Monthly Archives: April 2006

Nice one from Greenpeace USA attacking the Ted Kennedy opposition to the Cape Wind project. (Sorry, this page has an auto-load flash — adjust your speakers if like me you’re annoyed by a sound blast when loading a page).

Ted has a mansion on Cape Cod and has sided with the brainless position that the mills will mar the view.

Since when is a windmill ugly? I’ve never understood this — to me they are graceful symbols of planetary custodianship. I sail in the Ijsomeer here in Holland, where they dot the landscape (or the lakescape, I guess), and they make me proud.

What also makes me proud is to see Greenpeace USA going after an A-list Democrat for an environmentally unsound position. Trolling through Earth Day stuff I was remembering how insistent we were in the 80s about Greenpeace being politically neutral. Today everything in the US is so polarized around liberal/conservative Democrat/Republican issue splits, but the planet can’t afford that squabble, and it shouldn’t be Greenpeace’s fight.
That windfarm will provide home grown American energy and Ted Kennedy opposes it. Come on, conservatives, this ought to be YOUR cause.

–b

Did you know that the Netherlands is a nuclear power, and the conservative government here might join the US in a nuclear strike on Iran?

Absurd as this seems, the fact is that the US plans for a nuclear strike on Iran, revealed in Seymour Hersh’s New Yorker piece, would rely on US nukes stationed in Netherlands, Italy, Germany, the UK, Belgium, and Turkey.

And under the terms of these weapons placements, the US could do it without asking any of those countries if they’d mind terribly enabling that attack, being complicit in the deaths of up to 3 million people, and bringing down the inevitable reprisals and possibly a global jihad down on their own heads.

Regardless of how things go in Iran, it’s time to get those missiles out of Europe. They’re a cold war legacy, a danger to people who have no say in the election of the guy who decides if they’re used, potential terror targets, and (as if it mattered) completely illegal under international law. (The NonProliferation Treaty, which the US loves and hates selectively did declare that no land-based nukes are to be stationed outside a country’s own territory.)

It’s time that those of us who believe in Peace made our own pre-emptive strike. Let’s get those NATO nukes out of the equation. Demand an assurance from the Defence Ministers of the UK, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Italy, and Turkey that they won’t play at the game of nuking Iran. And tell them to wise up: US Nukes out of NATO.

–b

OK, this video of a grafitti artist taggin Air Force One is a fake. Marc Ecko’s speech about “Why I Tagged Air Force One” is pedantic and boring. And instead of using the opportunity for message, he uses it for marketing.

But what a great idea, and what a challenge for some enterprising young tagger or political activist out there.
And don’t talk to me about security. Back in my days of Breaking and Entering for a Good Cause, I learned a variation on that old Godfather saw: “If history teaches us anything, it’s that you can always get around security.”

Roof of the Canadian Embassy in Boston? Fire escape could be pulled to ground level with a simple hook and rope.

Nuclear Test Site in Nevada? They relied on nothing but desert to protect that in 1983. Four of us walked over salt lakes and abandoned mining trails and we were in for a four –day camping trip. “A security guard out here would make the Maytag Repairman look like an overachiever” jested Jon Hinck.

Statue of Liberty? The guard watched TV in his trailer and made his walk around the base on the hour like clockwork. We landed zodiacs at quarter past the hour and put a Hiroshima anniversary message up.
The US Capitol building? We distracted security with a decoy and scaled some scaffolding to put an anti-nuclear message on the dome.

Others in Greenpeace have gotten into UK missile bases, nuclear power plants, and put banners on the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, the Pyramid of Ghiza, the statue of Christ overlooking Rio… you name it, Greenpeace has bannered it.
Monumental Banners are Free Speech Crimes: not unlike the art crime of grafitti.

So let’s consider. If we could tag Air Force One with any message, what would it be???

Weapon of Mass Deception
No Nukes (except for mine)
Osama was here
If you can read this, you still live in a free country
I brake for nothing. Iraq body count: 35,000
Terrorist on board
Best I can do on one cup of coffee. Help me out here!

–b

P.S. When news of my involvement in the bannering of the Statue of Liberty in 85 reached my mother, she told a friend that I did it “to prove how easily terrorists could get to the statue.” I still haven’t had the conversation with her that begins “Ummmm, actually, Mom.…”

Many moons ago, when I worked with then-Greenpeace Board Chair David McTaggart, “Greenpeace co-founder” Patrick Moore was on the board. He was a likeable enough guy if you could get past the ego (but hey, after hanging out with McTaggart and his pals for a while, you get used to big egos), quick witted, good with a sound bite, personable.

We had one of our board meetings in Vancouver some time after he’d resigned/got booted, and we went to visit him at his home, where he was showing off his brand new, fire-engine red TR-7 sports car, purchased with the gains from his … fish farm.

And we were supposed to be impressed?

Patrick was raising salmon for profit, not fish for food. As a young idealist, I’d really looked up to Patrick. But I changed my mind that day.

As a scientist, he knew exactly the ecosystem compromises he made to amass the little pot of gold that bought him that car. As an environmentalist he knew exactly how much “green spirit” he was showing off tooling around town in a fire-breathing vampire of pretoleum. And as a role model, he damn well should have known better than to try to impress any of us who had looked up to him in any way, shape, or form. (The salmon farm, appropriately enough, failed, as most monocultures do, when a single invasive infection wiped out his entire stock.)
Well, Patrick has lived up to and surpassed that disappointment in the years since. As a paid apologist for the forest industry, he changed his motto from “A flower is your brother” to “A clearcut is just a temporary meadow,” and inspired the “Patrick Moore is a big fat liar” website as he battled against protection of the Great Bear Rainforest.
Patrick lost the “war in the woods” when less extremist (and unpaid for) views prevailed and protected the most important parts of North America’s last temperate rainforest. He was wrong about the Great Bear forest. He was wrong about his fish farm. And he was wrong when the French government bombed the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior to think (and SAY, to a New Zealand journalist) that it was an assasination attempt against him personally and “that bomb was meant for me.“
Now he’s getting a piece of the multi-million-dollar PR offensive the Nuclear Industry is putting out there to say Nukes are the Answer to Climate Change in the Washington Post.

They aren’t. And scientists who aren’t paid to have an opinion about nukes and carbon production know that Patrick is wrong again.

Worse, he’s a smart enough cookie to KNOW he’s wrong. Appropriate that his piece in the Washington Post appeared on Easter. He’s been termed an Eco-Judas before, and it looks like he’s found a new source for his 30 pieces of silver.

Here’s a suggestion, Patrick:

–b

Jeepers, things at the Greenpeace office have been in non-stop high gear for a while now, and I’m in that horrible place where my to-do list is expanding out beyond the boundaries of available time. And that’s INCLUDING the twice a week in the office until midnight routine, which ain’t gonna happen this week.

Between the (somewhat) unexpected Seymour Hersh revelations about US nuclear attack plans for Iran that kicked our Nukes-out-of-NATO campaign into high gear, the McDonald’s Monkey-Murdering-McNuggets story, a new site build for our Disarmament campaign, ongoing Oceans work and more than the usual number of trains to be kept running for more than the usual number of people, the competition for the front page of the Greenpeace website has been fierce, the deadlines have been rolling in one on top of another, and things (and your humble diarist) get a bit tetchy when the pace starts exceeding the speed limit — and that’s an Autobahn-generous number at the best of times.

I’m soooooooooooooo ready for a holiday. Easter, bring it on!!!

But today is a big day for my eldest sprout, Doon, who will be going on his first canvassing expedition. Those damn World Wildlife Fund people have infiltrated his school with an outstanding kid’s campaign to save the sharks (jealous of their website, moi?) and we figured a prime location for him to pick up his quota of fifteen 3 euro donations would be the Greenpeace Office.

I gave a talk yesterday to 14 US university students who were here with the Greenpeace activist training programme. Brought them down into the basement to set the scene for what a Greenpeace office looked like in the early 80s, and talked about canvassing, and what great activist training that is. You have two minutes, max, to state your objective and win your audience over before that door closes on you. (An eternity, now that I think about it, compared to the grab window on the web.)

It was great to see signs of intelligent life, and active radicalism, among American University students, and one of them came up to me afterwords and said it was the first time he’d had a “passing the torch” speech and that he’d found that inspiring — so many of the “older people” (ouch) that he knew who had been active in their youth were now bitter and dismissive of those efforts. The latter is hard to hear, but the former warmed the cockles.
It’s so hard in this job to keep the long view — remembering that the activism that is happening now, the action that needs to be out the door, the messaging that needs to be relevant to a particular audience, also has a role in the future of activism as a whole. And that when we forget to speak to youth, and to kids, we’re doing a disservice to those who will follow.

WWF (or World Nature Fund, as they are known here in Holland) REALLY knows how to organize kids. I’ve always loved their Panda Passport system, and I’m thoroughly impressed with this shark campaign. Seems like every kid at Doon’s school knows the sharks are in danger and the range of games and easy learning materials at their site is very cool. I’m glad they’re thinking about that stuff.

Amazon being cleared to grow soy which goes into the chicken mcnuggets that go into Unhappy meals in Europe.

I keep telling my son, Doon, that clown is evil.

Go yell about it.

And if you blog this one, tag it “McAmazon,” wouldja? I have a feeling this one is going to have some legs, and it would be nice to be able to track it down.

I’m still trying to get Movable Type to accept a Blog Claim tag from Technorati, and if I can’t get around a mod_security issue I’m having with my host, I may just have to make the leap to WordPress.

Of course, that’ll probably bring on a whole new heap of humdingers.