GREEN GLOBE YEARBOOK 1996 73 Greenpeace: Storm-Tossed on the High Seas
membership and income falling, its leaders had fired one executive director, Paul Gilding, and were attempting to sack staff.1 Angry messages across its sophisticated internal communications system accused its leaders of conducting a ‘reign of terror’. An anonymous press release from its headquarter...
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| Language: | English |
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| Online Access: | http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.602.5012 http://www.fni.no/ybiced/96_07_pearce.pdf |
| Summary: | membership and income falling, its leaders had fired one executive director, Paul Gilding, and were attempting to sack staff.1 Angry messages across its sophisticated internal communications system accused its leaders of conducting a ‘reign of terror’. An anonymous press release from its headquarters in Amsterdam told journalists that ‘Greenpeace is now spending more time and money on its own internal wars than on fighting for the environment. If Greenpeace’s own supporters knew what was going on internally they would soon stop sending in subscriptions, the life-blood of the organization.’2 Greenpeace, in its twenty-fifth year, appeared to be suffering a major mid-life crisis. Yet a year later, the prospects had been transformed. The organization was once again riding high after successfully preventing Shell, the multinational oil company, from towing its redundant Brent Spar platform from moorings in the North Sea and dumping it on to the bottom of the North Atlantic Ocean off Scotland. And it was gaining a new rush of headlines, and widespread international support, for its operations against proposed French nuclear weapons tests at the Mururoa atoll in the Pacific Ocean.3 A decade after French commandos had blown up the original Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour in New Zealand, killing a crew member as the vessel prepared to disrupt French tests, its replacement was taking to the waters again on a similar mission. The roller-coaster year taught Greenpeace’s current generation of activists a lesson their predecessors had often learnt. The organization lives or dies by its deeds, usually on the high seas. Unlike most other environmental organizations, it is not sustained by a broad-based green ideology (like Friends of the Earth), or by extensive scientific and practical conservation activities (like the World Wide Fund for Nature). It exists by spectacular campaigning, and swiftly implodes if the headlines falter. |
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