Frances puts her corned beef to one side for a momentFrances volunteers for our biodiversity campaigns and 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.
People sometimes ask me why I volunteer for Greenpeace. Well, let's see what I do and why.
As a volunteer on the forests and oceans campaigns, my job involves doing investigative research work. The work is pretty varied, and is a combination of doing desk research and getting out and about in the big wide world.
For example, as part of our Amazon work, I've been visiting various supermarkets, looking at whether we can link the beef products on their shelves back to companies who we know are involved in destroying the rainforests. Today, cattle farms occupy nearly 80 per cent of all deforested land in the Brazilian Amazon. Many of the beef products from these farms are sold on the world market. The Amazon doesn't belong on a supermarket shelf labelled as corned beef!
Meanwhile, over on oceans, I did some research on the sushi market as part of our Mediterranean campaign to ban all bluefin tuna fishing until stocks recover and to protect their spawning grounds as marine reserves. The aim of the research was to identify key companies and restaurants trading in this endangered species, helping to push it towards commercial extinction.
This magnificent tuna species, which can dive a mile in minutes (I can't even swim!) and accelerate faster than a Porsche, is a prized ingredient in sushi restaurants. As I found out during the research, it's a mega-bucks business involving a number of large multinational companies, such as Mitsubishi who are alone responsible for up to 40 per cent of the trade.
The sushi restaurant research led to activities outside Nobu, a top London sushi restaurant, where we demanded they take endangered bluefin tuna off the menu. As far as I'm concerned, this is the equivalent of serving ivory, tiger paw or rhino horn.
I really enjoy doing the research, whether it's going through the freezer section in supermarkets or sitting in front of a computer, because it means I get to expose links between the powerful players and the environmental destruction they're associated with.
I am totally inspired by the many environmental activists around the world who are uncovering facts which would otherwise be hidden, especially under difficult circumstances like in the Amazon or Japan.
Speaking of which, I was recently outside the Japanese embassy along with 40 other Greenpeace volunteers, reminding the Japanese government to show respect for human rights by dropping criminal charges against the Tokyo Two. These two Greenpeace campaigners, Junichi Sato and Toru Suzuki, face a decade in jail for exposing evidence of large-scale corruption within the Japanese whaling industry.
Instead, the Japanese government should prosecute the real criminals involved in the embezzlement scandal and put an end to national whaling in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary.
As long as corporations and governments continue to destroy the health of the world's oceans and cause ancient forest destruction, Greenpeace will always be out there in the front-line defending our planet. That's why I do the work that I do for Greenpeace.
