Category Archives: Popular

The best of this blog.

1992: A memo to Greenpeace from David McTaggart

I was reminded by a friend of this email, written by David McTaggart in 1992 and sent widely throughout Greenpeace at the time. The internal squabble it was intended to address is long a thing of the past, but the summation he gives of the organisation’s early strategy and development and founding principles has some

Farewell the Sirius: second star to the right, and straight on til morning.

They gathered to farewell a ship — former captains, campaigners, and crew — and raise a toast to a creature of steel and wood and rope which had been their home, their guardian, their fierce champion, and occasionally their trickster nemesis. And, as whenever a Greenpeace salty dog or two is gathered, they rose, one

They gave us a break: the Kit Kat campaign ends in success

Chalk one up for Social Media, the megaphone of the world’s second superpower, Public Opinion. Over the weekend, Nestle conceded to worldwide demand that they stop using palm oil from rainforest destruction in their products. Our flagship tactic in this campaign was a parody of a Kit Kat ad, which Nestlé, in what in public

Greenpeace International migrates to Planet Three

Planet III — launched May 2010 It sounds like Sci Fi. But it’s the latest incarnation of the “Greenpeace Planet” website and Content Management System, which we launched today. It involved more than a year of effort, lots of sweat and blood and not a few tears,  by a great many people led by Andrew Davies.

Can this Earth Day video get more views than Justin Bieber?

Yes. It can.  To everyone who tweeted, Facebooked, up-thumbed, blogged, emailed, IMed and otherwise digitally disseminated our “Give Earth a Hand”  Earth Day video:  YOU ROCK.   We asked if we could beat pre-teen hearthrob JB’s video to the top of the chart, and you rocketed us into the #2 slot for the day on

10 questions to people-power your activist campaign

Over the weekend, I was lucky enough to hang out with a fine bunch of rabblerousers. We talked about movement building, and the kinds of things that make some campaigns successful in attracting big, unruly crowds, and the kinds of things that turn those big, unruly crowds into game changers.  We workshopped a set of questions

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Being a Head of State at the Copenhagen Climate Talks

I wrote this in 2001, at the Earth Summit in Johannesburg which was considering [urgent] action on climate change. I hope, that as Ministers now consider the draft agreement for [urgent] action at the Copenhagen Climate Summit, and Heads of State arrive to begin wrangling, that things will be different. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to

Thank you, Earth Day

Today was a good day. Greenpeace offices around the world did something extraordinary for Earth Day.  We set aside our national differences, we erased our borders, and focused on doing one simple thing globally. All we did was drive a video up into the upper ranks of the most popular items on YouTube and create

Letter to an activist

Dear X, Yesterday we had an argument. The crux of our argument is this: You believe real actions to save the planet are taken by trained, specialist activists. Online actions, such as emails from a supporter don’t count. You called them “trivial.” I disagree.

Driving Apple to boast about green MacBooks

Apple launches the new MacBook with a TV ad touting the MacBook as “the greenest” While I’m awaiting the reviews from our tech folks as to how much of that is greenwash and how much is substance, Ethical Corporation heaps  praise on the Green My Apple campaign for even getting them to the point of setting

Greetings, Hippies: my Greenpeace induction speech.

I’m here to tell you, kids, that your real parents were hippies. And guess what? It’s genetic. You’re hippies too.

Recipe for saving a small planet

Here’s a little something I whipped up for my email signature a couple weeks ago:   Recipe for saving a small planet Preserve 2 pristine polar seas Add equatorial rainforests (intact) Set aside 4/10ths of the world’s oceans Sprinkle with reallocated military spending Whisk in 1 energy revolution Season with sustainable agriculture Add fresh, clean drinking

Wall Street Journal: Parody ad flips Unilever

Catch that subhead? That ain’t Mother Jones there, that’s the Wall Street Journal, saying that the Greenpeace Dove ad parody campaign flipped Unliver into a policy of only buying palm oil from suppliers who can demonstrate they don’t cut down forests — Unilever’s mumbled demurings notwithstanding. There were other elements of this campaign that don’t

Radically goofy: Mister Splash Pants and the Geography of Hope

Well whaddya know. Calgary Journalist Chris Turner has written an outstanding article about the phenomena of Mister Splashy Pants for the Globe and Mail. I say “outstanding” not just because I’m button-popping proud to see this blog sited as a news source — he’s latched onto and articulated some really good stuff about how digital

What nearly killed Mister Splashy Pants…

Ok, we all thought it was a funny name: when we launched our name-a-whale competition, we had over 11,000 entries that we split up among our Communications Team members to select five each to go forward as finalists. We had poetry, we had mythology, we had emotional, we had funny: and we had Mister Splashy

Who’s driving who?

I’ve just uploaded the presentations I made at the E-campaigning forum. One, Who’s Driving Who, is from the public event and charts a short history of Greenpeace online participatory campaigns, including Green my Apple. It’s intended for a general (though web savvy) audience. The second, Green my Apple, dissects the participatory aspects of the campaign

Sweet, green apple

It’s nearly midnight, and tattered remnants of Team Green my Apple are still in the office. Zeina is practically hoarse from whooping. Elaine has gone home after a marathon Flash coding exercise to change the front page of the Green my Apple site. Tom is at home with his newborn baby Mia, but here in

A few Greenpeace campaign tools described

I used a couple-three internal buzz words the other day in an email exchange, and was asked to define a “Pre-order Petition,” a “Buzz Visualizer” and “Brand Judo.” These are examples of a few tools that Greenpeace has used successfully in the past, and I thought I’d share: Pre-order petitions A pre-order petition is a

25 years with Greenpeace

Twenty Five years ago today, I stuck my foot in a door. It was a trick that Cathy Dees, my field manager and trainer, taught me, for ensuring that no suburban housewife in any devo turf was going to terminate my rap before I’d got to the bit about the slaughter of the harp seal pups,

How many olives to make a litre of oil?

Saturday’s olive picking experience was just great. The weather was stunning, the company good, and I really needed the kind of zen space that manual labour can get you into. There was a new-fangled invention come to the farm. Now back in my day, we disdained even so much as the plastic rakes that were common

It was Jackson Browne that made me invade that nuclear test site, sir…

Grateful Child is a self-described elderly hippy living in Connecticut who pings all of us at Greenpeace with love every now and again. He sends encouraging messages when we save whales. He made up mugs and mousemats for the web team to say thanks for the web site. He chats with our supporter services folks