Monthly Archives: May 2006

Around the campfire at Greenpeace meetings when we’re not singing Kumbaya and making ‘smores, we’re analyzing how effectively we are getting our messages across to THE PUBLIC. Got us full color graphs with circles and arrows ‘n everythin’.

But many of us old timers know the real test of what’s making it into the media mindstream: call your mom and ask her what she’s heard about lately.

Now my Mom lives in the States, where Greenpeace news can be as rare as snow on the Fourth of July and even less long-lasting. My Mom reads no newspapers, doesn’t watch network news, and only occasionally listens to the radio. But this Mother’s Day, she knew TWO things about Greenpeace.

One, somebody in a bikini had protested about some pollution thing.

And Two, we’d changed our position on nuclear power.

I set her straight on point two — the only person in Greenpeace who has changed their position on nuclear power is Patrick Moore, a guy who hasn’t worked for us for two decades and makes a living claiming that he just wasn’t very smart when he was an environmentalist. Now he gets paid by the forest industry and the GE industry and the nuclear industry, and he’s suddenly much smarter. If you got paid by a multimillion dollar industry to spout opinions honed by global PR machines which can put a shiny spit and polish on any old shoe, you’d sound real smart too.
On point Bikini,  I had to explain what the action was about, that it involved chlorine-spewing paper mills owned by Europeans which wouldn’t be allowed to operate in Europe, which will be polluting the very river our Carnival Queen was elected to celebrate, and which runs between two countries whose relationship has gone notably chilly as a result of Uruguay’s decision to place the plants just upstream of the border and let Argentina have the effluent. So my mom came away with what Hugo Chavez did — “I didn’t read the sign, I only saw the bikini.“
But  oh the internal sturm and drang I didn’t tell my Mom about. Is using a bikini to carry a message wrong? Is it somehow less honorable than climbing a mast and hanging a banner?  These questions and more started bouncing around our intranet the moment the action was over.
The Carnival Queen in question was brilliantly articulate in my view, about her right to address any damn head of state in the world about the pollution of the river that runs through her home, thank you very much, and if she did it with a Samba shake well hello Greenpeace, whatever happened to the dictate that “We’re fighting to get our children into the next century in one piece. Beyond that, to hell with the rules.”

The irony isn’t lost on me that we put ourselves into life threatening situations in tiny boats in front of explosive harpoons, sometimes to far less attention than our Carnival Queen got. We spend years researching the death toll from Chernobyl to a point that we can go toe to toe with the World Health Organization and not blink, and a momentary smirk on Tony Blair’s face makes a photo travel around the world in an instant.

Saint Machiavelli makes the coffee around here, and I say what he says: Whatever works.

In my view we’re in a death-defying race for the most limited and valuable commodity in modern society: the tiny puffs of human attention that collectively set society’s sails and change the course of history. Coca Cola isn’t tying itself in knots over whether it’s being too aggressive in drawing eyeballs. The Nuclear Industry isn’t doing any “Are we being to sensationalist?” navel-gazing in their Thursday therapy sessions or chastising one another on internal email lists for perhaps overplaying that Patrick Moore character’s very old association with Greenpeace.

The core values of Greenpeace are non-violence, respect for nature, and the political and financial independence which allows us to name names and expose environmental crimes without fear or favor. Around those, we draw an uncrossable line. But when it comes to grabbing THE PUBLIC’s attention to issues which impact our planet’s future, as far as I’m concerned it’s war, and the only rule of war is “win.”

And we’re not winning until we’ve won over my Mom.

–b