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The list goes on: A campaign this year to disrupt supertanker maneuverability tests in the Strait of Juan de Fuca brought accolades from those who viewed them as prelude to increased tanker traffic down the B.C. and Washington coasts.
Others deplored Greenpeace's protest, saying it would harm legitimate efforts to gather data on how supertankers behaved in coastal waters which could someday prevent an environmental catastrophe.
The group's recent campaign to stop the Vancouver Aquarium from importing two Icelandic killer whales won applause from those opposed to wild animals being held in captivity and derision from those who claimed the protests endangered the whales' lives and ignored the aquarium's role in public education.
Perhaps the blackest hour in the organization's first 10 years came two years ago when an embarrassing internal power struggle between Vancouver head office and the rebel San Francisco branch threatened to tear the organization apart as no outside foe had been able to do.
'Greenpeace Vancouver was lax in organizing the branch offices,' says Moore. 'Once we got started, they were forming everywhere. People were just setting up offices, calling themselves Greenpeace and collecting donations.'
Two international meetings in 1977, the year Moore became president, and 1978, failed to solve the problem. Policies continued to vary from branch to branch. No one wanted to accept Vancouver's leadership.
'Mostly, what they didn't want was Vancouver's $250,000 debt, even though the others were trading on the Greenpeace name and undermining our fund-raising base,' said Moore.
So the Vancouver office launched a violation of trademark lawsuit against the others 'and provided them with a common enemy -- us,' he said. The other 16 branches coalesced under the leadership of McTaggart, then president of the British arm.
Moore, McTaggart 'and some other old Greenpeace buddies' sat down together and within 45 minutes had agreed to form an international council with voting members from each country where the group was represented.
Vancouver dropped its lawsuit and the quarter-million debt was paid out of the new common purse.
It was, in a sense, a painful coming of age for the environmental organization. Now, with branches in Canada, the United States, France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom and supporters in other countries, membership and funding grow steadily, spokesmen say.
The organization has also tried deliberately in recent months to curtail the large amounts of money spent in earlier years fighting injunctions and paying fines.
Moore says the Vancouver wing in 1981 had about $6,000 in legal fees, but these were for court cases it initiated. Although assessed $45,000 in fines from the supertanker protest earlier this year, Greenpeace spokesmen say they have no intention to pay up.
It plans to avoid expensive court action wherever possible. The old protest tactic of mass arrests is no longer economically feasible.
While most work is still done by volunteers, Greenpeace began paying salaries about five years ago. Moore earns $1,350 a month, while other paid staff get between $750 and $1,200.
Local and national campaigns are launched with approval from the front office in each country. International policy statements and budgets must be unanimously approved at secretariat level during annual meetings in Washington, D.C.
The group has been instrumental in:
- halting atmospheric nucleartesting in France;
- persuading the International Whaling Commission this year to place a one-year moratorium on the killing of sperm whales;
- stopping the grey seal hunt in the Orkney Islands off Scotland and;
- securing along with other community groups a seven-year moratorium on uranium mining in British Columbia.
In the next decade, Greenpeace will concentrate its protest efforts on the nuclear industry -- the issue on which it cut its teeth, says Moore.
'The nuclear issue is going to be the major one in the next 10 years,' he predicts, 'right from the issue of nuclear testing, to the issue of waste dumping to the issue of uranium mining -- all down the line it's going to be necessary for people to become more aware and educated.'
There have been occasions when Greenpeace may not have been popular, or even right but, as Vancouver's mayor said when he honored the group with Greenpeace Day: 'Whatever our opinion might be on a specific environmental issue, there is no question that Greenpeace has made us think about such concerns as saving the whales and the spread of nuclear power and, in making us think, has made us more informed citizens of the planet.' adv for rls nov.
