Category Archives: History

Veteran Greenpeace watchers will have noticed that we’re running hot with quite a few online brand-jamming campaigns at the moment.

• You can become a Jedi in the Rebel Alliance against VW’s green veneer (Yes, VW makes some of the most fuel efficient cars on the European market. But thats only 6% of their global group sales, they artificially inflate the price of those cars AND they’re the big gorilla of opposition to climate legislation in the US and EU. If that’s green, I’m a wookie.)
• You can join Ken in his intervention against Barbies’ packaging, which is supplied by notorious criminal deforesters in Indonesia. (Lego gets it — they’ve already pledged to switch)
• You can Unfriend Facebook’s idiot retrograde policies of fueling their servers with coal instead of renewables
• You can  urge Nike and adidas to stop poisoning Chinese rivers and detox the textile industry.

All of these campaigns ultimately aim at sea-changes in the way we do business with the Earth. They’re about changing entire industries to more sustainable practices. But unlike so many Greenpeace campaigns in the past, we’re not putting government or regulators directly in the crosshairs with weak-ass petitions or the kind of clicktivism I call Santa Claus missives (letters that will never be read, asking for things you know you’re not going to get): we’re targeting global brands.

I wrote the following for today’s launch of our campaign against Nike and adidas. It says a lot about where we’ve been with this form of campaigning and why we are increasingly going after big brands:

Over the past years you, our 11 million subscribers and supporters worldwide have been changing the face of earth-destructive industries by challenging their leading brands. You’ve helped reduce toxic chemicals in the computer industry with the successful Green My Apple campaign. You’ve convinced Coca Cola to remove climate-killing chemicals from their refrigerators. You’ve stopped a major cause of Amazon forest destruction by challenging the soy purchasing policies of McDonald’sand other fast-food brands. You’ve battled forest destruction by getting Unilever and Nestle to drop contracts with palm oil suppliers sourcing from deforestation through pressure on their Dove and Kit-Kat brands. You’ve recently convinced Lego to stop using packaging from the habitat of the sumatran tiger. Barbie, Facebook, and Volkswagen are all feeling the heat of current corporate campaigns to end deforestation and stop climate change.

You have the power to change Nike and Adidas, and with them, an entire industry. Clean water is not only a basic human right — it is the world’s most threatened essential resource. We’re asking governments to commit to zero discharge of hazardous chemicals within a generation. But governments are slow — the real players in changing industry are the global brands and corporate decision-makers who set policies about what they buy and where they buy it.

What that doesn’t say is how duecedly hard it used to be to get Greenpeace to do this stuff. Back in the days when we first were setting up Greenpeace Planet and our global web presence, most campaigns were all about pressuring politicians. The kind of fun evident in the Barbie push or the VW Darkside campaign was not allowed. Humour was verboten as unbecoming of discourse on a serious issue, and our happy band of hipster webbies were regularly getting their wrists slapped for attempting to spice up the odd press release with a bit of wit.

But in those days we were still, as good McLuhan’s Children, all about the “Media Mind Bomb.” We were convinced that getting coverage from Journalists meant providing a dramatic visual, then sounding like a journalist, or a scientist. We were trying to gain mainstream acceptance from a mainstream media. That’s changed over the last decade or so as we’ve stopped having to speak through the filter of a story editor or a press desk. We knew the power of the “Media mind bomb,” but then we discovered the “Social Media mind bomb.” Boom. Everything changed.

Globalised brand reputations were suddenly massive corporate assets: tarnishing them got the attention of decision makers. We had barely launched our campaign against Coca Cola’s use of climate-killing chemicals in refrigerants at the “Green Olympics” in Sydney in 2000 before the CEO himself was on the phone pledging a phase out: a promise Coke not only kept, but which they extended by bringing along Unilever and most of the industry.

And when we finally started winning concessions, oy the grief we caught for patting Coke or McDonalds on the back or congratulating them or even declaring victory. The dominant thinking was that all corporations were monolithically evil. Kudos –even when they did the right thing– were bad karma.

We’ve come a long, long way from those days, and to the credit of the Good Ship Greenpeace, for all our internal arguments, we don’t argue long with success: these days, every campaign wants the next Green my Apple, the next Kit-Kat, the next Barbie, the next VW Darkside, and every iteration seems to raise the bar and ups the ante.

Flipping a big brand away from the Dark Side is good Judo: it can achieve the same aim as a targeted public push at international legislation or national law, by putting a bigger gorilla on your side of the table. We’ve watched so many former targets (Not just Coke, but McDonalds, Apple, Home Depot, and others as well) change not only their own policies, but step up to change the entire supply chain, or put their lobbying weight behind changing the regulatory environment. That’s where the real change happens — and sometimes it simply isn’t heard if you or I or Greenpeace are asking for that change. But it is heard if a Fortune 500 company is asking for the same thing.

And somewhat sadly, it’s a testament to who runs the world these days. The US Supreme Court decision to grant corporations equal protection under free speech laws as human beings, and thereby contribute as much as they like to political campaigns, says it all. Politics is no longer about people power.

But, as these campaigns demonstate, people power is alive and well when it comes to corporate reputations. We vote with our wallets now, and global brands are connecting the dots between their brand reputation and their bottom lines.

We need to be increasingly vigilant in demanding that those brand reputations be built on good stewardship of the Earth and care for the future: and that it be built on real action, not a green veneer bought cheap with PR pixie dust.

So I’m in the pub last night, as one tends to be of an evening in the UK, and mention that I once lived in Lewes, down near Brighton, for 3 years. I’m among a gaggle of Greenpeacers meeting here in Richmond, across the street from a house where Ron Wood once lived and in view of the place where the Magna Carta was signed, and am asked how that squares with my having worked with Greenpeace since the late Pleistocene Era.

This affords me the opportunity to tell the young whippersnappers a story, which I share with you here, of how Greenpeace International came to be headquartered for a time in a snoozy village on the south coast of the UK.

It all began with a lawsuit.

In 1978, Greenpeace v Greenpeace pitted the founding office of Greenpeace in Vancouver against the upstart San Francisco operation. San Francisco had figured out a thing called “fundraising” and was pulling in money to build its operation. Vancouver was broke, having spent every dime they had on worthy if expensive campaigns to stop nuclear weapons tests and save whales, and figured that since they’d invented the idea and come up with the name, they were due some of that income. San Francisco disagreed.

Enter David McTaggart. David was a part of the Greenpeace world because he had sailed into the Pacific atoll of Moruroa to stop a nuclear weapons test. But in an organisation brimming over with hippies (and please note, I never use that term as a pejorative), he was a businessman. His motive for challenging the French government in a tiny boat was less about a dream of world peace than a pissing contest of righteous anger he felt at any government cordoning off a swath of international waters and unilaterally declaring it off limits to a free man of the sea like himself.

So McTaggart saw the lawsuit as an opportunity. He declared himself referee, sat the parties down at the table, and came out with an agreement that the Canadian office could have Canada, the US office could have the US, the name “Greenpeace” would be owned by an independent third party called Greenpeace International (which, yes, he’d be happy to head up), both offices would be licensed to use the name and in return pledge a certain amount of income to the headquarters. Out of those funds Canada’s debt would be settled.

And so, in 1979, Greenpeace International was born as a Dutch Foundation. I’m a little fuzzy on why it was initially set up in Holland — though I know David was pursuing the French through the international court in the Hague, there was a fledgling national Greenpeace operation starting there, and he probably had the donated services of a lawyer who knew how to write articles of association for a Dutch Stichting. It may also be that the story of a Dutch romance had something to do with it.

What I do know is that David hired a young dutchman, Art van Remundt, to head up the operation, and Art was keen to set up the office in Switzerland. Because, well, isn’t that where big, important international headquarters of things like the United Nations are?

So Art loaded up a van with filing cabinets and a desk and headed for Geneva. When he got to the border he was asked why he was coming to Switzerland. He answered that he was moving there and setting up an office of Greenpeace International Very good, says the border guard, may I see the official papers giving you permission to do so?

To which Art allegedly replied with a bland look and the single word “Papers?”

This was not the correct answer, in the view of the Swiss border guard, and Art was sent packing. McTaggart, furious, declared the whole thing “too complicated” and unilaterally decided that the headquarters would be in the UK, near a wee house named Rose Cottage that he had just bought in Rodmell.

Greenpeace International occupied first one floor, then two, and ultimately the entire building on the High Street in Lewes until 1989, when it moved back to Amsterdam to escape the persecution of Maggie Thatcher. When journalists asked about the location, press officers would point to the economy of not being in London, the ease of access to Gatwick airport, the protection against infiltration afforded by a village where everyone knows you. But the bare fact is that McTaggart, somewhat Tiberius-like, decide the empire was to be built around him and in the place he preferred to live. And that he managed to convince the entire organisation that this was sensible and logical. Persuasion was one of his skills.

Which leads me to a bit of an insight about the early days of the organisation, borne of discussions here in Richmond. We’re talking with Chris Rose about Values-Based campaigning, and the Cultural Dynamics typology model which divides any population into three groups, roughly described as Pioneers (who are motivated by the need for self-fulfillment), Prospectors (who are motivated by the need for material goods and esteem), and Settlers (who are motivated by the need for safety).

Most of us in Greenpeace today test out as Pioneers, and our communications tends to speak to that group. Yet when we look at the ills we are trying to cure, and the people we need to convince, those prospectors are key. They’re the majority in most of the countries we want to change, and it’s their consumption habits that have us all thinking we should be rummaging around for a spare planet that we hope someone might have left lying around in a closet somewhere. We’re here today to train in how to repitch our messaging to persuade others through the frame of their own value sets, rather than trying to pull them kicking and screaming into ours: How to speak the language of settlers to settlers, and the language of prospectors to prospectors. (Want to find out which one you are? Take this test.)

McTaggart was a prospector. Amid the hippy messengers of world peace and media mind bombs he would call campaigners in to his office and ask them to explain to him “in simple terms, cause I’m not a bright guy” what the problem was they wanted to go after and how they figured to solve it. Those sessions, it occurs to me, were a primitive form of audience testing — with McTaggart ever championing the concept that “you need to make it clear enough for a guy in the street to get it in two seconds.”

That’s of course just plain common communications sense, but it was also in that office that messaging tended to get stripped of the values that most of us by nature would have spoken to — the “airy fairy stuff” as he’d call it — of consciousness-raising and implied, if not stated, belief in the spiritual evolution of humanity, the worthy mysticisim of people who with a straight face would ask “What’s so funny about peace, love, and understanding?” We had to craft arguments against nuclear waste dumping in the North Sea on the practical hooks: you can’t get it back, it could radiate the fish we eat, the UK should be ashamed as the “Dirty Man of Europe” for polluting a global commons with its waste. These were arguments that would resound with the security concerns of settlers, the esteem values of prospectors — and these were the messages which won us campaigns and made us grow.

That “guy in the street” he had us all talking to was him — the prospector, not the pioneer, not the hippy. He wouldn’t have had a clue about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs or the opinion polling which forms the base of research we’re using, and were he here today I suspect he’d be making a rude gesture and telling us to quit wanking on about this stuff and “get on with it” — by which he’d mean campaigning. But his impatience would be routed in the fact that he would learn nothing here he didn’t already know. Somewhere in that Machiavellian brain, when he was putting the kabash on the mystics and championing the mechanics, he knew this stuff by instinct — and what made him a great communicator and a great persuader was knowing how to sense his audience, how to find what motivated them, and seduce them into doing the thing that was in their best interest, which just happened to coincide with what he wanted.