December 2011

It's the end of the road for one of our campaign legends: Brian.

Only six months ago, Brian was working for the Dark Side - an anonymous Volkswagen employee only concerned with getting through his day job. He took orders from his superiors without questioning them. He did what he was told.

But then – suddenly - everything changed.

Recently, Greenpeace got a rare look behind the curtain at how big oil stages citizen support for huge oil companies, when activists got inside a TV commercial shoot in Washington DC.

The winter solstice is as good a time as any to look back over the last 11-and-a-bit months that were 2011. And what a year it's been, not just for us here in the office but for all our supporters and volunteers who've kept our campaigns going.

That’s what I heard above the chatter as the crew finished the fifth course – Bream served with red tea, orange and chocolate – prepared by the creative and expert hands of Diego Guerrero.

As I write, this I'm looking out of my window of the Fefor hotel in Norway at a wintery landscape of mountains, forest and an ice-covered lake - the same place where Amundsen, Nansen and Scott planned their historic expeditions to the poles. That I'm here with a team to plan our future polar work is an inspiring and humbling parallel.

Asia Pulp and Paper – the company doing so much to jeopardise the future of Indonesia's rainforests – has done some pretty stupid things in the past. But pulping the trees in its own tiger sanctuary is astonishingly dumb.

And yet that's exactly what APP has done.

Something unprecedented happened yesterday. Greenpeace campaigners and part of the UK fishing industry came together to deliver 10,000 messages from Greenpeace supporters about the need for reform of the Common Fisheries Policy to Number 10.  

The next stage of voting on Brazil’s new Forest Code – which could have devastating impacts on the Amazon - has been once again postponed before going to President Dilma Rousseff.