Cyberactivism revolutionises Greenpeace campaigns

Eliminating geographical boundaries
Empowering individuals to act
Campaigning for climate change
Cyberactivism without telecommunications
Campaigning beyond the Internet

When US president, George W Bush, recently withdrew the US from the Kyoto Protocol (international agreement on climate change and global warming), Greenpeace launched a campaign to pressure the 100 largest US companies into supporting the protocol.

But how was such an ambitious campaign, involving consumers around the world, to be organised and communicated? Through the Internet and cyberactivism, of course. Cyberactivism is revolutionising the way Greenpeace runs its campaigns.

Eliminating geographical boundaries

Unhindered by geographical constraints and independent of media interests, cyberactivism erodes boundaries between local, national and global communities, bringing new political arenas to the public.

Developer of Greenpeace's new Cyber Centre, international new media campaigner Kevin Jardine said that cyberactivism was about building a global community of resistance to environmental destruction. "The centre provides a cyberactivist community where people representing over 170 countries and territories can share ideas and participate in environmental actions such as the recent Corporate 100 actions against global warming," he said.

"With a simple mouse click, cyberactivists can learn which US companies oppose the Kyoto Protocol and can take that information into the real world to use their buying powers accordingly".

Activists can also download action kits, send entertaining Flash-animated postcards to friends and play informative games.

With membership exceeding 20,000 and growing by over 100 people every day, the Cybercentre is already a hotbed of cyberactivism.

Empowering individuals to act

For an organisation that has always championed the power of individuals to effect change, cyberactivism is a natural extension of Greenpeace's campaign work.

In 1995, only a year after Greenpeace published its first website, Greenpeace publicised online a secret nuclear shipment route from France to Japan and listed the fax number of the French Embassy and newspaper Le Monde where online visitors could send letters of protest.

While the site was unsophisticated by today's standards, the French government reportedly received enough faxes to demand that Greenpeace remove the fax number from its page.

Today Greenpeace employs similar tactics, though on a different scale.

In June 2000, Greenpeace activists installed a webcam at the end of an underwater radioactive discharge pipe operated by the French nuclear agency Cogema, in La Hague, France, to provide live documentation of nuclear waste discharges.

Danish Environment Minister Svend Auken viewing Greepeace's OSPAR webcam at the meeting in Copenhagen.

Greenpeace broadcast the images from the pipe onto the web and onto a large screen at the Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the North-East Atlantic (OSPAR ) in Copenhagen, Denmark, where delegates were discussing the future of nuclear reprocessing.

Visitors to the Greenpeace website could be virtually present at OSPAR by sending messages to delegates, which were then broadcast on the screen.

After almost 2,500 people sent messages to delegates, Cogema was appropriately embarrassed and a Greenpeace end-of-pipe action took place live on the Internet, the Northeast Atlantic countries called on France and the UK to end their nuclear reprocessing - despite Cogema's efforts to rescue the situation by sending down divers with a banner to display before the webcam, claiming the discharges had "Zero Impact." Listen to the illustrated radio piece from the action.

Campaigning for climate change

The current Corporate 100 push in Greenpeace's climate change campaign was inspired by previous campaigns targeting the climate change policies of individual companies.

Prior to the Sydney Olympics in 2000, Greenpeace developed the Coke Spotlight, a rogue or spoof site of Olympics sponsor Coca-Cola, opposing its use of global warming-inducing refrigerant gases - hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HFCs).

While revealing the truth behind the trademark, the site also provided cyberactivists with letters to send to the company's CEO Doug Daft. One month after the website went live, Coca-Cola committed to an HFC phase out.

Greenpeace information technology director Brian Fitzgerald said that roguing offered a way to inject controversy around a trademark and associate a brand with environmental criminality. "Coke folded on HFCs because they're a global brand, and they were facing a global campaign that could have an impact on their good name."

An earlier example of similar pressure was Greenpeace's Arctic Action site, created in opposition to BP's oil drilling operations in the Arctic Ocean and its contribution to climate change.

The site included multimedia updates uploaded directly from the Arctic Ocean, the opportunity to send electronic letters to BP CEO John Browne and a choice of 1200 institutional BP investors, as well as an animated game where polar bears throw snowballs at BP Arctic drilling rigs.

Cyberactivism without telecommunications

But cyberactivism is not limited to a world where people have access to computers, Cyberactivism is also influential in parts of the world where computers are scarce or where people do not even have telephones.

In 1999,Greenpeace located its first worldwide new media campaigner, Hemant Babu, in India - a country with one billion people and a mere three million computers.

Babu's first action involved establishing a cybercafe in front of the abandoned Union Carbide factory in Bhopal, where a gas leak in 1984 killed about 16,000 people and left almost half a million others with permanent health injuries.

Thousands of Bhopal residents visited the cybercafe, where they sent electronic messages to Union Carbide, Dow Chemicals (merged with Union Carbide in 2000) and the Indian government, demanding that the area be cleaned up since the factory continued to leach toxic chemicals into local groundwater.

"This form of cyberactivism empowers people with modern information technology to fight their battles against environmental criminals. Given their socio-economic condition it is too much to expect that they will come to technology. So our job is to take technology to them," he said.

"By doing this we ensure that information technology does not remain an elitist concept but reaches the most oppressed strata of society, which is also often the worst affected by environmental degradation."

After the first 3,000 letters, Union Carbide shut its corporate mail centre and began to screen out email messages from Greenpeace sources.

While Union Carbide remained intransigent, the story effectively drove media attention to the problem.

A second cyber-campaign demanding that the World Bank stop funding polluting factories in the Indian state of Gujarat convinced World Bank President James Wolfensohn to meet with Greenpeace staff in New Delhi, where he agreed to most of their demands.

Campaigning beyond the Internet

Greenpeace has begun to draw upon the skills of its cyberactivists to support campaigns beyond the Internet.

Through Greenpeace Austria's Gene Detektive (Austrian language) website, supporters are asked to visit supermarkets and report back on genetically engineered food.

Similarly, through the forest campaign's Rainforest Cybersleuth site, customers were asked to visit lumberyards and help Greenpeace determine which companies were selling wood from ancient forests. This site is no longer live since the British Columbian government in Canada finally agreed to protect Canada's remaining coastal rainforest.

Jardine explains that "In addition to the good work our cyberactivists are doing by sending letters to politicians and corporate decision makers, we are increasingly working to give them things to do in their own communities beyond the Internet to support Greenpeace campaigns."

Greenpeace's Corporate 100 push (part of the climate campaign) includes one of the most ambitious attempts to mobilise cyberactivists beyond the Internet and take them even further into the real world.

Over 4000 people have downloaded an action kit, which includes a black and white poster, leaflet, and suggested ideas for newspaper articles - all designed to allow activists to run local public campaigns in their own communities to push branches of large US companies to support the protocol.

But even small cyberactions can have enormous effects. Just recently, a modest response to an action alert created by Greenpeace Japan meant victory for their campaign against a nuclear facility.

Seventy five emails from all over Japan were considered enormous pressure by the mayor of the small town selected to host the site, and he acceded to the call for a public referendum.

While cyberactivist tools and tactics in the future may build on present models, there is no telling what, exactly, cyberactivism will look like in the future.

"The Internet will continue to play an important and powerful future role as an ally in the fight for the planet's future," Fitzgerald said. "Whether it's a zodiac in front of a harpoon, or the story of a tiny sailing ketch daring a government not to test a nuclear weapon, the core message of Greenpeace has always been that individuals can take action against huge destructive forces and win," he said.

Visit the Greenpeace Cyberactivist Centre.