Ahh, Weekends. Time to kick back with a cold gif, throw a couple of logos on the creative fires, open up a jar of culture jam, turn on the Photoshop and bar-b-cue something for the Green my Apple campaign:
Monthly Archives: September 2006
Green my iPod
Filed under Activism, Green Design, Greenpeace, Uncategorized
Green my Apple, Steve!
All the Apple users in the Greenpeace office here in Amsterdam are hiding behind the clean lines of their Apple monitors, squirrelling away their iPods, and placing their arms protectively about their iBooks.
But despite the fact we’re going head to head with Cupertino, we’re not confiscating anybody’s precious Apple. We’ve just launched the Green my Apple campaign.
We’re asking Apple users worldwide to be the ones to make Apple do the right thing: get rid of the toxics in their product lines and introduce a world-wide take-back and recycle scheme. Simple, really.
We’re not going to bungee-jump into the next MacWorld. We aren’t hanging banners on Apple HQ. We want that “Snakes on a Plane” effect: people getting passionate about the campaign because they’ve had a hand in creating it. We need T-shirts! (Every good campaign begins with the T-shirt, sez one Greenpeace wag).
We’re offering video and images under a Creative Commons license for people to remix. We’re looking to harness all that LOVE that Apple generates and concentrate it into one vast rainbow-raygun beam that melts the heart of Steve Jobs and makes him stop poisoning children and small animals in the e-waste graveyards of China and India.
So pick up the challenge. Whatever you do, tag it: greenmyapple Drop us a line about it.
Come on, Steve-o. You’ve already saved Apple. Now Save the World.
Filed under Activism, Green Design, Greenpeace
Greenpeace, quien es?
Slacker am I — a whole week without a post. I’ve been away at a Greenpeace Communications directors meeting talking about Greenpeace’s identity.
Now talking about Greenpeace’s identity is almost oxymoronic: we are defined by what we do, not by what we say. We use “actions speak louder than words” as our credo.
But this is now the second organisation-wide project I’ve been involved with which has sought to nail down, in a mission statement and a set of backing documents, exactly what Greenpeace is.
It’s harder than one would think. When I think of people who have embodied Greenpeace to me, they’re not a consistent identity or persona. If I were to draw them up as characters, they might look like this:
The Rambo: Greenpeace in Rambo mode stole into the secret Siberian mink farms where the Soviets were feeding whale meat to the animals. The land crew was captured (and this in the days when people were being shot at the Berlin wall), but we managed to get photographic evidence of the operation to the Rainbow Warrior. The Rainbow Warrior then played chicken with a Soviet Destroyer and beat it out to the 12-mile limit. A lone zodiac driver takes off for US waters to get the pictures out. When he gets captured by a soviet helicopter, a crewmember breaks his leg jumping into the running zodiac from the deck of the ship to rescue the film. Rambo/Greenpeace got the pictures out, and the news was awash the next day, exposing the Soviet’s 100% illegal practice. That’s Greenpeace.
The Diplomat: Few people get to see Greenpeace in operation at the meetings where international law gets made, but there’s a particular brand of “political judo” which we’ve practiced for many years that has won major victories. One of our operatives, faced with a split vote over language that determine whether a particular law would be effective or not, calls the boss of one of the representatives the night before the vote to warn him about how seriously Greenpeace takes this vote, and how unwelcome we can be to politicians in bringing attention to things we don’t like. The target vote changes overnight. The delegate privately calls the Greenpeace representative a “nasty little agitator.” The Greenpeace operative likes that so much, he puts it on his calling card. That’s Greenpeace.
The mystics vs the mechanics: Greenpeace is full of meat-eating, car-driving, tobacco-smoking activists who believe the way to change the world is through monkeywrenching large powerful forces rather than making individual lifestyle choices. But it’s also full of vegan pacifist hemp-wearers who believe you have to be the change you’re trying to create. Ever since the first voyage of Greenpeace, when an argument broke out between the meat-eaters and the vegetarians about how to stock the ship, these factions have been locked in a quiet struggle. The latter would follow a rainbow to find the whaling fleet. The former would role their eyes and call it luck when it worked. That’s sooo Greenpeace.
There’s a dozen more. There’s the Greenpeace that believes that our job is simply to call attention to environmental crimes, and the Greenepace that believes we need to be part of the solutions. There’s the Greenpeace that will sit down with a corporate CEO to negotiate, and those who don’t believe that to be our place. There’s the Greenpeace that believes saving whales is a conservationist cause, and those that call it an animal rights issue.
You can see the problems anyone would fact in trying to distill that down into a crisp definition.
One way to tackle it is storytelling. I’ve been thinking about and gathering stories which I believe define the Greenpeace Identity, from snippets of the above to David McTaggart sailing into a nuclear test zone as his act of personal defiance, to Cyberactivist Anne Novek singlehandedly flipping a local patio-furniture company’s policy on purchasing endangered wood.
Heard a story that you think defines Greenpeace’s identity? Drop me a line, post a comment, send me a rainbow.
Filed under Activism, Greenpeace
Captain’s Blog, Stardate 0060915
Mike was second mate on the Greenpeace ship Esperanza a few years back when I got on board for a campaign against Icelandic whaling.
He’s one of Greenpeace’s Old Spirits: a gentle giant with a big heart and the kind of passion for the work that infuses everything he does. During his travels in his days as a mate, Mike kept a large mailing list of friends and family to whom he sent diary entries.
He’s now a Captain aboard the Rainbow Warrior and writing his own blog, full of the song of the wind in the stays and the creak of the winch. Check out this nugget, and catch him regularly at http://mastermike.wordpress.com/
Swim Stop
August 19th, 2006 at 7:34 pm
The ship slows down, I’m in the engine room with Tapio, the chief engineer. He de-clutches the shaft from the main engine and tightens up the brake. “We don’t want the propeller turning with swimmers in the water,” he says to me. By the time I emerge from the engine room and onto the main deck the crew are already splashing about; they’re in the deep end. It’s a swim stop and there are three thousand meters of Tyrrhenian Sea beneath us. I rush down to the cabin I’m sharing in the dungeon and slip into my swimming trunks. It’s been a hot Mediterranean day and the sea is cool to my skin and refreshingly salty to my lips. I swim to the stern and then up the length of the Rainbow Warrior to the bow. The anchors are tiny little things, she’s a beautiful little boat. And I feel so privileged to be here and seeing the icon from another angle. You can’t sink a rainbow.
Filed under Activism, Greenpeace
September 11th: the birthday of non-violence
On Sept. 11, 1906, Gandhi, then a young, little-known lawyer working in South Africa, joined a meeting of fellow Indians in a Johannesburg theater to protest a proposed law that would force Indians to carry identity documents and be fingerprinted. …
Gandhi convinced those present to resist or ignore the law but without resorting to violence. He called the idea “Satyagraha,” which literally translates as “insistence on truth.”
This conicidence floored me. That one of the most creative acts of violence since the trojan horse — boxcutters taking out the twin towers — shares an anniversary with one of the most creative acts of resistance.
Filed under Uncategorized
Toxic Tittilation
“Greenpeace comes down hard on dangerous dildos!” Such was the headline in one online story about the news from our Dutch colleagues, who have found high levels of gender-bending phthalates in sex toys sold in the Netherlands.
Phthalates are used to soften plastics. They also mimic human hormones and can damage reproduction, cause liver and kidney defects, and upset the body’s ability to regulate hormone production. There is some evidence they cause cancer.
In 2005 the EU banned the use of the phthalate DEHP in children’s toys because of its damaging effect on young children. One of the issues there was that many toys spend a lot of time in the mouths of children, accelerating the leaching of chemicals and their uptake in the bloodstream.
Now, independent testing revealed that seven out of eight sex toys, including dildos and vibrators, contained phthalates in concentrations varying from 24 to 51 percent. According to Greenpeace Toxic campaigner Bart van Opzeeland, these are among the highest concentrations found in anything he’s tested over the last few years, and in objects intended for internal and oral use, no less.
Three million people in the Netherlands say they have sex toys in their homes, and a million toys a year are sold on the domestic market. (Yeah, you do the math, you realise that either more people have sex toys in their home than say they do, or an awful lot of tourists are buying them here and taking them home.)
So other than writing a rib-tickling blog about this (oh come on, you gotta let me have ONE gratuitous sex pun here), what’s a body to do????
You can sign this petition demanding better chemical regulation in the EU, and you can watch this video about how to buy safer sex toys in future.
Filed under Activism, Uncategorized
