Arctic Sunrise
It’s 4am in the morning and the Arctic Sunrise lies at anchor just off Den Helder, the last Dutch port before you enter the North Sea. I’m in the campaign office, a cabin close by the bridge that reeks of human beings spending too many days in too close proximity under too much stress. Here the action team has just learned that their last 24 hours of planning and training to stop an oil rig from moving into place in the Arctic have been for nought. The rig has got wind of Greenpeace’s presence in the region, doubling its speed. We can’t catch them in time to provide the planned dramatic backdrop to the speech of Kumi Naidoo, our Executive Director, before the United Nations to call for an end to oil drilling in the Arctic.
What the team doesn’t know is that this is a false alarm. It’s designed to test their sleep-deprived decision making, strain the team and its leader, demonstrate the importance of backup contingency plans at sea, and stress their overall performance in tomorrow’s action. If they analyse the data closely, they’ll figure out it makes no sense and start to question it. If they don’t, they’ll spend the next hour being observed to see how resiliently they react, what they prioritise, and how well they lay out contingency alternatives. Then they’ll learn that the information of the rig’s acceleration resulted from a computer glitch, and they can return to the plan they’ve cooked up with the crew and spent most of the night preparing, but an hour the poorer in preparation time and sleep.
This is an On Board Campaigners Training, a regular feature of the Greenpeace International Action Team’s curriculum to help accelerate the transition of promising troublemaker talent into seasoned salty dogs. Continue reading
