By Frank Noakes
SAN FRANCISCO — Of Greenpeace's 5 million supporters worldwide, 1.5 million live in the US, says Greenpeace media coordinator Bill Walker. These supporters "quite frankly still tend to be white and middle-class people scared about whales dying, but more and more we are broadening our base so that we become truly reflective in our membership and in our staff of the work that we're doing in the communities". Greenpeace has already begun to diversify its staff, increasingly hiring from other than white middle-class backgrounds.
Greenpeace has "made great strides in working with local communities, particularly low-income ethnic communities. Because, when you look at toxics you realise that a majority of the toxic dumps and the production facilities in this country are sited in communities of colour. When you look at fishing, local native communities have existed for thousands of years making a living off the local fisheries, and now they're being driven out by the transnational corporations.
"So more and more we've come to think of our work as under the rubric of environmental justice, which is like a merging of the environmental movement and the civil rights movement. The exploitation of lower income, working-class communities of colour cannot be separated from environmental issues; the pollution of the air, the pollution of the ground water cannot be separated from the economic and political forces that make that burden disproportionately borne by the less powerful in our society.
"We've done some things that people wouldn't necessarily expect of us: for example, participating in the 30th anniversary of the march on Washington [a black civil rights march]. We've participated in a number of those forums, so that line is disappearing between what used to be called the white middle-class environmental movement, and the more locally based grassroots groups trying to keep toxics out of their backyards."
Greenpeace is now working in direct partnership with those groups and discovering that environmentalism has existed in those communities all along, though it wasn't known by that name, says Walker.
"When the United Farm Workers were fighting to keep pesticides from poisoning their workers, that was seen as a public health issue or a civil rights issue; of course it's also an environmental issue. There are any number of examples of this new way of thinking about environmentalism."
Internationally, Greenpeace is working on five broad campaigns. These campaigns, explains Walker, can have different emphases from country to country. In Europe the toxics campaign centres on cleaner production, stopping pollution at its source. But whereas the goal remains the same, in the US the battle is to halt the expansion of the toxic incineration industry.
"The idea of burning toxic waste to get rid of it, which of course doesn't happen, became the preferred method pushed by industry over the last 20 years, so most of our toxics work in the United States concentrates on stopping incinerators in specific communities. We're sort of playing a shell game with the incineration industry; they propose an incinerator in a town and we run in there and organise and beat it back."
In addition to toxics, Greenpeace's other campaigns are, atmosphere and energy; forests; nuclear; and ocean ecology.
Ocean ecology is probably the group of campaigns that Greenpeace is best known for — save the whale, save the dolphin. "That campaign has grown enormously more complex as we've moved from trying to save individual species into broader issues of ecosystem management. The main focus of ocean ecology is now very complicated — things like the rights of coastal communities to make a living off traditional methods of fishing, as opposed to huge transnational corporations tying up all the resources."
In December 1992, the newly elected Clinton administration promised it would withhold permission for Waste Technologies Industries to conduct a test burn at its controversial East Liverpool, Ohio, facility (situated within yards of schools and homes) until a full investigation of the facility was carried out. However, once in office Clinton and Vice President Al Gore caved in to industry pressure, allowing the facility to test burn.
Environmentalists have been very disappointed with Clinton's administration. "There was a very big expectation. He and Al Gore appealed very directly to Americans who are concerned with the environment."
A Newsweek poll after the election showed that the environment was the number one issue amongst Clinton voters. People made a judgment on two things, says Walker. Al Gore's track record as the leading environmental senator tended to balance out the serious doubts held by many about Clinton's record as governor of Arkansas, where he supported toxic incineration and had ties to a number of chemical industries. In addition, on the campaign trail Clinton and Gore reversed the rhetoric of the Reagan and Bush years, saying that jobs and the environment weren't counterposed. But, having said that, Clinton compromised all the way on any number of issues.
In May, at the Portland timber summit, Clinton and Gore began with polished performances seemingly supporting the forest defenders, but ended up parroting the corporate line.
Walker acknowledges that there are more "greenies" in this administration than in the Republican governments, but says they are being muzzled. He believes that Clinton is running the risk, especially with the environmentally disastrous North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), of alienating environmentalists.
"Our role is to continue to be critical, to speak out. We didn't assume that just because there was a change in administration that everything was going to be rosy."
The NAFTA issue has drawn Greenpeace into what some people consider unusual alliances. But these are things that they've wanted to do for a long time, Walker insists. This is strikingly highlighted by the working relationship with the trade union movement. The two movements have long been at odds; corporations and politicians have often used environmentalists as the scapegoat for job losses in the US. NAFTA has begun to change that, and both movements are recognising a common interest.
Walker says that unionists are recognising that Greenpeace members are not Luddites. "I don't want to overestimate it [the relationship], but it has significant implications for how we continue to work together in the future. We're no longer seen as the bogey man by labour, and we no longer see them as a bunch of redneck hard hats that don't care about the environment. We've discovered that politics makes strange bedfellows, but we're also discovering that we're not really such strange bedfellows at all; we really have a lot in common.
"That's really the most interesting implication. It's very significant: you're going to have the labour movement and the environment movement realising that they can work much more closely together."