Bunny McDiarmid, executive Director of Greenpeace in New Zealand, talks about her memories of life on board the original Rainbow Warrior as a deckhand...

I can still see in my mind's eye and often do, the grain of the wooden decks of the old Warrior, I can remember their feel underfoot, and the smell of the black tar when the sun hit them. I first joined her as a deckhand in 1984 in Jacksonville, Florida in a godforsaken boat yard in the backofbeyond. We were turning her from a motor boat into a sailing boat. And she turned beautifully. And it was the 'we', the 12 crew and 5 or 6 dedicated volunteers that did it all over the course of 4-5 months. The doing of this welded us to her and to each other. I remember Ulla the 24 year old danish fitter and turner who redid all the welding on the chain plates after the yard guys buggered it up.

I remember Henk skill sawing the aluminum bridge wings off so we could mount winches for the main sheet, I remember all of us walking the stays of the main mast as she swung over the yard into her sleeve on the main deck. I remember sitting braced on the main deck as we sailed through the night repairing the mainsail on an old sewing machine and I remember how fast we could unscrew all the bolts holding down the benches in the mess and push them into the companionway so that we had enough room for dancing. No campaign office, there was just the mess and the radio room off the bridge. No email just a clamour for the mail when we arrived in Hawaii after two weeks at sea.

The crew of the Rainbow Warrior in 1985 - Bunny is second from the right

I did not know much about Greenpeace when I joined the Warrior, I just liked what she was going to do - an anti nuclear campaign in the Pacific. The first stop was helping 350 Rongelap islanders move from their home island to another island 40 miles away because of the radiation contamination from US nuclear testing.

Continue reading Rainbow Warriors - past, present and future...

The Arctic Sunrise is on top of the world right now, at 82 degrees North, and the difficulties encountered are not just weather related. Because so few people live that far North, satellite cover is almost nonexistent, and staying in touch with the ship is a complicated operation.
We had to install iridium phones on top of the crow's nest to create a very low bandwidth dial-up connection.

Continue reading Just how do you get Internet at 82 degrees North?...

If you google “ Mount Difficulty” the first twenty-five pages do not link to information about the evocatively named central New Zealand mountain – they all go straight to adverts for wine and vineyards. It is apt that the analogy adopted (not by consensus) by the IWC Commissioners is that discussions on the future of the IWC are like scaling Mount Difficulty, as the very process of discussing the discussions could drive you to drink.

Continue reading Scaling Mount Difficulty - IWC ends early...

In 2007, HP promised to phase out using brominated flame retardants (BFRs) and polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastics in their products (except for servers and printers) by the end of 2009.

But earlier this year they said they would keep using these toxic chemicals until 2011.

So these Greenpeace activists in Beijing donned Mark Hurd masks (that'd be the CEO of HP) and held laptops declaring "HP: Harmful Products," and demanded that somebody come out of the HP headquarters and collect their toxic laptops.

Greenpeace has been campaiging against hazardous e-waste by pressuring manufacturers to get the toxics out of their products.

HP has no excuse for inaction: Apple's new computers are almost PVC free and don't have any BFR's. Dell, Lenovo and Acer have more products with less or no PVC and BFR's.

The next edition of Greenpeace's Guide to Greener Electronics comes out next week. The guide ranks the 17 top manufacturers of personal computers, mobile phones, TV's and games consoles according to their policies on toxic chemicals, recycling and climate change. Expect to see HP paying a Hefty Price for Horrible Performance.

How this works:

The accumulating costs above are based on the EUR 1.7 billion overrun announced by Areva/TVO plus an extra EUR 1.2 billion which will be needed to purchase electricity that has not been produced by Olkiluoto-3 since its projected start.

These costs will eventually be paid for by Nordic electricity consumers and French taxpayers, either through higher bills for customers or through taxes.

Related posts: EPR: Enfant Terrible of the French Nuclear Industry

Just a few minutes before the opening of the 61st International Whaling Commission meeting, a large rat was seen scuttling through the hotel and out the door. As metaphors go, it was a good one. The IWC meeting venue is another. Hosted at a casino hotel in Madeira, Portugal, it is fast becoming apparent that anyone betting on a good outcome for the whales is unlikely to win.

Continue reading IWC 2009 - whale conservation bloc not playing its hand...

Today things got ugly.

We are in Valletta Harbor in Malta. We learned that there were two vessels here owned by Fuentes, the tuna tycoon who controls over half the bluefin catch in the Mediterranean. We decided to board the vessel to inspect the cargo and documentation. Three women, Emma, Rita, and Liz, were the first to volunteer.

After the vessels refused our polite request to allow us access, Emma stepped on board to press the point. She was immediately attacked – they punched her, pulled her hair, picked her up and threw her overboard. One person hurled a large wooden pallet which whistled by our heads, and another tossed a full bucket of paint into one of our boats. If either of those had hit their intended targets, someone could have been seriously injured, but fortunately no damage was done.

Greenpeace is not known for taking no for an answer. For us, the violent response to a simple request to inspect the vessel reinforced our belief that they had something to hide. And even if they did not, greater transparency is essential to ensure that vessels are not able to obscure the kinds of illegal activity which have contributed to the bluefin’s decline.

We climbed onto the pier, where Emma again tried to board one of the Fuentes vessels. She was viciously assaulted by a burly sailor twice her side, holding her down and punching her repeatedly in the face. (We brought her to a clinic here for treatment, and she has a black eye and her neck is swollen but she’s ok.)

Continue reading A black eye for Emma and a step forward for bluefin tuna...

A cheeky reposting of Christian's blog on our UK website:

Around midnight three of my colleagues eased themselves off one of the Greenpeace inflatable speedboats and into the cold water of the river Medway in Kent.

It's difficult to imagine what must be going through your mind in that situation - in the dark, in the cold water, with the looming lights of a large ship getting closer. But however difficult to imagine it is, it must have been even more difficult to do, because Cathy, Emma and Hannah knew that they were swimming out into the channel to block a coal freighter carrying twenty thousand tonnes of coal from docking at the Kingsnorth jetty.

As they made their swim - on one of the shortest nights of the year - more Greenpeace volunteers flagged the ship down with flares and banners, pulled alongside and clambering up the steep metal sides, across the deck, and on up the mast and funnel. They secured themselves in place and waited for the calls from the morning news shows.

Continue reading Swimming towards a coal ship - Greenpeace campaigners block coal delivery to Kingsnorth...

Photo:Greenpeace/Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert

May I present the legendary Greenpeace T-Shirt collector, a writer with Greenpeace International - Steve Erwood.

When Greenpeace’s Aomori Communications Centre in Japan put out a call for campaign T-Shirts for an exhibition, everyone told us to speak to Steve. A prolific collector, Steve and his partner, Greenpeace activist Eric Heijselaar sent us a care package of historical Greenpeace shirts so large, it could constitute an entire exhibition by itself.

“It probably wasn't a conscious decision to start a t-shirt collection,” said Steve. But once you’ve volunteered for Greenpeace and joined a few actions, it’s easy to end up with a few in the closet. T-shirts help get the message across and help to get people on board with Greenpeace's campaigns”

There are so many personal and special moments behind each T-shirt. The favourite for Eric came from the famous Brent Spar action in 1995, when activists occupied the giant Brent Spar oil storage facility in the North Sea. At the time, Shell Oil and the UK Government had wanted to simply dump the obsolete platform into the sea, along with all of the toxic chemicals, oil and rubbish it contained.

Continue reading Wearing the Spirit...

The Rainbow Warrior is patrolling the waters of the eastern Mediterranean. We spent most of yesterday listening to fishermen. We also carried out a lot of inspections, ensuring that boats were legally licensed to fish, but mostly… we listened. Since few fishermen would be willing to speak openly over the radio, we visited their boats with our inflatable Zodiacs. The first challenge was finding a suitable language. Here in the eastern Mediterranean, we have already had conversations in Spanish, Italian, French, Arabic, English, and Maltese. Then there is the fact that many of the fishermen are pretty angry – about the disappearing fish, and about the regulations that have been put in place to try to stop the declines.

Continue reading Take care of our tuna...

Continue reading Sigourney Weaver gives UN the bottom line...

Continue reading EPR: Enfant Terrible of the French Nuclear Industry...

Continue reading So long Susan...

Unfortunately I have now found that this quote was in fact from Chevron's lawyer in relation to a similiar case - but I would guess there was a not entirely dissimilar sentiment involved here. (Strangely, Shell's former Group Auditor Bill Campbell also told Shell's senior execs in 2007 that "hell would freeze over" before they would appear in court to clear their names. These guys must clean up at the annual Oil Industry Buzzword Bingo convention).

Continue reading Hell still not frozen over...

An update on UN Climate negotiations in Bonn, Germany brought to you by our very own Cindy Baxter who has been at the negotiations since the start.

Coming to the end of a hard two weeks here at the climate talks in Bonn, we were greeted yesterday by a very (VERY) loud siren on the back of a truck parked by our colleagues just down from the conference centre. Sounding the alarm for the climate. The siren went on for two hours before our 15 activists were arrested. The noise carried into the building and maybe it
jolted some sense into at least some of the negotiators here.

Why were we sounding the alarm? Well, anyone who's been watching these talks would be quite amazed at the complete lack of urgency in these corridors, given the science on climate change. The usual suspects, the US, Canada, Australia, Japan and New Zealand, are holding everything up, and seem more obsessed with the short term, special interests of their fossil
fuel industries at home. I could get very depressed at this stage. Time is marching on.

Continue reading Wake up call in Bonn...