April 2009

Hey there Greenpeace afficionados. Want to go to Glastonbury festival? How's your store of GP-related facts? Do you, for instance, know which power station's chimney the Kingsnorth 6 climbed, leading to their arrest, trial and aquittal? Or which major Airport's expansion plans have been challenged by our Airplot campaign?

New Greenpeace USA Director Phil Radford has only been in post for three days, but already he's been arrested for taking action against climate polluters - he's one of the climbers in this banner hang outside the US State Department in Washington on Monday. 

Marge ascends from the Greenpeace basement to write for the blog relay - a whistle-stop tour of Greenpeace staff here in the UK. Click here to catch up on the other entries.

My name's Marge and I'm the Assistant Press Officer. I lead a somewhat double life just now - being partly based in the press office on the top floor and then descending to the bowels of our building to the video suite, where I run our video archive and do bits and pieces of editing. Who needs a gym when there are six flights of stairs between your desks! When the heck are they going to invent a solar powered lift?

Anyway it's a pretty varied worklife. A typical week? Well there isn't one really. I recently spent lots of time trying to find footage of krill for a TV programme that Willie, our oceans campaigner, was involved in. I had vague memories from school of what krill is - all I remembered was that it's that stuff whales eat, but on talking to Willie I find out its pretty important 'stuff', microscopic but important. It's a tiny crustacean, like a wee shrimp, that lives in vast swarms in the Southern Ocean.

Our Communications Director Tamara is next up in the blog relay - a whistle-stop tour of Greenpeace staff here in the UK. Click here to catch up on the other entries.

Having spent the last three years living in China, I and all of my Chinese colleagues became somewhat accustomed to what we referred to as "China bashing" by some of the international media. You know the sort of thing: the over-the-top, almost hysterical cry of "China's eating up all the world's resources!" Since China is now one of the world's largest manufacturing centres, the claim was applied to almost anything - timber, coal, or even the cobalt used to make our cell phone batteries. To a certain degree, therefore, there is a kernel - but not much more - of truth to the claim.

Two breaking stories neatly illustrate the flawed logic which still lurks at the heart of UK energy policy. First up is that German energy utility RWE's bid to build a new nuclear plant near Kirksanton in Cumbria will mean dismantling an existing wind farm on the site. While at the other end of the country, 600 workers at the Vestas Blades wind turbine factory on the Isle of Wight could be facing redundancy.

Jess, our first intern, is first up this week in the blog relay - a whistle-stop tour of Greenpeace staff here in the UK. Click here to catch up on the other entries.

Like many of you exploring the Greenpeace website, I have been concerned about environmental issues from a fairly young age. I have my parents to thank for that. But I've never been 100% sure exactly what I want to do about it. So when I graduated last year I decided as good a place as any to start was to look for some internships, to get an idea of what kind of jobs are out there. So here I am - an intern at Greenpeace. Their first one in the UK no less.

This new video has just been produced by our colleagues on the other side of the pond as a reminder that Kimberly-Clark, the makers of Kleenex, are still ravaging forests in North America to produce their tissues.

We've had a bumpy week in the blog relay after Jim dropped the baton earlier this week (shame Jim), but here's hoping one of our other climate campaigners, Anita, will get us back on track in this whistle-stop tour of Greenpeace staff here in the UK. Click here to catch up on the other entries.

I'm on my second run at Greenpeace having taken a short trip around other non-governmental organisations in between times, but I've always worked on climate issues here.  At the moment I'm lucky enough to head up the aviation team and work with some really smart, fun and inspiring people. But Greenpeace is like that. It has introduced me to some of the most amazing people from around the world. From schoolteachers, children and subsistence farmers in the Philipinnes who we worked with to successfully defeat a proposed new coal fired power station, to grandmothers who chained themselves to petrol pumps to ‘Stop Esso', and now, with local residents from Sipson who will lose their homes if the government and BAA go ahead with their crazy plans and build a third runway at Heathrow.  Not that we will let them!