Emily is my hero - who is yours?

As it's coming up to the end of the year I've been clearing out the closets in my laptop and tying up loose ends on our website. As a result I have found myself reminiscing about things that have happened over the last year or even further back...

I have been thinking about all of the wonderful projects I have been involved with this past year notably - defending the Pacific Commons and the Climate Rescue Station in Poland. And I feel lucky to be involved with such wonderful campaigns that are proving to have positive results! One of the questions I get asked when I discuss my work with friends and people I meet - is how I got involved with Greenpeace in the first place. I usually tell people that I became an online supporter and won a competition to be a volunteer for the GE campaign in China. But I often forget to mention that the reason I became an online supporter is because I read a tribute about a girl called Emily who was a Greenpeace activist that died while protecting the Amazon rainforest in December 2003.

She was without a doubt - the loveliest person anyone could ever hope to meet. I was totally inspired by her story and signed up as a Greenpeace online supporter as soon as I put down the January 2004 issue of the Ecologist Magazine where her tribute was printed amongst stunning photos illustrating the amazing work Emily had been involved with.

Now 5 years on - I'm looking back at her tribute page on our website and wondering what she would be doing now if she were still around today. I imagine that she would be on the Arctic Sunrise right now - as it prepares for an action packed visit to the Amazon. I am sure in spirit - she is. I hope that you will take a moment to read about Emily and enjoy her blogs from the Amazon tour she was on in 2003.

She is certainly one of my heroes (considering where she led me - she is actually my greatest) and I will always be grateful for learning about her life that day when I picked up the Ecologist.

Given the environmental challenges that we now face I figure we could all use some green heroic inspiration as we look to the year ahead of us. If you have an environmental hero from this year or from any other year - please tell us about them by leaving a comment.

Posted by Lisa at 3:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I'm reposting this piece from the Greenpeace UK blog by my esteemed colleague Joss.

The tension built as the judges deliberated. Then at last the results were were all in and - ta-da! It was time to announce the winner of the first annual Greenpeace 'Emerald paintbrush' award for greenwashing above and beyond the call of duty. Cue a quick roll on the drums, and step forward into the spotlight - BP!

The energy corporation with an income larger than most of the world's nation states has spent a lot of time and money restyling itself as being 'Beyond Petroleum' in recent years, but a trawl through their accounts quickly reveals just how empty that assertion really is - 'Back to Petroleum', more like it.

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Posted by Jamie at 5:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Thanks to our New Zealand office - here's the English version of the video Andrew posted below. Lovely vid to share on Facebook and the like. Hint hint!

Posted by Lisa at 11:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Last week, I had the pleasure of meeting the wonderful Paddy Hart, a Dublin-born, Australian ex-whaler. "What is going on?”, you may well ask. "Is Greenpeace now consorting with whalers?". Note that I said "ex-whaler" - Paddy was in Tokyo, Japan to support Junichi and Toru - the Tokyo Two, to ask Prime Minister Aso to quite whaling, and to reassure Japan's whalers that there is life after whaling. Naturally, if you put two Irishmen together, you'll never get us to shut up, so I spent a few days hearing of Paddy's adventures over the years (and I told a few shaggy dog yarns myself). As well as being a great storyteller, Paddy was the skipper and harpoonist of a whaling vessel in Albany, Western Australia, in the 1970s until public opinion and economic rationale closed down the Cheynes Beach Whaling Company - the last whaling operation in the English-speaking world.

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Posted by Dave at 7:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

From our German office. It's a tongue and cheek update of this video.

I don't speak German, so no idea what the text says. Probably "happy holidays" or some such. Translation welcome (please post in the comments).

Update: Thanks for the translations! My curiosity is now satisfied.

Posted by Andrew at 2:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

As the delegates at the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission meeting in Korea negotiate tuna into extinction. Our oceans team over there have been asking them to fill out this survey:

WHAT SORT OF FISHERIES MANAGER ARE YOU?

Your scientists tell you to end overfishing by reducing effort by 30%. Do you:
a) thank your scientists and reduce fishing effort by 30%
b) say “nya-nya-nya I can’t hear you” and continue fishing at current levels
c) pretend you’re being responsible while in fact negotiating another year of 20% overfishing

You watch another fisheries commission fail miserably to save their stock from collapse and instead head towards commercial extinction. Do you:
a) learn from their mistakes and end overfishing immediately
b) follow them blindly in ignoring their scientists
c) imagine that you are different, your oceans are different and somehow you can continue overfishing without the same thing happening here

You discover that part of your fishing area is riddled with pirates and they are stealing fish from your legal fishing fleets. Do you:
a) ban fishing in those areas to flush the pirates out of your ocean
b) put in place even more complicated measures to create loopholes for the pirates to exploit
c) negotiate on behalf of your pet pirates and stop any measures being adopted that might upset them

What proportion of your delegation has vested interests in the fishing industry?
a) 0-40%
b) 40-60%
c) more than 60%

Where would you advise your fishing industry to invest their profits?
a) sound science and a sustainable management plan
b) more boats and bigger boats
c) parrots, eye patches and wooden legs

Posted by Lisa at 2:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Whale Of A Day from Greenpeace_AustraliaPac on Vimeo.

(larger version)

Mesmerizing timelapse video showing the making of a 17 metre fin whale sand sculpture on Bondi Beach, Sydney. Sculpture by Greenpeace activists and sand sculptures, video by Keith Loutit, music by Headstrong and Shelley Harland.

The sculpture was done as a protest against whaling, and in support of two Japanese activists who are facing up to 10 years in jail for exposing a whale meat smuggling scandal. If you don't have tons of sand handy, you can still support them as well.

Here's how:

1) Sign the Tokyo Two petition telling the Japanese government, "If defending whales is a crime, arrest me."

2) Change your Facebook/Skype/whatever status to, "Wanted in Japan ;-)". (Winky smiley face optional, depending if you're a winky smiley face kind of person.)

Posted by Andrew at 10:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I have a confession to make: I lead a double life. Besides being an intern at Greenpeace International, I also do a master's degree in International Law. International Human Rights Law has a prominent place in the program I follow, and I think that between this and my internship, I'm more informed than most people about what rights we have, simply by existing.

At university, I hear a lot about protecting from torture, the right to free elections, the right to life, the right to a family life. At work, I promote the right to a clean and safe environment. These rights are all equally important, they are interlinked. It's not much use to have a right to life if this life is lived under oppression. It's not much use to freely elect a government if this government is going to destroy the environment you live in. It's not much use to have a clean environment if your life is threatened every day in this environment.

The video below serves as a good reminder.

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Posted by Juliette at 12:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The noble art of Google bombing - of making a website rise up the search results by encouraging other websites to link to them in a particular way - is being harnessed by blogs campaigning against new coal-fired power stations in the UK, especially the proposed new facility at Kingsnorth in Kent. The idea is to make the No New Coal website appear at the top of the list any time a search is done for 'Eon' (which is, of course, the company so intent on building the plant at Kingsnorth).

Anyone with a website, blog or profile on the likes of MySpace or Facebook can help out, so if you'd like to help here are the full instructions I purloined from Climate Change Action:

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Posted by Jamie at 12:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Set things right: click here if you're guilty of opposing whaling.

Today's Guardian picks up an interview with Junichi Sato about his arrest in Japan for exposing corruption in the whaling industry. About the extreme crackdown on Greenpeace when 40 police raided the office to arrest him and seized membership lists and computer disks. About his experience of being strapped to a chair and interrogated. About being accused of being no better than Aum Supreme Truth, the doomsday cult that carried out a deadly gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995.

The Japan Times is finally running the story as well -- the first time the truth about this political persecution is coming out in the Japanese press.

Amnesty has condemned the arrest as politically motivated.

Tomorrow, December 10th, is the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We're running a full-page ad in the IHT/Asahi Shimbun Asian edition, the English language version of one of Japan's leading papers. We're running it inverted, so the reader has to turn it over to read the text (and anyone there in Tokyo, if you can capture video of someone turning their paper over to read the ad on the subway or in a cafe, do send it along!)

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Posted by Brian at 7:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Over on the Guardian blog, Damian Carrington has a post on mobilization tactics and climate change:

Can the people of the world make global warming history? Ed Miliband, the UK's minister for energy and climate change certainly hopes so.

Talking to the Guardian, he has called for a mass movement, like the 2005 Make Poverty History campaign, that will force the world's leaders to agree to a meaningful global climate deal at UN talks in Copenhagen at the end of 2009.

The Make Poverty History campaign, a coalition of hundreds of groups, successfully urged the G8 meeting in Gleneagles to cancel $40bn of debt owed by 18 of the world's poorest nations.

With uncanny timing, the campaign group Plane Stupid have occupied a runway at Stansted Airport, stopping all flights. I suspect this direct action, by about 50 protesters, was not what Miliband had in mind. The police have made multiple arrests and it's now all over. My colleague Leo Hickman has strongly defended the action.

Damian goes on to ask whether mass protest or direct action (like Plane Stupid's) is better for putting the breaks on climate change. Here's a thought: What if we did both?

Posted by Andrew at 8:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There's a revealing article in the latest issue of Campaign (a marketing industry weekly) about morality and advertising. It's a thoughtful and honest piece, written by a senior industry professional - tackling the question, "If your personally held views conflict with what you do at work, do you forget your principles or dissent?"

There's a nice summary of different perspectives in there that I can't capture in a paragraph. (excerpt | full article)

In the same issue, there's an editorial titled, "Are morals affordable in an economic downturn?", which concludes with:

What's beyond question is that the harsh economic climate will test agencies' morality to the limit. Word is that many are already battling to win the experiential and field marketing brief for the tobacco manufacturer Gallaher.

A principle isn't a principle until it costs you money, Bill Bernbach famously observed. It remains to be seen how many agencies will emerge from the turbulence with both their balance sheets and their morals in good shape.

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Posted by Andrew at 2:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Europe's food safety checks will be debated tomorrow in an important EU GMO meeting in Brussels.

Citizens, environmentalists, activists and food-lovers have sent thousands of messages to every Environment Minister in Europe -- almost 70,000 in just under a month.

Yesterday we discovered that the UK and Germany are planning to wreck the meeting -- objecting to positive new measures that would strengthen the assessment process. Germany has been among the more food-friendly (and consumer-friendly) countries up to now, so this is a really shameful turn for the worse!

Related: GM-Free Ireland has an interview today on their website with Prof. Patrick Wall, the former head of the European Food Safety Authority.

Action: Write directly to the Ministers for UK and Germany before the GMO meeting on Thursday.

Posted by Eoin at 3:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Guardian has a good article on the "Top 10 big energy myths". It explains solar and wind power are ready for the prime time, and some other good ones.

Myth 4: nuclear power is cheaper than other low-carbon sources of electricity

If we believe that the world energy and environmental crises are as severe as is said, nuclear power stations must be considered as a possible option. But although the disposal of waste and the proliferation of nuclear weapons are profoundly important issues, the most severe problem may be the high and unpredictable cost of nuclear plants.

The new nuclear power station on the island of Olkiluoto in western Finland is a clear example. Electricity production was originally supposed to start this year, but the latest news is that the power station will not start generating until 2012. The impact on the cost of the project has been dramatic. When the contracts were signed, the plant was supposed to cost €3bn (£2.5bn). The final cost is likely to be more than twice this figure and the construction process is fast turning into a nightmare. A second new plant in Normandy appears to be experiencing similar problems. In the US, power companies are backing away from nuclear because of fears over uncontrollable costs.

Oh yeah, we know all about Olkiluoto. What a mess.

Posted by Andrew at 3:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)