Greenpeace New Zealand Weblog

A funeral and a celebration: grim clouds over Dalian

nick — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 02:12:57 +0000

Aurthur JD writes from Dalian in China… I arrived in Dalian on the day of the funeral for firefighter Zhang Liang, who drowned beneath the thick crude when his crew jumped into the ocean – without safety gear – to attempt, in vain, to fix an underwater pipe. Our lead photographer, Jiang He, who by [...]

Oily people point to a dirty reality

Jay — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 23:01:24 +0000

The pictures coming from the Gulf of Mexico are horrible; birds covered in oil, enormous plumes of crude lying just below the surface; thousands of barrels worth of oil gushing into the sea each day. And beaches covered in the stuff. It’s painful to watch. And, on an academic level, an oil spill of the same [...]

Dorothy Stowe 1920 – 2010

nick — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 22:19:03 +0000

Greenpeace cofounder, social justice advocate Greenpeace co-founder Dorothy Stowe passed away at 03:00, July 23, 2010 in Vancouver, Canada, at the age of 89. Dorothy Stowe Dorothy Anne Rabinowitz was born in Providence, Rhode Island on December 22, 1920, from Jewish immigrant parents from Russia and Galicia. She described her father Jacob as “idealistic and political. [...]

Facebook hits 500 million mark

nick — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 00:35:07 +0000

It’s official: an eye-watering 500 million people are now using Facebook. But as the social networking site celebrates this latest milestone, another one is in the making: almost half a million of its users have joined one of our groups calling for the company to ditch dirty coal – and go [...]

Maybe just maybe we will make it

bunny — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 05:07:21 +0000

The last few days we have been optimistically trying to organise a flight to Mejato. Mejato is a small island at the north end of the Kwajalein Atoll. It is also where a large section of the Rongelap community still live after being evacuated there by the Rainbow Warrior 25 years ago. The main purpose [...]

A big win for people power

nick — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 23:49:44 +0000

Lucy Lawless heads the March Against Mining Today the Government announced a complete u-turn on plans to mine New Zealand’s best conservation land. There will be no mining in Schedule 4 land or any national parks now or in the future! This is a huge victory for the environment and for future generations. We saw the biggest [...]

Government looks set to back down on mining Schedule 4 land

nick — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 08:49:58 +0000

When the Government announced plans to mine some of New Zealand’s best conservation land, New Zealanders made submissions in unprecedented numbers and marched in record numbers. We’ll know for sure tomorrow but it looks very much like they’ve listened and are about to make a complete u-turn. According to 3 news: “There will be no mining in Paparoa [...]

A time-lapse history of nuclear explosions

nick — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 22:47:20 +0000

This is frightening. Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto created a beautiful, undeniably scary time-lapse map of the 2053 nuclear explosions which have taken place between 1945 and 1998, beginning with the Manhattan Project’s “Trinity” test near Los Alamos and concluding with Pakistan’s nuclear tests in May of 1998. Each detonation is represented by a blip [...]

The latest chapter in the Nuclear Pacific tale

bunny — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 20:06:35 +0000

Many times I have been on the phone or at a gathering of our Greenpeace supporters and one has said to me “Thanks you so much for all that you do, you are so brave! I wish I could be out there with you”. I’ve never quite known how to respond to this. Is it [...]

Climategate- the showdown

Kathy — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 21:00:56 +0000

Climate Debate (C) Greenpeace / Cumming It wasn’t quite pistols at dawn, but in the softly-softly world of climate science, it was definitely a show down. Some of the key players in the “Climategate“ scandal gathered in central London last night for a public debate; the first time some of them had met in person. To recap [...]