Greenpeace
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.
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2 Moruroa Atoll and the Vega 3 Saving the Whales 4 Greenpeace International 5 The Rainbow Warrior 6 Activities 7 Funding |
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
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.
Moruroa 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 Moruroa, they were answered by David McTaggart, a Canadian expatriate and former entrepreneur 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.
Outraged that any government could exclude him from any part of his beloved Pacific, 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 Moruroa, 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.
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 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.
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 responsibility 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 his 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 persistence 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 governance as its chief foes - the multinational corporations.
First deployed to disrupt the hunt of the Icelandic whaling fleet, the Rainbow Warrior would quickly become a mainstay of Greenpeace campaigns. Between 1978 to 1985, crew members also engaged in nonviolent direct against the ocean-dumping of toxic and radioactive waste, the Grey Seal hunt in the Orkneys and nuclear testing in the Pacific.
It was Greenpeace’s continued protest against nuclear testing at Moruroa atoll that prompted the government of France to order the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior, in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1985.
The Warrior had sailed from the Pacific, where it assisted the evacuation of the inhabitants of Rongelap in the Marshall Islands, who continued to suffer health affects attributed to the fallout from American nuclear testing during the 1950s and 1960s, and was due to lead a flotilla of vessels protesting against imminent nuclear tests at Moruroa.
On the evening of July 10, frogmen attached two bombs to the hull of the ship. The first bomb detonated at 11:38, and was closely followed by the second explosion, sinking the ship and killing photographer Fernando Pereira.
Acting on tip-offs from a shocked public, the New Zealand police quickly traced the bombing to Major Alain Mafart and Captain Dominique Prieur of the French armed forces, who were posing as a Swiss honeymoon couple. Mafart and Prieur were arrested, but attempts on the part of New Zealand authorities to secure the extradition of their suspected accomplices from Australia, and later from France, were unsuccessful.
The French Government intially denied any involvement in the bombing, but mounting pressure from the French and international media led to the admission, on the 22 September, that the bombing had been ordered by the French secret service. Investigations subsequent to the bombing also revealed that the Auckland office of Greenpeace New Zealand had been infiltrated by Christine Cabon, a French secret service agent who posed as a volunteer in order to gather information on the Moruroa campaign and the Rainbow Warrior's movements.
In 1987, the French Government agreed to pay Greenpeace compensation of NZ$13 million, and formally apologised for the bombing. The original Rainbow Warrior, too damaged to repair, was cleaned and scuttled in Matauri Bay, where it serves as an artificial reef and popular dive destination.
In 1989 Greenpeace commissioned a replacement vessel, also named the Rainbow Warrior, which remains in service today as the flagship of the Greenpeace fleet.
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.
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.
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.
Saving the Whales
When Robert Hunter was contacted by neuroscientist Paul Spong, a New Zealand neuroscientist hired by the Vancouver Aquarium to study the behaviour of whales in captivity, the 'Save the Whales' campaign which resulted was initially orchestrated under the banner of Project Jonah, due to Irving Stowe's resistance to broadening Greenpeace's scope beyond opposition to nuclear weapons.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.The Rainbow Warrior
In 1978, the Rainbow Warrior, a 40-metre, former fishing trawler named for the Cree legend that inspired early activist Robert Hunter on the first voyage to Amchitka, was launched by Greenpeace. Originally launched as the Sir William Hardy in 1955, the Rainbow Warrior was purchased at a cost of ÃÂã40,000 and restored and refitted by volunteers over a period of four months.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.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.External Links