By Lisa Macdonald
Greenpeace, founded in 1971 by anti-nuclear activists in Canada, is today the dominant environment organisation worldwide. What Greenpeace does and how it does it shapes, to a large extent, public consciousness about the major environmental issues.
Greenpeace's main campaigning method — bold direct actions designed to get maximum publicity — has raised public environmental awareness and earned Greenpeace the wrath of big business and governments all over the world.
The powers that be have used every possible means to discredit and weaken Greenpeace, from smear campaigns to police raids to the 1985 bombing of the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour by French agents.
Nevertheless, Greenpeace has developed into a powerful multinational operation with a fleet of ships, helicopters, more than 500 employees (even after a 30% staff cut last year), two dozen offices and almost 3 million dues-paying supporters. In 1995-96, it received $175 million in donations.
Compromise
However, these "eco-warriors" are prepared to compromise. Last September, Greenpeace outraged environmentalists by supporting the weakening of dolphin protection laws in the US.
During the late 1980s, a range of environment organisations conducted a consumer boycott and lobbying campaign to stop the slaughter of dolphins by tuna fishing in the eastern Pacific. In 1990, the US government imposed laws which reduced dolphin deaths by 96%.
Last year, however, Mexico claimed the laws violated international trade rules. Greenpeace, along with the Colombian, Venezuelan and Mexican governments, participated in secret talks which produced the US retreat.
A statement by Earthtrust, the Sea Shepherds Conservation Society and other groups in the October 7 issue of the US Nation claims that while Greenpeace never assigned a worker to the dolphin campaign or sent a ship to eastern Pacific protests, it mailed "millions of letters appealing to the public to 'save the dolphins' by sending their cheques to Greenpeace".
The statement says: "We have enough trouble overcoming the 'green propaganda' put out by cynical corporations. When a group with a public reputation for activism acts hypocritically, it is terribly damaging."
Paul Watson, a co-founder of Greenpeace who left and formed the Sea Shepherds, claims that Greenpeace agreed to the dolphin compromise to further its aims of expanding into Mexico.
More telling are Greenpeace's recent efforts in the rapidly expanding area of "green consumerism".
"... the ideological battle for the environment has been won", Paul Gilding, former head of Greenpeace International, wrote in the July 21, 1995, Financial Review. Now, he argued, we must convince business that going green can be profitable. "Eco-competitiveness", says Gilding, will be our salvation.
Gilding had left Greenpeace to become an environmental consultant to corporations after the Greenpeace board did not back his vision. Since then, however, evidence has mounted that Gilding's perspective has been adopted.
The current executive director of Greenpeace International, Thilo Bode, an economist with no background in the environment movement, has presided over a massive restructuring involving major cuts to campaigns and staff, as well as sponsoring of corporate products and projects.
Last August, not long after Kelvinator and Westinghouse launched their isobutane-cooled refrigerators as the "Greenpeace approved" alternative to ozone-depleting CFC-cooled refrigerators, Greenpeace International launched the Smile, a modified version of Renault's Twingo car that is twice as fuel-efficient.
The Smile is, nevertheless, petroleum-based, prompting other environment activists (including from Greenpeace USA) to note that it would have been far more environmentally sound to campaign for better public transport.
Greenpeace has recently shelved several hard-hitting reports and campaigns against polluters.
According to Pratap Chatterjee in an article circulated on the internet in August, Greenpeace decided last year to drop its campaign against Shell's oil exploration activities in Nigeria and the killing of Ogoni people campaigning against them.
Furthermore, "a Greenpeace report on the potential environmental impact of Chevron's oil exploration in the Kutubu highlands in PNG was never published, nor was a report on Rimbunan Hijau, a Malaysian timber multinational that controls 80% of the logging concessions in [Malaysia]".
The researchers on these projects have since left Greenpeace, as has the Greenpeace employee in London who compiled a massive report on seven major oil corporations which was subsequently shelved.
High fliers
Greenpeace argues that a lack of resources (donations dropped by 20% in 1995-96) and fears of legal problems forced it to drop those reports and campaigns. Other information, however, indicates that Greenpeace is shifting its resources to recruiting lobbyists who can strengthen its role in international forums.
Greenpeace's increasing reliance on expert negotiators, media liaison people and lobbyists who can "operate" in the corridors of power is, according to many ex-Greenpeace campaigners, creating a bloated, self-serving bureaucracy.
According to Chatterjee, last year Greenpeace paid around $130,000 to advertise in the Economist for an international toxic issues coordinator, "a sum of money that Greenpeace employees say could easily have paid the annual salary and campaign costs of two new staff people".
Not that Greenpeace is particularly concerned about its workers' wages. Former anti-nuclear campaigners Ben Pearson and Jean McSorley, retrenched during Greenpeace Australia's restructuring last year, appeared before the NSW Industrial Relations Commission last month claiming 32 and 48 weeks of unpaid overtime respectively.
Greenpeace's structure — centralised in an international board and a small core of highly paid managers who make major decisions on behalf of a passive membership — cannot permit internal democracy.
Chatterjee quotes a former Greenpeace campaigner: "Radical boat actions are what made Greenpeace famous — they are done by teams ... working in complete secrecy. But all of Greenpeace is run by such a secret system of internal politics ... It makes great headline television news but that's hardly building strong domestic movements."
Greenpeace's emphasis on offering not only "career paths but probably a pension plan", as Thilo Bode puts it, to attract experienced lobbyists and managers, means that it must raise huge amounts of money — and make the political compromises "necessary" to succeed.
In his book Divided Planet: The Ecology of Rich and Poor, Tom Athanasiou reports that just before the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, Greenpeace's German, Dutch and British offices refused to distribute copies of Beyond UNCED, a pamphlet produced for Rio by Greenpeace's USA and Latin America branches, because it used "leftist" terms like "social equity" and even "democracy".
Reformism and radicalism
What happened to the organisation that won fame and fortune as the most fearless, radical and uncompromising of environmental groups? In fact, it hasn't fundamentally changed.
Certainly, as Greenpeace has grown in public profile and influence and as governments and corporations have been forced to make some concessions to the mass environmental consciousness generated during the 1970s and '80s, the organisation has been conservatised.
Under the pressures of a worsening ecological crisis, a demoralised environment movement and the need to maintain the huge bureaucracy that it has become, Greenpeace has pretty much accepted the status quo — so long as it has a role to play in it.
This view was summed up in the organisation's advice at the Rio summit that the countries of the South had "little choice but to abandon any nobler planetary vision and demand a larger piece of the disintegrating global pie" (Athanasiou).
But Greenpeace has always had a liberal outlook. Its emphasis on ultraleft stunts, rather than on building broad, mass campaigns, is merely an extension of its basic reformist strategy, another means of lobbying corporations and governments.
As Peter Melchett, executive director of Greenpeace UK, put it in his article in the December 30, 1995, New Scientist: "We can never 'win' against the overwhelming forces of a nation state ... What we can sometimes do is force the large and powerful to respond to public opinion and environmental imperatives."
This flip-flopping between the illusion that capitalism can be reformed and surrendering in advance can not save the planet.
Environmentalists must pursue a strategy that can win control over decision-making about natural resources use, production methods and waste disposal away from those motivated only by bigger profits and place it in the hands of the majority, whose interests lie in protecting their health, well-being and children's future.
This requires acknowledging the need to struggle consistently for both social justice and environmental protection. We must not accept Greenpeace's refusal to do this, such as during the 1995 campaign against French nuclear testing at Moruroa when it was not prepared to support Tahitians' calls for independence.
It also requires rejecting Greenpeace's elitist, opportunistic methods in favour of rebuilding an active, democratic, mass environment movement which, unlike the lobbyists in the UN, parliamentarians' offices and corporate boardrooms, has the power to force governments to legislate for and enforce environmental protection.