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May 9, 2008The business press won't leave us alone
What do all these newspapers have in common: The Wall Street Journal, Germany's Financial Times and Handelsblatt newspaper, and the Dutch Financieele Dagblad? They've all reported positive stories about our campaigns and campaigners around the world in the past few days.
First Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal and the Netherlands's leading business paper, covered the success of our Dove palm oil video, and the effect it's having at Unilever HQ.
And this weekGermany's FT says the unlikely shift that GMO campaigners helped create in the European Commission has "seriously set back" the agro-chemical industry, something the industry would like to play down.
Finally (how's your German?), Handelsblatt.com printed a detailed feature on Lo Sze Ping, our top guy in Greenpeace China.
Iran centre of WWD proliferation
February 2, is World Wetlands Day, marking the date of the Convention on Wetlands in Ramsar, Iran, in 1971. People from environment groups and conservation agencies working on wetlands protection and education are celebrating today under this year's banner: "Healthy Wetlands, Healthy People".
Maybe there's a Ramsar site near you -- they're all over the world.
The Ramsar Secretariat would love to hear from people (email link) who've done something today for World Wetlands Day -- photos from a group outing, or some crafts or art made with materials from your local wetland.
Want to make a cut-out marine or freshwater turtle? Download one of these beautiful print-and-make turtles from the Ramsar website.
UPDATE: Environmental News Service reports that to mark World Wetlands Day the Republic of Congo designated four new Wetlands of International Importance, including one that is the second largest in the world.
Bush's State of the Union
Personally, I didn't have the stomach to listen Bush's speech last night. Greenpeace USA executive director, John Passacantando did, and he doesn't mince words in his blog about it:
Tonight the President was in classic form, grinning and winking like he had just pulled off a great fraternity stunt at the Delta House… not acting like the first president in US history to start and oversee the loss of TWO wars. A President who fueled a Holy war and put our young people in front of shrapnel with the cavalier attitude of a man who has never done an honest day’s labor.
The Washington Post also fact checked key statements in Bush's speech.
Nuclear winter, Tiny cars and Green IT
Here's 3 articles I thought were worth sharing from my morning reading - after yesterday's entirely predictable and depressing announcement that the UK Government is going to spend more billions on failed nuclear power, Polly Toynbee has a good analysis on how it happened in the Guardian:
The danger is that politicians have decided they have taken the "hard decision" and nuclear is "the answer". If a "mix" is needed, the nuclear concrete mixers may grind up the wind, solar, wave and tidal generators that will be needed before the first lightbulb is lit by a new reactor. Meanwhile, the "nuclear answer" deceives the public and delays yet further the necessary great national energy-efficiency drive that politicians continue to avoid.
On another big environmental story - the Tata cheap car for India, Desicritics has an entertaining article, 'The Tata Nano: The Second Coming or Satan's Car?' It covers the debate around the launch of the car and its implications and includes a few barbed comments about our own slogans!
PRO - It's a marvel of engineering! The world will never be the same again! Tata rocks! The car has been reinvented again! And also, Jesus, Vishnu, Moses, Mohammad and the Buddha called and said this was the best they could have hoped for humanity. Amen.
CON - It's a disaster of unimaginable levels! Civilization as we know it has come to an end! Tomorrow we shall wake up and find ourselves choking to death! Polar bears will drown, whales will be eaten and tigers will end up as Viagra. I hope you're all happy, doing Satan's work!
Less entertaining but also informative about Green IT trends - 'More Steps Toward Eco-Friendliness: Lead-Free, Halogen-Free and Energy Efficiency' from GreenComputing.com. Green was definitely the PR buzzword at the annual gadget fest of the Consumer Electronics Show this year.
Your choice 2007
Here at Greenpeace we like to think we know a good story when we see it, but hard numbers count more than hunches - here's the top ten of what you, our audience liked reading on our website, viewing on our YouTube channel or in our newsletter in 2007:
Back in Sept we asked you to suggest names for humpback whales tagged as part of our Great Whale Trail site. Lots of interesting, moving, earnest and exotic names were on the short list but Richard had a hunch that including one slightly silly one on the short list just might be a good idea (personally I was rooting for 'James Bond: Licensed to Krill') and so Mister Splashy Pants made the short list. The story was BoingBoing-ed and Reddit-ed and the meme did what memes do. Over 150,000 votes later there's now a humpback whale called Mr Splashy Pants swimming around the Southern Ocean.
2: Baring all to highlight climate threat
We all know sex sells, so when our Swiss office revealed plans for famous artist Spencer Tunick to photograph six hundred people shedding their clothes on a glacier in the Swiss Alps we knew it would as some would say - 'have legs'. One of our team even took part - the rest of us just put up the photos. Unsurprisingly some 849,000 of you found the YouTube video more interesting that the written story!
First launched in August 06 our quarterly Guide to Greener Electronics has been attracting a lot of you gadget lovers to see which companies are doing most for the environment. The addition of games console makers in November drove a new peak in links from many gadget/technology blogs. With an average of more than 10,000 visitors every month it's also not gone unnoticed by most of the major companies.
God doesn't do waste
That's the message from the Archbishop of Canterbury for the new year. You can see his New Years address in full at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6qGu4vQJFA
France's Revolution Ecologique
Greenpeace campaigners are still in heated discussions this morning with the French government and representatives of other social partners at France's environmental policy making forum, le Grenelle de l’Environnement. If you can read French, keep an eye on the Greenpeace France homepage for the latest updates. If Al Gore is right, this is the beginning of an historic process.
Last night Al Gore joined Nicolas Sarkozy on stage, after the French President announced decisions made during the first two days of the forum, including notably a freeze on GM field trials and a ban on incandescent lightbulbs.
How many years does it take to change a lightbulb? If the lighting industry had their way, it would take until 2019. Sarkozy yesterday agreed to ban the most inefficient lightbulbs by 2010.
France's Environment Minister, Jean-Louis Borloo, said in an interview on Tuesday "if all of France switched lightbulbs, we could save (turn off) a nuclear power station."
There's more stuff in there about the climate and energy efficiency in particular. Indeed, at a glance much of this government's stated Révolution Ecologique (except the nuclear bits for now) looks like Greenpeace's Energy Revolution.
Protests about working conditions in France didn't stop after the original Grenelle (on labour issues) in May 1968. They spread, and inspired more protest and organizing around the world. It's that time again.
(Picture of Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson is especially for the Dutch Government, which last week U-turned on it's promise to ban the ill-fated incandescent lightbulb.)
UPDATE: The Grenelle is over. La Vie Verte just published a good roundup in English of what happened.
The Hip-Hop Environmentalist
Dr Octagon's latest single "Trees" is being used by MTV to promote awareness of the environment through the THINK campaign and $1 of each downloaded single will go to Friends Of The Earth on their BIG ASK campaign.
Respect!
Five eco blogs to visit for Blogday 2007
- First up is EKO((b))logas, a blog in Lithuanian about climate change and eco activism. (I spotted this blog via our who-links-to-us log for the Greenpeace 7 steps energy efficiency campaign... I don't speak Lithuanian.)
- Matt Prescott's Ban the bulb blog is another excellent grassroots activism site, chock full of useful information about those ill fated incandescent lightbulbs that waste so much energy.
- I read Cursor.org's Media Patrol every weekday for news on U.S. politics and foreign relations. It's easier to read than a newsreader filled with RSS feeds.
- I don't know how Pepijn and Juliette find the time to keep their blogs updated, and still do such sterling work in the Greenpeace Forum. They're stars! Go visit their blogs and say hello!
- Wait, that's five already! :-P
Still reading? Got a technorati account? Why not fave Greenpeace's MakingWaves blog (this one).
(technorati.com tag: BlogDay2007)
Thank you, Rachel Carson
©Greenpeace/Newman
I was a child of the 60s, and the place where I spent most of my youth was upstate New York in the United States.Largely agricultural, the area was heavily sprayed with pesticides. The marshes at the north end of Cayuga lake were sprayed with DDT. Because of this, as a child, I thought of eagles and herons as exotic species that featured in picture books, and lived far away. Not so. Eagles, herons, and a handful of other raptors and large bird species once ranged across upstate New York. But by the time I was a child, they were all gone.
It took a Zoologist named Rachel Carson to figure out why. Because before she wrote Silent Spring, there was nobody charged with noticing. There was no Environmental Protection Agency. There were no eco-activists. If the US Department of Agriculture wanted to cause widespread collateral damage to birds and aquatic wildlife in its relentless pursuit of eradicating perceived pests, who was to raise a hand in protest?
The book Rachel Carson wrote so profoundly awoke a complacent public, it changed the world. The EPA, Greenpeace, the Endangered Species Act, and the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts in the US are arguably all direct decedents of Silent Spring, along with bans on dozens of chemicals she targeted in her pages.But Silent Spring wasn't about chemicals.
What Carson exposed was more: a corporate, government, and social blindness to consequences, to linkedness, to the basics of balance and response in natural systems.
When Greenpeace rocks Beijing
by Kontau in Beijing.
I was standing behind the stage when Imogen Heap, Nadirah X, Greenpeace guitarists and Chinese rock musicians joined together to perform the song "Go Green". Thousands of young people were waving their hands with the peace sign, and singing along the chorus "Go green, Greenpeace!" This was truly the most memorable moment of my Greenpeace life.
Mammalian Super Tree
Via the BBC I just found this rather wonderful image. It shows the explosion of types of mammal species that happened over time. If you download the complete pdf file (it's 1.6 MB) you can zoom all the way down to the individual species.
The tragedy is that this explosion of diversity is now being put into reverse, the next decades will see this tree becoming less, not more dense as man made extinctions wind back the evolutionary clock. Unless of course we do something about it.
Cultural Baggage
I was taught a lesson today that I suspect will live with me for a long time. To cut a long story short, I had written an article for the website about the Congo rainforest. A Belgian colleague asked me to change the wording in one paragraph as it could be perceived as offensive to African people.
My initial reaction was to be a little defensive, both because I believe that I am culturally sensitive and also because sometimes I can be a little possessive about my writing. The conversation in my head was full of indignation, the very suggestion that I wasn't being culturally sensitive was in itself, offensive.
Bush chills with MSN pals
Savaglio/TBWA, an ad agency in Argentina, recently tendered for some work with us. Tucked onto a CD chuck full of good ideas ranging from an entire TV series concept to new T-shirt designs, they included this minty-cool piece of digital candy as a present. Given George's lackluster performance and unambitious State of the Union address the other night, it seems the right time to share it. Click on the image.
Queen Elizabeth goes green for Christmas
It's the same every year - each time Christmas comes around, your shelves become littered with cards featuring bedraggled robins and mawkish fireside scenes until they go into the recycling bin. But not this year, because we've cooked up something a little bit different.
It's an e-card, but not just any old e-card. With the help of Her Royal Highness Queen E (or at least, someone who looks very much like her), you can send friends and family alike the Queen's Alternative Christmas Speech, a customised message full of Christmas cheer that's eco-friendly in two ways. First, no trees will have been harmed in making it, and secondly Queen E has plenty of practical advice to impart that will help one and all have a greener Christmas. If you know someone who could improve their ways, this is the card for you.
For those not in the know, here in the UK (and, I believe, across the Commonwealth), our television screens are blessed each Christmas Day with a personal message from our Head of State. It's kind of like the US Presidential address but with more corgis and tweed, and receives a fair bit of lampooning.
Green and Happy Christmas...
Elaine's been driving us all mad (well, at least since I arrived in Amsterdam yesterday) with her Christmas card plans. For me, it's a little early - am I a Scrooge to not really think about Christmas until about December 20th? Anyway, enjoy, and spread far and wide!
300 million and counting
At 07:46 East Coast Time on the 17th October 2006 in the United States, a momentous event occurred. The 300 millionth American was born. Or as some people in the US have been pointing out, they most likely just walked across the border. The media not surprisingly prefers the baby story; a photogenic child untainted by the dirty politics of US immigration so we'll stick with the script. 300 million seems small potatoes compared to the enormous populations of China or India, both well over a billion people and still growing, but it is the average US citizen's consumption of resources that makes 300 million such a frightening milestone.
Humanity has started eating the planet
There was a fairly stiff article in today's Independent (UK):
"Today is a bleak day for the environment, the day of the year when mankind over-exploits the world's resources - the day when we start living beyond our ecological means."
That's it, folks today was Overshoot Day. According to Global Footprint Network, October 9th was when we began using more than our fair share of the Earth when "humanity started eating the planet".
Assuming that the world has a certain quantity of natural resources that can be used sustainably each year, October 9th is the date on which we've used it up. We've gone into the red, and the interest rates have started kicking in.
Our place in the world (Röyksopp video)
For me, having a good attitude towards the environment is realising that "the environment" isn't somewhere else - it's where you're sitting right now. And part of that realisation is how certain actions - those that we take for granted - have a knock-on effect. The electricity used to read this webpage has to come from somewhere - from fossil fuels, nuclear, hydroelectric or maybe wind. So there's a chance that reading this page has caused chimney somewhere to pump a few more particles of CO2 into the sky. When you wash up or flush the toilet, the water has to come from somewhere - and go somewhere else.
While this amazing video by Norwegian band Röyksopp doesn't actively promote a green message, it really struck me on how well it illustrates the interconnectivity between things - even at a mundane, domestic level. There are no isolated actions...
Daryl Hanna has a vlog
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.
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