Greenpeace

Greenpeace, one of the largest environmental advocacy organizations, is best known for dramatic protests over marine environmental issues that capture media attention. The environmental activist group is famous for members who place themselves in harm's way. From a small antiwar group formed in 1971 in Vancouver, Canada, the organization had grown by the early 21st century to an international organization with 5 ships, 2.8 million supporters, 27 national and regional offices, and presence in 41 nations.

Among its thousands of dramatic protests, Greenpeace activists have infiltrated nuclear test sites, shielded whales from harpoons, protected fur seals from clubs, and blocked ocean-going barges from dumping radioactive waste. The strategy was inspired by a confrontational but nonviolent philosophy rooted in the Quaker concept of bearing witness and also in the nonviolent interventions of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. The organization's strict adherence to nonviolence has led to breakaways by some who want more muscular activism (for example, Paul Watson, founder of the Sea Shepherd Society).

Greenpeace tactics were also influenced by political street theater and the work of Saul Alinsky, the Provos of Amsterdam, and the Diggers of San Francisco. Greenpeace raised street theater and protest tactics to a new level using global media. The effect, according to Greenpeace cofounder Robert Hunter, was a “mind bomb”—that is, an action designed to create a dramatic new impression to replace an old cliché. The most obvious example of a “mind bomb” was to overturn the image of heroic whalers to that of heroic ecologists risking their lives to save the gentle giants of the [Page 341]sea. This approach caught the world's attention and dramatically changed the political terrain for commercial fishing and whaling operations after Greenpeace's first whaling protests in June 1975.

Greenpeace organizers first noticed the power of dramatic protest in 1971 when they imagined a new kind of protest amid an intense international controversy over U.S. nuclear weapons testing in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska. They chartered a fishing trawler to sail into the test area in the expectation that the U.S. government would have to call off the test. The trawler originally had the name Greenpeace, while the group originally called itself the “Don't Make a Wave” committee, the fear at the time being that nuclear weapons tests could create tidal waves. The trawler Greenpeace sailed from Vancouver on September 15, 1971, but turned back after arrests, other delays, and being held back by winter storms.

When the United States detonated the bomb two months later, Greenpeace was ignored in the United States—however, the Canadian media saw the protests as visionary and helpful. French nuclear testing was also an early prominent target of Greenpeace protests. When a small Greenpeace sailboat that sailed into the French nuclear testing area of Moruroa in the summer of 1972 was seriously damaged in a collision with a French warship, the protest led to headline coverage around the world. The Greenpeace antiwhaling campaign began in 1974 with training on zodiac inflatable boats using outboard motors. The summer campaign in 1975 was launched to confront whaling vessels on the high seas off the U.S. and Canadian Pacific Coast. When a Russian factory whaling ship fired a harpoon perilously close to one zodiac in late June, the incident touched off a media frenzy at a scientific meeting of the International Whaling Commission in London. The fight to save the whales changed that day, according to Rex Weyler, a Greenpeace historian.

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