helped to develope the
cooperation of European Greenpeace groups.
In 1979, the original
Vancouver
-based Greenpeace Foundation encountered financial
difficulties, and the North American offices were reluctant to be
under the authority of the Vancouver office and it's president
Patrick Moore. Disputes between
offices over fund-raising and organizational direction split the
global movement.
David McTaggart lobbied the Canadian
Greenpeace Foundation to accept a new structure which would bring
the scattered Greenpeace offices under the auspices of a single
global organization. On October 14, 1979,
Greenpeace
International came into existence. Under the new
structure, the local offices would contribute a percentage of their
income to the international organization, which would take
responsibility for setting the overall direction of the movement
with each regional office having one vote. Some Greenpeace groups,
namely
London Greenpeace and the
US based
Greenpeace Foundation
however decided to remain independent from Greenpeace
International.
Organization
Governance

Greenpeace's regional and national
offices.
Greenpeace
consists of Greenpeace International (offically Stichting
Greenpeace Council) based in Amsterdam
, Netherlands
, and 28 regional offices operating in 41
countries. The regional offices work largely autonomously
under the supervision of Greenpeace International. The executive
director of Greenpeace is elected by the board members of
Greenpeace international. The current director of Greenpeace
International is
Kumi Naidoo and the
current Chair of the Board is held by Lalita Ramdas.
Each regional office is led by an regional executive director
eleced by the regional board of directors. The regional boards also
appoint a representative to The Greenpeace International
Annual
general meeting, where the representatives elect or remove the
board of directors of Greenpeace International. The role of the
annual general meeting is also to discuss and decide the overall
principles and strategically important issues for Greenpeace in
collaboration with the representatives of regional offices and
Greenpeace International board of directors.
Funding
Greenpeace receives its funding from individual supporters and
trusts. The organisation does not accept money from governments or
corporations in order to avoid their influence. Greenpeace was the
first organization to use
face-to-face
fundraising in order reach new supporters since in the mid
1990's the number of older supporters started to decrease. In 2005,
most of the 169,6 million € received by the organization was
donated by about 2,7 million regular supporters, mainly from
Europe.
Priorities and campaigns
Greenpeace runs campaigns and projects which fit into the "Issues"
(as campaign areas are called within Greenpeace) categories below.
Besides exposing problems such as
over-fishing or
threats linked to nuclear power, such as
harmful radiation and proliferation, Greenpeace campaigns for
alternative solutions such as
marine
reserves and
renewable
energy.
The organization currently addresses many and varied environmental
issues with a primary focus on efforts to stop
global warming and the preservation of the
world's oceans and ancient forests. In addition to conventional
environmental
organization methods, such as lobbying businesses and
politicians and participating in international conferences,
Greenpeace uses
direct action to
attract attention to particular environmental problems.
For example, activists place themselves between the whaler's
harpoons and their prey or invade nuclear facilities dressed as
barrels of radioactive waste. Currently Greenpeace is in the midst
of a campaign called
Project Hot
Seat, which is geared toward placing pressure on the
United States Congress to stop global
warming. Other initiatives include the development of a
fuel-efficient car, the
SmILE.
Current priorities
Below is a list of Greenpeace's current priorities:
Solar Electricity
The
EPIA/Greenpeace Advanced Scenario shows
that by the year 2030,
Photovoltaic
systems could be generating approximately 2,600
TWh of electricity around the world. This means that,
assuming a serious commitment is made to
energy efficiency, enough solar power
would be produced globally in twenty-five years’ time to satisfy
the electricity needs of almost 14% of the world’s
population.
Fossil fuels phase-out
In the Greenpeace and
EREC´s
Energy evolution scenario, the world
could eliminate fossil fuel use by 2090.
Think tanks
Think tanks, under the Greenpeace
umbrella, propose blueprints for the world's transition to
renewable energy. The focus is to reduce carbon emissions without
compromising on economic growth. The Solar Generation project,
conceived in 2000 by Greenpeace and the European Photo-voltaic
Industry Association (EPIA), addresses major energy challenges
facing the global society and charts out the solar energy remedies
until 2050. Greenpeace think tanks also focus on individual
nation's energy scenarios. For example, Greenpeace has published
scenarios where renewable resources like solar can become the
backbone of the economies of developing countries like
India, by 2050.
Ships
Since Greenpeace was founded, seagoing ships have played a vital
role in its campaigns.
In 1978,
Greenpeace launched the original Rainbow
Warrior
, a , former fishing trawler named for the Cree legend that inspired early activist Robert Hunter on the first voyage
to Amchitka. Greenpeace purchased the
Rainbow
Warrior (originally launched as the
Sir William Hardy
in 1955) at a cost of £40,000. Volunteers restored and refitted it
over a period of four months.
First
deployed to disrupt the hunt of the Icelandic
whaling fleet, the Rainbow Warrior would
quickly become a mainstay of Greenpeace campaigns.
Between
1978 and 1985, crew members also engaged in non-violent direct
action against the ocean-dumping of toxic and radioactive waste,
the Grey Seal hunt in Orkney
and nuclear
testing in the Pacific. Japan's Fisheries Agency has labeled
Greenpeace ships as "anti-whaling vessels" and "
environmental terrorists".
In May
1985, the vessel was instrumental for 'Operation Exodus', the
evacuation of about 300 Rongelap Atoll
islanders whose home had been contaminated with
nuclear fallout from a US nuclear test two decades ago which had
never been cleaned up and was still having severe health effects on
the locals.
Later in 1985 the
Rainbow Warrior was to lead a flotilla
of protest vessels into the waters surrounding
Moruroa atoll, site of French nuclear testing.
The
sinking
of the Rainbow Warrior
occurred when the French government secretly bombed the ship
in Auckland
harbour on orders from François Mitterrand himself.
This killed Dutch freelance photographer
Fernando Pereira, who thought it was safe
to enter the boat to get his photographic material after a first
small explosion, but drowned as a result of a second, larger
explosion. The attack was a public relations disaster for France
after it was quickly exposed by the New Zealand police. The French
Government in 1987 agreed to pay New Zealand compensation of NZ$13
million and formally apologised for the bombing. The French
Government also paid
₣2.3 million
compensation to the family of the photographer.
In 1989 Greenpeace commissioned a replacement vessel, also named
the
Rainbow Warrior,
which remains in service today as the flagship of the Greenpeace
fleet.
In 1996 the Greenpeace vessel
MV Sirius was detained by
Dutch police while protesting the import of genetically modified
soybeans due to the violation of a temporary sailing prohibition,
which was implemented because the
Sirius prevented their
unloading. The ship, but not the captain, was released half an hour
later.
In 2005
the Rainbow Warrior
II ran aground on and damaged the Tubbataha Reef
in the Philippines while she was, ironically, on a
mission to protect the very same reef. Greenpeace was fined
$7,000 USD for damaging the reef and agreed to pay the fine,
although it said that the Philippines government had given it
outdated charts.
Along with the
Rainbow Warrior, the Greenpeace
organisation has two other ships:
Criticism
Greenpeace has been variously criticized for being too
radical, too
alarmist, or too mainstream, for using methods
bordering on
eco-terrorism, for having
itself caused environmental damage in its activities, for taking
positions which are not environmentally or economically sound, and
for valuing non-human causes over human causes.
Early Greenpeace member Canadian Ecologist
Patrick Moore left the
organization in 1986 when it decided to support a universal ban on
chlorine in drinking water, chlorine which
Moore has called "the biggest advance in the history of public
health" and "essential for our health." Moore has argued that
Greenpeace today is motivated by politics rather than science and
that none of his "fellow directors had any formal science
education".
A French journalist under the pen name Olivier Vermont wrote in his
book
La Face cachée de Greenpeace that he had joined
Greenpeace France and had worked there as a secretary. According to
Vermont he found misconducts and continued to Amsterdam to the
international office. Vermont said he found classified documents
according to which half of the organisations 180 millon € revenue
was used for the organisations salaries and structure, while the
organisation some time set unnofficial agreements with polluting
companies to get donation in exchange of not attacking the
company's image. Animal protection magazine Animal People reported
in March 1997 that Greenpeace France and Greenpeace International
had sued Olivier Vermont and his publisher Albin Michel for issuing
“defamatory statements, untruths, distortions of the facts and
absurd allegations”.
Greenpeace Works
In March, 2007 a division dedicated to working more closely with
the entertainment community, founded by
Mark Warford and former Eurythmic
Dave Stewart was established in Hollywood.
Inaugural
projects included the music release of 'Go Green', a
celebrity-laden pop song that included Dave
Stewart, Annie Lennox, Sarah McLachlan and newcomer Nadirah X and a cultural exchange with Greenpeace China and the Hollywood
community. The affiliation with Greenpeace
was closed in October, 2007 due to gross misalignment. Founders
Mark Warford and
Dave Stewart continue under the banner of
Weapons of Mass Entertainment.
See also
References
Further reading
- David McTaggart with Robert Hunter, Greenpeace III: Journey
into the Bomb (London: William Collins Sons & Co., 1978).
ISBN 0 211885 8
- Robert Hunter, Warriors of the Rainbow: A Chronicle of the
Greenpeace Movement (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
1979). ISBN 0-03-043736-9
- Michael King, Death of the Rainbow Warrior (Penguin
Books, 1986). ISBN 0-14-009738-4
- John McCormick, The Global
Environmental Movement (John Wiley, 1995)
- David Robie, Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage of the Rainbow
Warrior (Philadelphia: New Society Press, 1987). ISBN
0-86571-114-3
- Michael Brown and John May, The Greenpeace Story
(1989; London and New York: Dorling Kindersley, Inc., 1991). ISBN
1-879431-02-5
- Rex Weyler (2004), Greenpeace:
How a Group of Ecologists, Journalists and Visionaries Changed the
World, Rodale
- Kieran Mulvaney and Mark Warford
(1996): Witness: Twenty-Five Years on the Environmental Front
Line, Andre Deutsch.
External links