...because there ain't no planet B

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.

There's lots of evidence emerging that climate change is having a devastating effect on krill - something of concern for anyone who like the cuddlier critters that eat it, such as whales, seals and penguins. Yet, bizarrely, we are now fishing krill. Using huge factory ships. Why? To make fish meal to feed to farmed fish, and also to supply demand for fashionable omega 3 supplements. The way we're unthinkingly fishing our way down the ocean food chain just as fast as we can drives me nuts - it's so shortsighted. Willie suggested I needed to relax - perhaps I should take a krill pill? (he takes his role as the office wit pretty seriously, as you can see...)

So there you go, I was supposed to be writing about press and video but I think I got slightly sidetracked....so back on track. Let me show you how some of my work links up with our campaigns - you may have read Emily's blog (if you haven't you should have, she's part of our actions unit and was a member of the Kingsnorth 6) talking about some of the direct actions she's participated in. And hopefully seen some of such events on the TV news.

Well, another arm of my work (along with other editors here) would be to receive tapes of whatever Emily and our many other hundreds of activists have been up to, and do a quick edit for the TV news. I generally link it in with some background footage illustrating the particular issue our protest was about, so for example, maybe some amazing footage of how the Amazon should look followed by footage of what is currently happening out there: mile after mile of just dusty soil and cattle ranches.

The finished tapes are then taken out to TV news stations, we've even got a solar powered scooter to deliver the tapes sometimes, great carbon-free green propaganda! And hopefully, just hopefully, we get to spread the message that we can't all just continue consuming this planet like there's a 'planet b' we can all hop off to, because there isn't.