2011 was a good year for Greenpeace Northants. We have been able to get involved in lots of interesting and important campaigns which have also involved new and innovative ways of getting the message across. The Barbie campaign was one such event - Mattell, who make Barbie, were using packaging that originated from Indonesian rainforests, and so a Barbie hunt began, hiding Barbie dolls around Northampton for people to find and creating an online map for people to update when they had found the Barbies. The pressure continued to grow on the company with stickering and phone calls to their head office and Mattell and other toy manufacturers eventually gave in to Greenpeace’s demands to source their packaging from sustainable sources. Another success!
Other successes that Greenpeace Northants were involved in included the oceans campaign which targeted unsustainable fishing practices in the UK tuna industry. Following pressure from Greenpeace, which involved direct actions on John West, the whole industry agreed to better, more sustainable fishing methods. This campaign continues with the focus on the Common Fisheries Policy which is up for review and needs to be based on sound science. Watch this space for 2012!
As always we attended lots of festivals this summer, including the Umbrella Fair (which was a lovely sunny weekend), the Bardic Picnic (sunny) and the World Peace Fete (very wet and cold), which were good fun and we enjoyed chatting and signing up people to campaigns. Looking forward to more (sunny) festivals this year! We rounded off the year with a brilliant veggie Christmas feast to pat ourselves on the back. We all ate so much food it was untrue but we don’t like waste!
This is just a brief titbit of what we got up to in 2011 and we did lots more besides. What is great though is that we have a lot of fun whilst doing it, as well as getting the serious job done of doing our bit to improve our environment and save our resources. We already have plans for 2012 with a special guest in town on 21st and 22nd January - check out the page shortly for more details.
If you want to get involved and find out more about what we do we would love to see you at our monthly meetings, or please email or ring us with any questions. We meet at on the first Tuesday of each month at 8pm at:
The Labour Club,
Charles Street,
Northampton,
Below are some brief comments from some of our group about their highlights from 2011 (I was mean and told them they couldn’t just write about the Christmas Dinner!).
“In 2011 I enjoyed the Barbie campaign which targeted Mattel, whose packaging had been traced back to Indonesian rain forests. The shocking Tarnished Earth Exhibition showing stark images from the tar sands in Canada was great too and we were lucky to have it in Northampton. Another highlight was the excellent veggie Christmas feast, and it was lovely that Malcolm from HQ could make it too!” Julie
“I really enjoyed the sustainable tuna campaign, being involved in the stickering, and then seeing each of the companies/supermarkets crumble under the pressure!" Steve
“I was inspired by the campaign about the tar sands in Alberta Canada and was pleased to see other oil related issues being addressed”. Gill
“It has been a lot of fun doing festivals and joining up with the local Friends of the Earth group – dressing up in gorilla suits and having a dance!” Alan
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