Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Greenpeace International and the politics of perspective
change
International NGOs have helped create a global civil society, and their actions, as
Wapner (1996) argues, can have a significant impact on world politics. Greenpeace
International, originating in Vancouver, Canada, in the late 1960s with a small but
highly visible direct protest action against nuclear testing in the Pacific, is now a
large global organization operating transnationally, nationally and locally. Many of
their actions have focused on securing sufficient publicity to alter people's way
of looking at the world, on changing their values and perspectives, and ultimately
their actions and behaviour. Greenpeace aims to broadly disseminate an ecological
sensibility that can operate as a political force by changing people's meaning schemes
and perspectives, influencing policy development and implementation, and changing
practice. With its defining campaigns against seal culling, whaling and the proposed
dumping by Shell of their Brent Spar oil installation in the North Sea, Greenpeace
has helped nurture an ideational context, through the use of striking imagery, that
has in turn inspired their direct and indirect supporters to act in a more pro-
environmental manner. Such activism often employs a sophisticated and effective
image politics (Dale, 1996; DeLuca, 1999), and Greenpeace International has become
a master of the political image, the mocking vlog, and the penetrating 'spot' and
subversive culture jam. As Wapner (1996) notes, people generally tend to translate
experience into action through their general interpretative categories, understandings
and conceptions of the world. Their experience is mediated culturally through the
dominance or operationalization of certain norms, values and predispositions.
Greenpeace campaigns aim to (re)align these with a clearer and deeper concern for
the planet, often by 'bearing witness', stinging people's consciences by showing
environmental abuse or revealing corporate disinformation, and exposing the gap
between the rhetoric and the reality of public relations, news management and actual
behaviour. In some cases Greenpeace activists experience concerted attacks on their
physical well-being, arrests and, as in Russia in 2013, imprisonment on charges of
piracy for protesting against oil exploration in the Arctic.
Defining what is meant by 'ecological sensibility' and measuring changes to societal
and ideological discourses is not easy. It requires a fluid approach that accepts
diffuseness and is sensitive to subtle but meaningful changes in individual, group,
institutional, corporate and governmental deliberations. Despite the cyclical nature of
green activity and activism, environmental and sustainability awareness is slowly
becoming mainstreamed within business, government, culture and politics. We are all
environmentalists now, because a generalized ecological sensibility is increasingly
pervasive, perhaps even fashionable, in Western civil society. Green has become a
symbol for global political action, as with the rapid expansion and globalization of
new and old media, TV and the Internet, national sovereignties are being perforated
by images of protest, environmental degradation and activist achievements. Globalism
is now increasingly associated with the drive for a global (ecological) citizenship
(Dobson, 2003a; O'Byrne, 2003) that understands and acts with regard to the fragility
of the planet's ecosystems, its life-support systems, its beauty and its interdependent
nature, combined with a belief in global human equality. Similarly, global civil society
campaigns like Jubilee 2000, Make Poverty History, Live Eight and Live Earth have
arguably functioned to extend this ecological sensibility to encompass the wide range
