Greenpeace

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GREENPEACE.

Greenpeace is an international nongovernmental organization that in 2005 had forty-one branches and 2.8 million supporters worldwide. It was founded in 1970 by Canadian and American antiwar activists in Vancouver, British Columbia, to promote a peaceful world based on ecologically sustainable principles. In 1979 it became Greenpeace International and moved its headquarters to Amsterdam.

Greenpeace activists are best known for embracing the Quaker philosophy of "bearing witness" and Mahatma Gandhi's strategy of "nonviolent direct action" to combat nuclear testing, commercial whaling and sealing, toxic-waste dumping, and the like. "We fire images rather than missiles," Robert Hunter, one of the group's founding members, once famously stated, "mind bombs delivered by the world media" (Dyson, p. 58). Since most of their campaigns involve protecting the world's oceans, they rely primarily on an "eco-navy" of small ships outfitted with cameras, satellite technology, and zodiacs (motorized inflatable rafts). They call themselves "Warriors of the Rainbow," a reference to a Cree legend, according to which the races of the world would one day band together under the symbol of the rainbow to restore the earth's biodiversity. Critics decry them as "peace pirates," "ecoguerrillas," and "antinuclear musketeers."

Greenpeace undertook its first major campaign in 1971, when a small group of founding activists steered an old halibut seiner (dubbed Greenpeace) and an aging minesweeper (Greenpeace Too) to the Aleutian waters of Alaska in a daring effort to stop the United States from detonating a five-megaton nuclear bomb below the surface of Amchitka Island. In 1972 and again in 1973, the group sent the yacht Greenpeace III in a similar attempt to deter France from detonating an aboveground nuclear device on Mururoa, an island near Tahiti in the Tuamotu Archipelago of French Polynesia. While these quixotic ventures failed to stop the detonations, they attracted world media attention and helped turn public opinion against the testing. In 1972 the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission announced that it would no longer conduct underground tests in the Aleutians. In 1975 France put a moratorium on all aboveground testing in the South Pacific.

For the next decade, Greenpeace engaged in a series of campaigns to end commercial whaling and sealing and to stop the dumping of toxic wastes in the world's oceans and rivers. In 1977 the group confronted a Soviet whaling flotilla—the factory ship Dalniy Vostok and nine whale catchers—off the coast of California. After trying unsuccessfully to position a zodiac in the line of fire between a catcher and a whale, the Greenpeace crew ran their cameras as a Soviet harpooner killed an immature sperm whale in flagrant violation of the 1946 International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling. These images, and many more broadcast around the world in subsequent years, eventually helped force the International Whaling Commission to declare a moratorium on commercial whaling in 1985. Greenpeace launched a similarly successful campaign to halt the killing of baby seals in Newfoundland in 1976. It used the same confrontational tactics to stop ships from dumping radioactive materials and chemical waste in the Atlantic Ocean and North Sea.

When France undertook a series of underground nuclear tests in Mururoa in 1985, Greenpeace sent its flagship, the Rainbow Warrior, to the South Pacific to disrupt the testing anew. On 10 July, however, the ship sank while in port in Auckland,New Zealand, after two explosions blew its hull apart, killing the Greenpeace photographer Fernando Pereira. Suspecting sabotage, New Zealand police soon arrested two French commissioned officers, Major Alain Mafart and Captain Dominique Prieur, who were posing as a honeymoon couple using counterfeit Swiss passports. Further investigation by Le Monde and other French newspapers directly implicated the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE), the foreign operations wing of the French secret service. In September, President François Mitterrand and Prime Minister Laurent Fabius admitted that high-ranking government officials had engineered the sabotage. Soon thereafter, Charles Hernu, the minister of defense, and Admiral Pierre Lacoste, the head of the DGSE, resigned their posts. France agreed to pay for the loss of the Rainbow Warrior and to compensate Pereira's family. A New Zealand court sentenced Mafart and Prieur to ten years in prison. Aside from tarnishing France's international reputation, there were no other negative consequences of the Greenpeace scandal. Mitterrand was reelected in 1988. France continued to use Mururoa as a nuclear test site (aside from a two-year moratorium) until 1996. Most of the remaining saboteurs, all presumably members of the DGSE, escaped conviction.

In the early twenty-first century Greenpeace remains one of the world's most active environmental organizations. It continues to apply its "bearing witness" and "direct action" strategies to the mining, transport, and disposal of nuclear and other hazardous materials, and to the maintenance of ocean wildlife and ecology.

See alsoEnvironmentalism; Greens.