It's an eco-focused video blog. Looks pretty professional, but in a friendly way. Basically, it looks like she travels around doing cools stuff and make video blogs about things that are important to her. Lots of animal rights and environmental topics. I like it.

My favorite episode so far is "bike culture". Riding a bike in most US cities is an act of activism. It's almost like civil disobedience. Most cities are so car focused. You have to get out there on the streets to understand what I'm talking about. But it's fun, it costs less, you stay healthier.

Right now I'm living in Amsterdam, where biking to work is the normal thing. And it's great. Tons of bike paths, and my route goes through Rembrandt Park. Very relaxing.

Posted by Andrew at 6:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

© Greenpeace

I was shocked to read an article in Grist about plans for the expansion of power generation using coal in the U.S.

With 153 new coal plants currently proposed, the U.S plans to triple the amount of coal fired power generation within the next 4 years. Sadly it seems as though only 24 of these plants will use gasification technology, which reduces the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere. The construction of up to 309 new 500 MW coal plants in the U.S is anticipated by 2030.

Read more »

Posted by Lisa at 7:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

We published a scorecard and report today listing what tech companies are doing to reduce their share of the global electronic waste problem. Dell and Nokia didn’t do so badly, but those stylish Apple computers and Moto phones rated a miserable 1 or 2 out of 10 for greenliness.

Green Electronics Guide »

Posted by Eoin Dubsky at 4:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Following an additional confrontation yesterday morning where tuna fishermen blockaded and boarded the Rainbow Warrior - as well as fire hosing its crew; our ship has been towed out of France's 12 mile territorial zone by the French authorities!

More here »

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Posted by Dave at 12:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"While the Esperanza visits the Philippines, it becomes witness to the worst oil spill to ever hit the country. The crew assist in clean up efforts and help assess the damage of this disaster for the marine environment and for the people who live there."

Ocean Defenders TV: Philippines oil disaster »

Posted by Dave at 5:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

© Gavin Newman/Greenpeace

The Esperanza is now at the island of Rapu Rapu in the Philippines, leading a flotilla of 70 protesting boats against the Lafayette Mining company's

"There are 67 of them. Wooden outriggers in light blue, pink, green and yellow circle around the Esperanza, flags at their stern: "No to Lafayette! No to Marine Pollution!" Men and women are standing on the ships roofs, dancing, waving to us. We all watch from the poop deck, and no matter who you meet this morning of the Esperanza crew, everybody is smiling. We are leading a flotilla against the destructive Lafayette gold- and silvermine on the island of Rapu Rapu. And we all feel we are on the right side."

Defending our Oceans: Flotilla Power »
Watch Ocean Defenders TV: Undermining Paradise »
Stop Lafayette From Polluting Our Seas!
Lafayette Mining Operations No-Win Situation For Rapu Rapu »

Read more »

Posted by Dave at 2:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

© Greenpeace

The Rainbow Warrior arrived in Marseille at aroud 8.15am, as part of it's Mediterranean Tuna campaign- it's anchored currently a mile outside the harbour entrance, and completely blocked in by 25 French fishing vessels! [More on this as we get news]

The harbour authorities had earlier tried to stop the RW from entering Marseille - but the Provence-Marseille District Authority and the the city mayor overturned the decision.

Read more »

Posted by Dave at 11:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Check this amazing - if shocking - underwater footage taken by scuba divers surveying the oil spill in the Lebanon.

"Apart from being a human tragedy, the recent conflict between Israel and Lebanon is also an environmental disaster. This video shows the impact on the marine environment of the massive oil spills resulting from the bombing of a powerplant close to Beirut."

Watch the movie »
More about the oil spill »

Posted by Dave at 11:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

© Greenpeace/Karel Zwaneveld. Activists paint 'Stop Pirate Fishing' on the side of the 'pirate' Russian ship Mumrinskiy

This morning, our activists managed to halt the unloading of a Russian ship, the Mumrinskiy at Eemshaven in the Netherlands. On board the ship was a cargo of illegally caught cod, stolen from the Barents Sea, set to be imported into the Netherlands. We want the AID (Inspection team of the Ministry of Agriculture) to investigate the ship and its papers.

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Posted by Dave at 8:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Norway - the only country in the world to openly conduct commercial whaling (Japan and Iceland hide behind the flimsy veil of 'scientific whaling'), is failing to reach it's Minke whale quota for this year. Excellent news!

This year was the highest ever quota: 1,052 whales were due for slaughter, up from 797 last year However, since the season started on April 1st, about 500 Minkes have been despatched. The whaling industry that the lack of catch is down to poor weather and rising fuel prices - but we know that it's down to a lack of market demand - people in Norway are losing the taste for whale meat.

Either way - it's reasonably good news for the whale population.

Norway Whalers Land Only Half of Quota »
The Guardian: Norway fails to fulfil whaling quota »
BBC: Norway's whale catch falls short »

Posted by Dave at 8:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

© Greenpeace / Newman. Activists and fishermen attempting to use oil booms made from local materials to protect beaches from spilled bunker oil.

Of course, as soon as I posted my oil spills roundup, Andrew's posted a more detailed story about what's happening in the Philippines.

"It took Rodolfo Galuna only 15 days to build the small wooden boat he named "Rona". But now the 52-year-old fisherman has no use for it. Black, stinking oil sludge covers the boat’s hull, has crept into Galuna's back yard and quietly destroyed this fisherman's livelihood here on Guimaras Island. "I don't know what we will be living off in the future", said the father of six, "I must find something new". It is day ten of the biggest oil spill in the history of the Philippines."

Philippines spill witnessed first hand »

Posted by Dave at 7:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

© Greenpeace/Gavin Newman. Mangrove Roots and new shoots coated with Oil from the sunken Petron-chartered single hull vessel oil tanker in Nueva Valencia, Guimaras Island. Philippines.

The last few weeks has brought a lot of bad news about oil spills - there was the bombing by Israeli forces of oil tanks in Jiyeh, Lebanon.Meanwhile, 5.3 million litres of crude oil was spilled off the coast of India, when the Bright Artemis oil tanker collided with a smaller cargo ship it was trying to assist.

Worst of all, the Solar 1 sank in rough seas off the Philippines, spilling 200,000 litres (53,000 gallons) of bunker oil - with more escaping since - we estimate there's 100 to 200 litres of oil an hour pumping out into the ocean. Lying in deep water, recovery of the ship is unlikely, creating an ecological time bomb - it's got another 1.8 million litres (475,000 gallons) of bunker fuel on board.

Read more »

Posted by Dave at 7:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On board the Rainbow Warrior, outboard mechanic Phil tells us how he was dragged from his bed at some ungodly hour to rescue three Portuguese ladies whose yacht had run aground off the coast of Corsica. All in a night's work for the crew of the Rainbow Warrior!

Read more on the Defending our Mediterranean »

Posted by Dave at 4:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Posted by Lisa at 11:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

© Greenpeace / Gustavo Graf

Mexico — Some pals of mine from the fortean world have been making crop circles for our GE campaign. In this interview, John Lundberg - who is a professional cropcircle maker - (who knew there was such a thing?) talks about making giant question mark in a maize field in Mexico and working with us.

"For years I'd thought that crop circles would be an ideal medium for promoting Greenpeace's genetic engineering (GE) campaign. The crop circles generate an alien mystique, encouraging people to consider the unknown."

Mexican crop circle asks the question »
Earlier work, in France: GE Maps: Censored by French Court, Republished by Greenpeace International, Featured by BoingBoing »
Circlemakers.org »

Read more »

Posted by Dave at 1:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

My name sounds like "Owen". I'm very new to Greenpeace, having joined in April 2006 as the Community Manager at Greenpeace International. Working and living here in Amsterdam is brilliant though, so I intend to hang around for a while!

A list of my hobbies and interests would read something like my job description -- basically I'm interested in getting technology and the internet to help people campaign better for stuff that matters.

My campaigning background is mostly with grassroots environmental and antiwar groups in Ireland, working on issues like wetlands/habitat protection, peace, disarmament, public participation/democracy and environmental justice.

Before moving to the Netherlands I lived in Ireland, the Czech Republic and France.

Posted by Eoin Dubsky at 1:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Apparently, the Japanese tuna industry has been cheating the system for years - catching well over their scientifically determined quota and pushing the southern bluefin dangerously low levels to dangerously. From the Sydney Morning Herald:

AUSTRALIA'S top fisheries manager has revealed Japan illegally took $2 billion worth of southern bluefin tuna, effectively killing the stock commercially.

An investigation into the imperilled fishery found Japanese fishers and suppliers from other countries caught up to three times the Japanese quota each year for the past 20 years, and hid it.

(snip)

The Bureau of Rural Sciences said the most recent estimate by Australian scientists of southern bluefin's parental biomass - the quantity of adult tuna - was that it stood at as little as 4 per cent of its original size.

Posted by Andrew at 2:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Seadoku is a little experiment we're trying down here in New Zealand but it may take the world by storm.

Here's the thing. Later this year the United Nations will meet to discuss the fate of deep sea life in international waters. For over two years now Greenpeace, along with a chorus of other NGO's and scientists, has been calling for a moratorium on bottom trawling in international waters.

During those two years a bunch of nations, and I'm ashamed to say NZ is up there with the worst, have been systematially wiping out delicate deep sea habitats in a remorseless search for the increasingly scarce orange roughy. The world needs to know ... and that's where sudoku puzzles come in.

Read more »

Posted by Nick at 10:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

From ABS-CBN:

Amidst endless war, death and destruction almost everywhere on our planet, a 20-year-old vessel, originally a Murmansk-based firefighting ship, is crossing the vast oceans on a voyage with a message of great concern but also of great hope. The Esperanza (Spanish for hope), the biggest vessel in the fleet of international environmental organization Greenpeace, is spearheading the Defend Our Oceans campaign. The journey started in Cape Town, South Africa, on November 15, 2005, and is the most ambitious ship expedition ever undertaken by Greenpeace. The Esparanza is on its way from India to the Philippines where it will arrive on August 15.

The Defend Our Oceans campaign brings the oceans to the shore. It exposes the enormous damage that human activity does to the oceans, but it also reveals the—often unseen—beauty of the oceans and proposes solutions how to preserve precious marine life.

Posted by Andrew at 4:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

First it was climate porn - now it's climate tourism. The Eiger mountain in the Swiss Alps is literally falling apart as the supporting glaciers recede leaving the rock unsupported and belive it or not it has become a tourist attraction!

Hansruedi Burgener has a mountain hostel that just happens to have good view of the crumbling rock face and is enjoying a very profitable increase in patronage as hundreds of people trek up the hillside to get a good look at the falling rocks.

"We would also have made a living without the rock coming down. But it would have been a bit quieter," Burgener said.

"I personally can't do anything to stop global warming, but we are at least making people aware of the consequences of climate change. You can see the effects up here."

I wouldn't be surprised to hear that they've employed a fiddler and a deck chair manager...

More on this story

Posted by Nick at 2:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Larnaca Cyprus:Rainbow Warrior loading supplies for MSF humanitarian mission to Lebanon. © Greenpeace / Phillip Reynaers

As we already mentioned, the Rainbow Warrior is currently helping Medecins Sans Frontieres to deliver aid to Lebanon. The latest news is that the the RW is back safe and sound in Cyprus after its first sucessful mission to Beirut.
More here...

Posted by Dave at 8:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

According to Nature.com, French researchers have found that high-tech electronic devices can be made from a natural substance - seaweed. When baked to a charcoal, the seaweed can be used for making the electrodes in state-of-the-art supercapacitors. The environmental issues surrounding harvesting vast tonnes of seaweed and baking it are open to speculation, but it already sounds better than using toxic, highly-industrialised methods of creating microelectronics. So expect your next computer to smell fishy.

Nature: Baked seaweed and chips »

Posted by Dave at 8:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A "mutant" crab with three pincers has been picked up in 100m of water near the Scilly Isles, off the Cornish coast, by a fisherman, and is currently installed in an aquarium in Newquay.

More on the mutant three-clawed crab »

BBC: Three-clawed 'mutant' crab caught »

Read more »

Posted by Dave at 8:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

UK 'think-tank' the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), has accused the media, the British government and environmental groups (waves hand... 'that'd be us, guvnor') of indulging in the promotion of 'climate porn' through promotion of alarmist apocalyptic climate change scenarios.

The IPPR's report Warm Words: How are we telling the climate story and can we tell it better? makes for interesting reading, and I do recommend taking a read of it. The only problem is, the IPPR are committing the same sin that they've accused the rest of us of - by using their "climate porn" catchphrase as an alarmist marketing tool to sell their idea of "climate porn" as a concept, they seem to want to scare people into acting on climate change!

Which is a little bizarre.

Read more »

Posted by Dave at 8:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Charlot, our Oceans campaign assistant, passed on this Power Point style presentation (in PDF format) by Jeremy Jackson. When it comes to credentials Dr. Jackson is no lightweight, and he does a great job of making things understandable. Lots of easy to interpret graphics.

Take a few minutes to flick through, and you'll have a good overview of the enormity of the crisis we're facing - or just skip ahead to slides 5 and 6, which speak volumes on their own.

A video version is available on the Harvard University website.

(And yes, I think Dr. Jackson has been giving this presentation for some years now, but I hadn't seen it before.)

Posted by Andrew at 3:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, it's good to see that someone's benefiting from global warming - an Inuit microbrewery in Narsq, Greenland, has foisted 66,000 litres of a new ale - Greenland Beer - onto the Danish market - using the pure meltwater from the island's ice cap. It's a novel idea, I guess - stopping the rise of our sea levels by storing the excess water in the bladders of beer drinkers and slipshod environmentalists.
Greenland ice cap beer launched

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Posted by Dave at 12:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I come from a land down under where women glow and men chunder ... well actually that's from a song about Australia but many of the same things apply here in New Zealand - just with fewer flies. I'd like to think it's a comment on the language rather than our habits but then again it is Australian...

Anyway, I work in the Greenpeace New Zealand office as the 'web manager' which, in a smallish office like ours, means I manage the website and myself. Lots of fun.

I've got my own weblog here that really doesn't get the attention it should - but you know how it is.

Posted by Nick at 11:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Lewis Pugh - the hardcore swimmer who has completed long distance swims in the Arctic and Antarctic, as well as all the major oceans, pitched up on the doorstep of the UK's Prime Minister, Tony Blair, today.

Lewis, who is currently swimming the 320km length of the river Thames as part of a WWF climate change campaign, had a five minute chat with Blair, before presumably jumping back into the water. Rather disappointingly, he seems to have turned up for the meeting in a t-shirt, rather than dripping wet!

Read more »

Posted by Dave at 8:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Following up on Dave's post about the multimedia piece in the LA Times. It actually covers a whole range of threats to the oceans.

We're still dumping a whole range of pollutants into the oceans - fertilizer run off, byproducts of fossil fuel combustion, etc. At the same time, we're throwing ecosystems out of whack with massive overfishing, destruction of coastal wetlands and global warming. Harm from one cause can keep an ocean ecosystem from bouncing back against another.

One example:

[Carbon dioxide] The greenhouse gas, best known for accumulating in the atmosphere and heating the planet, is entering the ocean at a rate of nearly 1 million tons per hour - 10 times the natural rate.

Scientists report that the seas are more acidic today than they have been in at least 650,000 years. At the current rate of increase, ocean acidity is expected, by the end of this century, to be 2 1/2 times what it was before the Industrial Revolution began 200 years ago. Such a change would devastate many species of fish and other animals that have thrived in chemically stable seawater for millions of years.

Less likely to be harmed are algae, bacteria and other primitive forms of life that are already proliferating at the expense of fish, marine mammals and corals.

[Photo: Marine life threatend by a mine on nearby Rapu Rapu island, Philippines. © Greenpeace/ Daniel Ocampo 2006]

Posted by Andrew at 12:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Update 9/11/2006:
Disposable Oceans?
The Trash Vortex weblog
Garbage at sea
Plastic Pacific

This horrific article comes from the front page of today's Los Angeles Times:

"On Midway Atoll, 40% of albatross chicks die, their bellies full of trash. Swirling masses of drifting debris pollute remote beaches and snare wildlife.

The albatross chick jumped to its feet, eyes alert and focused. At 5 months, it stood 18 inches tall and was fully feathered except for the fuzz that fringed its head.

All attitude, the chick straightened up and clacked its beak at a visitor, then rocked back and dangled webbed feet in the air to cool them in the afternoon breeze.

The next afternoon, the chick ignored passersby. The bird was flopped on its belly, its legs splayed awkwardly. Its wings drooped in the hot sun. A few hours later, the chick was dead.

John Klavitter, a wildlife biologist, turned the bird over and cut it open with a knife. Probing its innards with a gloved hand, he pulled out a yellowish sac — its stomach.

Out tumbled a collection of red, blue and orange bottle caps, a black spray nozzle, part of a green comb, a white golf tee and a clump of tiny dark squid beaks ensnared in a tangle of fishing line."

Read more »

Posted by Dave at 9:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Check out this roundup of photographs from last month's worldwide activities »

Posted by Dave at 7:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Our colleagues on board our ship, the Rainbow Warrior, are currently working with Medecins Sans Frontieres to get urgent medical supplies into Lebanon.

According to MSF:

"To date it has been very difficult to move large volumes of relief goods from Beirut to southern Lebanon by road. Trucks have been hit by missiles, so truck drivers are reluctant to move into the southern region and there are major problems in getting materials to Beirut quickly enough. The Greenpeace offer means a partial solution of one of our two problems."

Read more »

Posted by Dave at 5:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

From Independent Online (IOL):

The oceans are teeming with 10 to 100 more types of bacteria than previously believed, many of them unknown, according to a study released on Monday that has jolted scientists' understanding of evolution in the seas.

Using a new genetic mapping technique, United States, Dutch and Spanish scientists said they found more than 20 000 different types of microbe in a single litre of water from deep sites in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.

There is a tendency to think of the ocean as mostly empty of life except for a few fish and such, but really it is a complex soup full of interlinked ecosystems. We don't know yet how it all fits together, but we do know it's important.

Read more »

Posted by Andrew at 5:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)