Monthly Archives: January 2010

by Brian Fitzgerald | January 27, 2010

Here’s to Apple: iPad keeps its greener promise

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers.”

I always saw Greenpeace as fitting nicely into that old “Think Different” Apple ad. So in the early days of the “Green my Apple” campaign, when the company was (gently, lovingly) lambasted for the number of toxic chemicals in its products, I was disappointed at how Indifferent and Undifferent they were thinking. Steve went ballistic at a taste of his own medicine. He dug in.

But he had a problem. Because we weren’t actually talking to him — we were talking to his customer base. He could afford to ignore Greenpeace. But his customers? To them he has to listen. And when we said “We love our mac. We just wish it came in green” we were speaking with their voice, and they liked what they heard. In the best Lao Tzu style, we won without ever going to war, when the words “A greener Apple” appeared on apple.com, linking to a policy which delivered on nearly all of our demands. <div style=“width:250;margin-left:4;float:right>

But this month, Apple showed its true colors as a renegade by leading the pack in Greenpeace’s Guide to Greener Electronics in the number one slot, and the launch of the iPad kept Apple true to their green word: it’s PVC, BFR, arsenic and mercury free. Which means that if it ends up in India or China or Africa at the end of its lifecycle, to be cooked apart by 12 year old scavengers recovering precious metals or components, it won’t be poisoning them. The world is measurably better for this. And by greening Apple, Jobs is helping green the whole electronics industry.

But there’s more to be done. The green iPad shouldn’t be operating in a brown cloud. It shouldn’t be powered by dead dinosaurs. It shouldn’t be running its thin, sleek screen on electricity with a fat flatulent carbon footprint. Apple has the power to change minds, to change the world, and they should use it more to ensure that the cloud computing sector, our servers, our infrastructure, that internet that you’re holding in your hands when you hold an iPad is powered by green energy. When Apple walked out of the US Chamber of Commerce over disagreements about the Chamber’s stance on global warming, they were showing the kind of leadership we all need. Keep it up, Apple. Be that renegade, that energy revolutionary, that crazy force which refuses to accept the world as it is, but demands it to live up to a personal vision of what it could be.

Because the world needs those rebels now. It needs the renegades who won’t accept an unacceptable status quo, and who push the human race forward.

Take it further, Apple. Kick it up a notch. Because the ones who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the only ones who do.

The unifying effect of a global threat

We’ve been interviewing for more than a few staff positions here at Greenpeace International, and I’ve been sitting in more interviews than I’d like. They’re exhausting! High significance, need for constant high-energy attention to meaning and nuance, and they require me to summon my inner organizational representational extrovert, which I can do, thank you very much, but which costs me in energy. (A natural extrovert finds extroversion exhilarating — me it stretches like a bungee cord.)

But one thing I really enjoy is when internal candidates apply, and I get to peek into my colleagues’ CVs — it seems there’s always surprises, even when I think I know someone well. As there was last week, when I learned that someone I’ve worked with off an on for more than a decade was working to oppose the stationing of Cruise and Pershing missiles in England, at the same time that I was opposing their manufacture and deployment Stateside. Never knew. Should have guessed.

I’ve been reflecting on that time a lot lately, as I’ve thought about the role of the TckTckTck campaign — the public face of the Global Coalition for Climate Action (GCCA) — in the run up to the Copenhagen climate summit. Continue reading →

Handcuffs, jail cells, rap sheets, and Climate Change

get-out-of-jail-free-greenpeace It’s been a good week for get out of jail cards — just don’t let anybody tell you they’re free.

At the beginning of the week, I had two lots of friends who were facing the prospect of spending this weekend in jail. One set in South Dakota facing sentencing for draping a banner on Mt Rushmore reminding Obama that history honors leaders, not politicians, and his chance to make history is in turning the tide on climate change. In Denmark, the Red Carpet Four had already served 20 days in jail without trial, across Christmas and New Years, with no visitation rights. They were being punished, in effect, for making monkeys of Danish security when they breezed into a Head of State dinner hosted by the Queen. A limousine, a Tux, an off-the-rack dress, and a motorcade with the Greenpeace logo and the words “Planetary Emergency, Authorized Personnel” on it was all it took to get an audience with 120 world leaders, whom they asked to drop the caviar forks, put a cork in the champagne, and go make a climate treaty.

In both cases, prosecutors likened the activists, in words or deeds, to terrorists. Threats to democracy. Law breakers.

Law Breakers? We’ll take that. But terrorists they are not, and when it comes to Democracy, those who take up civil disobedience in the name of a cause are Democracy’s champions, not its enemies.

Rosa Parks was not a terrorist. Gandhi was not a terrorist. Law is made when law is broken, and truly big change seldom happens from within the system. Somebody has to throw the tea overboard to get things moving.

Right now, our elected leaders are failing to address the gravest threat our world has ever faced. The longer the inaction prevails, the more action we’re going to see by civil society. More and more people, mostly, but not all, young, will choose to take non-violent direct action — because civil disobedience is a last resort. It’s what a movement does when the legal channels have been exhausted. When the courts and the politicians and the corporates have been asked, and failed to respond. The people who make that choice are not criminals. They’re heroes.

I found it somewhat ironic that in the case of the Mt Rushmore folks, most were given sentences that involved community service. Now that’s a case where the punishment fits the crime. Because in fact, a community service is exactly what they rendered when they raised their voices, as big as a mountain, to let Obama know that we’re not the only ones watching — the future is.

And when the history of climate change is written, the real criminals will be outed, and they were not the folks who faced the possibility of jail this weekend.

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Filed under Activism, Greenpeace

by Brian Fitzgerald | January 4, 2010

Twitter page reactions

Ok, too much panetone trifle over the holidays, let’s start back into the New Year light.

I remember back in the 90s being very excited about an application with which you could apply a virtual post-it note to a web page. We thought this was killer — you could surround greenwash pages with reality checks, you could cross-reference pages trumpeting nuclear power as a global warming solution with all the reasons the Kyoto scientists refused to put it in the credits column. But of course, it required a dedicated app for those who posted and those who read the notes, so we had a very small community of people reading one another’s comments. The app never took off in a way that it really made a hit.

But twitter has an API call that allows you to gather references to any page into a single set of tweets, and some clever git named Gombo has made a Chrome extension called Twitter reactions out of it. Hey Presto, post-it notes for the web, and another great way to do page commentary and brand monitoring with Twitter.

Thanks, Gombo!