Being a Greenpeace active supporter can be challenging. At times it can be frustrating. But the one thing you can count on with Greenpeace is that you’ll never be bored.
In 2011 we:
- Became masters in the art of attaching stickers to tins of tuna without supermarket staff noticing what we were doing. This led to different methods being developed. The most successful was filling up our shopping basket with tins, placing the basket in the open freezer section and leaning over the freezer as if selecting a nice bag of frozen peas while madly attaching stickers to the top of each tin. Most of us admitted that this was an oddly nerve-wracking experience.
- Got used to perplexed looks while carrying round a handful of unusually dressed Barbie dolls with cardboard chainsaws attached to their hands. The looks got stranger when we were spotted abandoning the dolls in the shrubbery of our local park and sticking them to fences and flagpoles with masking tape.
- In between running our stall in Blackheath Farmers’ Market and raising awareness about the decline in fishing stocks, we took it in turns to dress up as Star Wars Storm Troopers. The uniforms looked like the real deal and we got a great response from the public. They were pretty uncomfortable though. And if you bent down, it was impossible to get up again.
- Towards the end of the year, we joined a spontaneous samba band party outside the Brazilian embassy in London. It was quite a shock to the system to start partying at 10 o’clock in the morning in a side street off Park Lane in early winter but the staff inside the embassy seemed to enjoy the rhythms coming through their windows. We left them a cake as well.
And it was all for a good cause:
- The tuna campaign persuaded John West and all the main supermarket chains to shift from the highly destructive FAD form of tuna fishing to the more sustainable pole and line method.
- Our ‘chainsaw Barbies’ aimed to stop forests in Indonesia being destroyed to make products like the packaging for Barbie dolls. Within months of the campaign being launched, Barbie manufacturer, Mattel, dropped the offending paper supplier.
- But not all the campaigns we took part in had such a quick response. Greenpeace’s campaign to persuade Volkeswagen to turn away from the Dark Side and support tougher car efficiency targets and a 30% cut in CO2 emissions rolls on. Despite the appearance of Storm Troopers all over the country (and Europe) VW is still playing hard to get.
- Our party outside the Brazilian embassy aimed to persuade the country’s prime minister not to relax laws protecting their rainforests. The campaign continues.
As I said, it can be frustrating at times. But if last year was anything to go by, 2012 will keep us on our toes.
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