Greenpeace

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Greenpeace is an international environmental organisation founded in Canada in 1971.

Greenpeace is widely known for its dramatic use of nonviolent direct action in campaigns to stop atmospheric nuclear testing and bring an end to high seas whaling. In later years, the focus of the organisation has turned to other environmental issues, including climate change and genetic engineering.

Greenpeace has national and regional offices across 41 countries worldwide, all of which are affiliated with the Amsterdam-based Greenpeace International. The global organisation is funded by the individual contributions of an estimated 2.8 million financial supporters, as well as grants from charitable foundations, but does not accept funding from governments or corporations.

Greenpeace's official mission statement describes the organisation and its aims thus:

Greenpeace is an independent, campaigning organisation which uses nonviolent, creative confrontation to expose global environmental problems, and to force the solutions which are essential to a green and peaceful future. Greenpeace's goal is to ensure the ability of the earth to nurture life in all its diversity.

Table of contents

1 Early history 2 Muraroa Atoll and the Vega 3 Saving the Whales 4 Greenpeace International 5 Activities 6 Funding 6.1 External Links

Early history

The origins of Greenpeace lie in the formation of Don't Make A Wave Committee by an assortment of Canadian and American ex-patriate peace activists in Vancouver in 1970. Taking its name from a slogan used during protests against American nuclear testing in late 1969, the Committee was established with the objective of stopping a second underground nuclear bomb test by the United States military beneath the island of Amchitka, Alaska. The committee's founders and early members included:

• Paul Cote, a law student at the University of British Columbia
• Jim Bohlen, a deep-sea diver and former radar operator in the United States Navy
• Irving Stowe, a Quaker and Yale University educated lawyer
• Patrick Moore, an ecology student at the University of British Columbia
• Bill Darnell, a social work student

Darnell is credited with coining the dynamic combination of words that bound together the group's concern for the planet with their opposition to nuclear arms.

In September 1971, the group chartered the Phyllis Cormack, a fishing vessel skippered by John Cormack. They named it the Greenpeace, and set sail for the island of Amchitka, with the intention of disrupting the second nuclear test. Intercepted by the US Coast Guard vessel Confidence, the Phyllis Cormack was forced to return to port, but not before the crew of the Confidence delivered a note, behind their Captain's back, declaring "what you are doing is for the good of all mankind".

Upon their return to Alaska, the crew learned that protests had taken place in all major Canadian cities, and that the second underground test had been postponed until November. Although attempts to sail into the test zone using a second chartered vessel also failed, this was the final nuclear test conducted at Amchitka.

On May 4, 1972, following Stowe's removal from the chairmanship of the Don't Make A Wave Committee, the fledgling environmental group was officially renamed the Greenpeace Foundation.

Muraroa Atoll and the Vega

When the newly formed Foundation put out a call to sympathetic skippers to help them protest the French Government's atmospheric nuclear tests at the Pacific Atoll of Muraroa, they were answered by David McTaggert, a Canadian expatriate and former entrepreneaur based in New Zealand. McTaggart, a champion badminton player in his youth, had sold his business interests and relocated to the South Pacific following a gas explosion which seriously wounded an employee at one his ski-lodges.

Enraged that any government could exclude him from any part of his beloved Pacific - even for the purpose of conducting nuclear tests - McTaggart offered his yacht, the Vega, to the cause, and set about assembling a crew.

In 1973, McTaggart sailed the Vega into the exclusion zone around Muraroa, only to have his vessel rammed by the French Navy. When he repeated the protest the following year, the Vega was boarded and McTaggart was brutally beaten by French sailors. Later, staged photographs of McTaggart dining with senior navy officers were released to the media, suggesting that all was civil between the opposing parties. A different picture was revealed when photographs of McTaggart's beating, smuggled off the yacht by crew member Anne-Marie Horne, were also released to the media.

The campaign against French nuclear testing achieved a victory when the French government announced a halt to atmospheric testing, only to being testing underground. Greenpeace would continue to campaign against testing in the Pacific until the French ceased their testing program in 1995.

Saving the Whales

As the chair of the Don't Make a Wave Committee, Irving Stowe was committed to retaining the Committee's single-issue, anti-nuclear focus. It was Stowe's wife Dorothy, inspired by the voyage of the Golden Rule, skippered by Albert Bigelow, a radical Quaker and World War II veteran, when it set sail for Enitowok Atoll in 1956, who first suggested using the technique at Amchitka. Stowe himself was a "convinced" Quaker, who had fled the United States, appalled at the military intervention in Vietnam. However, his stridently-expressed political views, which led to accusations of anti-Americanism, caused conflict with other members, who felt that explicit expression of political loyalties might alienate potential supporters of the fledgling organisation.

When Robert Hunter was contacted by a Paul Spong, a New Zealand neuroscientist recently fired from Vancouver Aquarium for suggesting that Skana, the Orca Whale which was the subject of his research, be freed, the 'Save the Whales' campaign which resulted was initially orchestrated under the banner of Project Jonah, due to Stowe's resistance to broadening Greenpeace's scope beyond opposition to nuclear weapons.

Stowe's death in 1974 effectively ended this deadlock, and a re-chartered Phyllis Cormack steamed from Vancouver to meet the Soviet whaling fleet off the Californian coast in the spring of 1975. Thanks to the guidance of a primitive radio direction-finder and some fortuitous navigation by musician Mel Gregory, who simply steered towards the moon rather than following a compass, the Cormack encountered the whaling fleet on June 26.

The crew used fast Zodiac inflatables to position themselves between the harpoon of the catcher ship Vlastny and a fleeing whale. Film footage of the Vlastny firing a harpoon over the heads of Greenpeace activists was broadcast around the world, highlighting the plight of the whales to the world's public in the closing days of the International Whaling Commission's 1976 conference, which had been taking place in London.

Greenpeace International

By the late 1970s, spurred by the global reach of what Robert Hunter called "mind bombs," in which images of confrontation on the high seas converted diffuse and complex issues into considerably more media friendly David versus Goliath-style narratives, the name Greenpeace had been adopted by more than 20 groups across North America, Europe, New Zealand and Australia.

In 1979, however, the original Vancouver-based Greenpeace Foundation was struggling financially, and the global movement was split by disputes between offices over fundraising and organisational direction. 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 organisation, and 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 organisation, which would take responsiblity for setting the overall direction of the movement. Greenpeace's transformation from a loose international network united by style more than focus, to a global organisation able to apply the full force of its resources to a small number of environmental issues deemed of global significance, owed much to McTaggart's personal vision.

McTaggart summed up the new approach in a 1994 memo: "No campaign should be begun without clear goals; no campaign should be begun unless there is a possibility that it can be won; no campaign should be begun unless you intend to finish it off." MacTaggart's own assessment of what could and couldn't be won, and how, was frequently controversial.

In re-shaping Greenpeace as a centrally co-ordinated, hierarchical organisation, McTaggart went against the anti-authoritarian ethos that prevailed in other environmental organisations that came of age in the 1970s. While this pragmatic structure granted Greenpeace the persistance and narrow focus necessary to match forces with government and industry, it would lead to the recurrent criticism that Greenpeace had adopted the same methods of goverance as its chief foes - the multinational corporations.

Activities

The organization is currently active in many environmental issues, with primary focus on efforts to stop global warming and preserve the biodiversity of the world's oceans and ancient forests. In addition to the more conventional environmental organization methods, such lobbying politicians and attendance at international conferences, Greenpeace's stated methodology is to engage in nonviolent direct action.

Greenpeace uses direct action to attract attention to particular environmental causes, whether by placing themselves between the whaler's harpoon and their prey, or invading nuclear facilities dressed as barrels of radioactive waste. These protests have often been called ecoterrorism by their targets, although Greenpeace has a stated committment to nonviolence.

Such well-organised and often well-funded protests, with the use of one of Greenpeace's ships, fleet of inflatable boats, and the like, and the arrangement of extensive media coverage for the carefully-designed telegenic images that result), have attracted large amounts of attention to Greenpeace's environmental causes. The organisation attempts to harness that attention through on-line actions at its Cybercentre.

Some of Greenpeace's most notable successes include the ending of atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons, a permanent moratorium on international commercial whaling, and the declaration by treaty of Antarctica as a global park, forbidding possession by individual nations or commercial interests.

Some critics note that while engaging in these protests against such activities as oil exploration in the North Sea, Greenpeace has no problem utilizing the products of these industrial ventures. Greenpeace responds that it has never opposed the use of oil, rubber, or chemicals, but that they push only for responsible usage. However, Greenpeace believes that some technologies are particularly egregious. Greenpeace is pushing for a complete ban of nuclear power plants, whaling and atomic testing.

The act.Greenpeace.org service has so far attracted many participants, mostly to email campaigns. It is arguably one of the most effective online activist networks, along with MoveOn.org; both are almost exclusively open campaigning organizations. Greenpeace defines an "Open Campaign" as an activist effort that is transparent down to the merest tactical details, although there may be some situations where some of these are hidden to provide some advantages prior to the fact. Greenpeace modelled its open campaigns after Winston Churchill's free press based strategy in WWII, which assumed that propaganda techniques not instinctually employed by journalism "on your side" on a more or less voluntary basis (via cultural bias), was ineffective or counter-productive, in that it simply will not be believed. Thus one did not have to tell all uncomfortable truth, merely be a more reliable reporter than the enemy, to be heard out and ultimately trusted by the enemy's agents.

Their anti-nuclear protests in the South Pacific during the 1980s irritated the government of France to the extent that in 1985 it ordered a group of French commandos to destroy the Greenpeace protest-ship, the Rainbow Warrior, which was moored in Auckland, New Zealand. Frogmen placed two bombs which detonated at 11:49 in the evening on July 10, 1985, thereby sinking the ship to the bottom of the harbour and killing a crewman, Fernando Pereira. The subsequent revelation of the French government's actions greatly embarrassed that government and had the effect of increasing the effectiveness of Greenpeace's campaign. Some of the individuals were caught by the New Zealand authorities, despite their having carried out their operation on the premise that the New Zealand police would be far too inept to detect them.

Funding

Despite its founding in North America, Greenpeace has been far more successful in Europe where its membership is larger and it gets most of its money. The vast majority of Greenpeace's donations come from private individual members. It has received donations from some prominent figures, however, such as Ted Turner. Along with other members of the activism industry, in the USA it also uses the services of the Fund for Public Interest Research. Greenpeace spends approximately $360M USD per year.

While Greenpeace claims that it does not accept donations from companies, governments or political parties; there has been a noted inverse correlation between their focus of attention and sources of income. The organisation claims this policy permits them more freedom of movement in their actions and the ability to be supported from people from any political background.

External Links

• www.greenpeace.org Official website
• Waves of Compassion: The Founding of Greenpeace by Rex Wyler
• Greenpeace: Always Bearing Witness CBC archives
• Greenpeace: Storm-Tossed on the High Seas by Fred Pearce
• Greenpeace 30th Anniversary