Once upon a time only Monarchs and Popes were considered infallible – now it is governing politicians and large corporations who are never wrong: they merely refine their views. They do not conduct u-turns, but turn a new leaf in the light of ‘new research’.

So it is with Greenpeace campaigns. Greenpeace wins them but government and big business are rarely ‘defeated’: they ‘respond to the views of stakeholders’. Annual reports record only progress, while spin-doctors disguise the source of change and play down the role of groups such as Greenpeace. Emperors do not like to be pronounced naked.

Perhaps they fear what might happen if the public realised the power of their potential. As Mohandas Gandhi said, people "often become what they believe themselves to be. If I believe I cannot do something, it makes me incapable of doing it. But when I believe I can, then I acquire the ability to do it even if I didn't have it in the beginning."

By and large the media play along, often describing Greenpeace campaigns mostly as ‘publicity stunts’, implying that they achieve nothing more profound than press coverage.

So when Greenpeace wins a campaign, the fabric of political life appears unchanged.

Campaigning for progress

In a way it’s good. The aim of campaigning is progress: to convert enemies to allies, not to humiliate. The real losers are the assumptions that underpin the paradigm of industrialism: that the global commons may be freely abused, that nature need not be respected, that material growth justifies any action. Yet through this process, Greenpeace gets little credit while business and industry are sustained in the pretence that their system ‘works’.

The truth is that Greenpeace has played a central role in changing the course of world events over and over, during the past three decades. It has faced down governments and multinationals, and repeatedly done what most informed opinion declared to be ‘impossible’. But what gets remembered is just the struggle. The outcome is too challenging for many politicians. So the story of the strategic role of Greenpeace remains largely untold, and little known.

Paul Hohnen, a former Australian diplomat and political director of Greenpeace says the political response to a campaign comprises the 3-Ds: denial, delay and dilution. Or as Gandhi rightly said ‘First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win’.

The passage from radical extremism to conventional wisdom may be remarkably swift.

Steve Sawyer, former Executive Director of Greenpeace recalls the genesis of the campaign to prevent the development of Antarctica, and having "a conversation to the effect that we couldn’t really expect to win anything in less than fifteen 15 years". In the event he says "it took eight – so much for our ability to predict timescales".

Antarctic campaign

Bitterly contested even within Greenpeace, the campaign to protect the Antarctic began in 1983 with no support from any established environmental group.

"All the experts in Washington and elsewhere said we must be more pragmatic, we ‘weren’t realistic’" recalls Sawyer.

One day in late 1988 Steve and Kelly Rigg (his wife and the campaign leader) passed their baby between them as they talked to Tucker Scully, the chief US negotiator. Scully declared in exasperation "there you go again with your theological position on World Park Antarctica: it’s not reality".

In 1988 the Wellington Convention allowing limited mining was passed and the campaign was almost abandoned. Yet in 1991 the Madrid Protocol to the Antarctic Treaty was passed, and mining banned for at least 50 years.

"It gave me great satisfaction to stand next to Scully at the ceremony in Madrid as the Protocol was signed off" says Sawyer.

By a combination of direct action, over-wintering expeditions, coalition building and worldwide co-ordinated lobbying against ratifying the convention, Greenpeace created a campaign that put an entire continent out of bounds to industrial development.

"The finite nature of the planet" had been recognised by governments for the first time, said Sawyer.

Phasing out CFCs and the introduction of Greenfreeze

In 1989 Greenpeace launched a campaign to cut chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) by 100 percent - at a time when no industrial government supported elimination.

US Department of Interior Secretary Donald Hodel suggested that rather than force industry to abandon CFCs, "Americans should be encouraged to wear sunglasses, hats and sunscreen lotion".

In the UK, chemicals producer ISC called the Antarctic ozone hole "a fiction". In 1992 CFC Du Pont manufacturer announced it would ‘stop producing CFCs as soon as possible’ but that there was ‘no likely alternative’ to its use in refrigeration. Industrial lobbying led to the Montreal Protocol allowing ‘soft’ ozone depleting CFCs to go on being used until 2030, on grounds that there were no alternatives.

Working with two German scientists from Dortmund Institute of Hygiene, Greenpeace developed and commercialised ‘Greenfreeze, a hydrocarbon based technology that used neither CFCs/Hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) nor the global warmers, hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs).

In 1992 UK HFC-producer ICI decried Greenfreeze as ‘pie in the sky’, saying it could take ten 10 years to be proven. The UK government called it ‘ill considered’ and ‘a significant risk’.

By 1996 the EU was committed to phase out HCFCs by 2015, a decade and a half ahead of the Montreal Protocol. By 1995 Greenfreeze technology had spread throughout Europe and much of Asia, with three of four major Chinese manufacturers adopting it. To date some 55 million Greenfreeze fridges have been sold, and only restrictive trade practices keep them out of the USA.

Within the Montreal Protocol, governments and even the United Nations Environment Programme literally took their line from the biggest industrial interests. So it continues with many other technologies: politicians just swallow what business tells them.

Genetic Engineering

In the late 80s and through most of the 90s, for example, Genetic Engineering (GE) was almost universally perceived as a panacea, which would breath new life into ageing western economies. Anyone who raised doubts was ignored, and if they couldn’t be ignored, they were treated to denial and ridicule.

"I remember being called ‘a bonehead’ at a scientific meeting at Sussex University" says Dr Sue Mayer, now director of Genewatch and then head of science for Greenpeace in the UK. The reason: "We were questioning patents on life and the use of ‘substantial equivalence’".

This is the concept, which underpins all authorisations to allow genetically modified organisms in food. "It was treated as the cornerstone – it was introduced by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development – and it’s at the nub of the issue. But it only looks at known toxic properties, and if a plant or animal doesn’t seem to contain those known problems they say it’s OK. Our point was that there might be entirely new, unintended problematic effects.

We were derided in the early 90s but now ‘substantial equivalence’ (which amounts to little more than making a subjective judgement that it looks much the same as a conventional plant or animal) has been criticised in a Royal Society of Canada study. The British Royal Society is having to examine it too". By 1999 Mayer’s critique made it into the establishment science journal, Nature (vol 401, 525-6).

Raising awkward questions about the very basis of industrial decision-making is what drives many Greenpeace campaigns that are reported in the media simply as ‘one-off’ protests.

Polluting the oceans

In the 70s and 80s Greenpeace pursued lengthy campaigns against incineration at sea, against sewage dumping and radioactive marine discharges through which it challenged the prevailing assumption that the sea could be treated as a dustbin because of its ‘assimilative capacity’.

In place of ‘dilute and disperse’ Greenpeace championed the ‘precautionary principle’, a concept hated and bitterly opposed by many in industry.

Persistent Organic Pollutants

From 1985 onwards Greenpeace targeted persistent, bio-accumulative toxic chemicals or Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs).

By 1995 the UN agreed to establish a convention to eliminate Pops – and in 2001 the Stockholm Treaty was signed, which aims to eliminate all Pops, starting with 12 of the worst chemicals, very much the same list that Greenpeace and others started with in 1985.

The Precautionary Principle and Clean Production

The Precautionary Principle was endorsed at the 1989 UNEP Governing Council and is now accepted as a part of many national and international environmental laws.

Sea dumping of radioactive and industrial wastes was banned worldwide under the London Dumping Convention, through amendments conceived and promoted by Greenpeace.

Clean Production was similarly championed by Greenpeace as a result of its 80s/90s campaign against the trade in waste, and releases of chlorinated chemicals (such as PVC, PCBs and dioxins).

Clean Production simply means designing-out pollution. It is now accepted wisdom among many young engineers but was dismissed as ridiculous when Greenpeace started campaigning for it. Clean Production was adopted by UNEP as a way to implement the precautionary principle in 1990.

"I used to think Greenpeace were just anarchists" admitted one politician, "but now I see a method in their madness".

The media however reports campaigns mostly as incidents, not processes. The campaign to prevent the sea-dumping of the Brent Spar in is a good example.

The OSPAR Convention and Brent Spar

After decades of campaigns to close off dumping options and over-turn the ‘out of sight-out-of-mind’ philosophy, Greenpeace realised that the oil industry had secured a neat back-door loophole in the OSPAR (Oslo and Paris Conventions) which regulated pollution of the N E Atlantic.

If nothing was done, a precedent would be set that would allow dozens, perhaps hundreds of redundant oil installations to be sunk at sea rather than returned to land for cleaning and recycling.

So in 1994 it objected to plans to sink the Brent Spar, the oldest and first such installation to be proposed for ‘sea disposal’ in the ‘brownfielding’ of the ageing Brent Oil Field. No government supported Greenpeace, and the UK more or less ignored its’ submissions.

Subsequently a three month occupation and re-occupation by Greenpeace ended with Shell, the Spar’s owners, bowing to public pressure and eventually dismantling the installation in Norway. By that time the OSPAR nations had agreed a moratorium on all sea-dumping of oil installations. Many of the campaigns relating to OSPAR have been conceived by Remi Parmentier, a long standing Greenpeace lobbyist, who was once denounced by a national delegate as ‘that little French bastard’.

The Brent Spar campaign shook the oil industry just as the GE campaign is shaking the GE industry.

Penetrating "cosy" relationships

The common characteristic is that frequently Greenpeace is the only non-governmental organisation to penetrate the cosy relationships between regulators and the regulated.

When Monsanto tried to bring GE crops to Europe in the mid 90s, Greenpeace was a leader of the campaign of rejection. But this was far from the first brush.

Peter Melchett, a former Executive Director of Greenpeace recalls a TV debate on genetically modified crops held at the University of East Anglia in the late 1980s.

"What struck me" he says "was that there was me and then a Swiss man from Ciba Geigy, someone from the John Innes plant breeding institute, a representative of ICI and the regulator from the EU. And they all knew each other – it was first name terms and how’s so and so, one of the children. They were sure there could be no problems – that there would be total public acceptance. I told them that organic farmers would have none of it – they didn’t believe me."

Actions for change

These political operations are not separated from the activism of Greenpeace – they are two sides of the same coin. Often the lobbyists and the activists are one and the same people. Like Gandhi, Greenpeace believes that ‘action expresses priorities’. With GM says Mayer "it was the actions in the mid 90s that really changed things – when Greenpeace started blocking soya imports into Europe. Then people realised it was getting everywhere – it could get into most of their food".

They did not like it and GE crops are banned throughout much of Europe. Demand for organic food is growing rapidly in the US and Europe and bans on GE M crops are spreading worldwide. Remarkably, and perhaps indicating a swing away from ever ‘freer’ trade at any cost, the Cartagena (Biosafety) Protocol of 2000 allows nations to prohibit imports of GE products based on the Precautionary Principle, if these might carry risks for health or the environment.

Death of David McTaggart

Thirty years is a long time. Recently, David McTaggart died, not the founder of Greenpeace but the man who united disparate Greenpeace offices into an effective international organisation, which could conduct such global political campaigns.

Opponents have sometimes accused Greenpeace of being ‘like the Mafia’ because of its international reach. It was also said of the Mafia that they were people who had learnt to ‘shorten the distance between saying and doing’ – and with its conversion of political analysis into direct action, Greenpeace is the same. Unlike the Mafia, however, it remains devoted to non-violence, agreeing again with Gandhi ‘I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent’.

McTaggart suffered violence from the French navy when he sailed into the Pacific in his yacht the Vega, leading the Greenpeace campaign against French nuclear testing, which was ultimately successful.

In 1995 President Chirac pledged to complete his ‘vital’ series of tests but abandoned half of them after a global Greenpeace campaign.

A vehicle for change

From this distance it is easy to forget or not to appreciate just how isolated campaigners were in the 70s and early 80s.

"Looking back it seems to me that all the campaigns were dismissed at the beginning, as was Greenpeace itself" says one long-standing campaigner.

"I remember being told categorically in 1978 and 1979 by the mandarins at MAFF [the British fisheries Ministry] that we couldn’t have a ban on commercial whaling (and they couldn’t support it). Because there were no substitutes for some whale products used in the UK – specifically an oil used for softening fine gloves and spermaceti for lipsticks. ‘Mad in retrospect – it shows how values have changed’."

Perhaps that’s what Greenpeace really is. A vehicle for changing values in order to protect the environment. A way for society to conduct a conversation with its self, to examine its conscience in public, and decide it must do better.

Consumed as it is with a sense of urgency* and an ambition to resolve the fundamental imbalances in human relations with the natural environment, Greenpeace has spent much of the past three decades ‘ahead of the curve’ on many issues.

As an ex-employee and as a long term admirer of Greenpeace I think its achievements deserve more honest acknowledgement by politicians, journalists and business leaders.

Many of them walk in its footsteps. I think it is bad for democracy if they refuse to admit that Greenpeace and other non-governmental organisations are political trail blazers and not just fire-brands.