Greenpeace is an international environmental organization that pioneered environmental direct-action tactics and has gone on to become one of the largest and most important global forces in the name of environmental protection. Greenpeace, which takes its name from its dual concerns of antimilitarism and environmentalism, was founded in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1971. It was one of several new environmental organizations to grow out of the New Left activism of the 1960s, and it adopted a decidedly more confrontational approach to environmental protection relative to the conservation organizations that preceded it.

Its first action was characteristic of the tactics and style that would come to define the organization. A [Page 826]number of activists, along with invited journalists, sailed an old fishing vessel toward the Aleutian Island ...