Greenpeace is a non-governmental environmental organization with offices in over forty countries and with an international coordinating body in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.Greenpeace states its goal is to "ensure the ability of the Earth to nurture life in all its diversity" and focuses its campaigning on world wide issues such as global warming, deforestation, overfishing, commercial whaling and anti-nuclear issues. Greenpeace uses direct action, lobbying and research to achieve its goals. The global organization does not accept funding from governments, corporations or political parties, relying on more than 2.8 million individual supporters and foundation grants.Greenpeace is a founding member of the INGO Accountability Charter; an international non-governmental organization that intends to foster accountability and transparency of non-governmental organizations.
Greenpeace evolved from the peace movement and anti-nuclear protests in Vancouver, British Columbia, in the early 1970s. On September 15, 1971, the newly founded Don't Make a Wave Committee sent a chartered ship, Phyllis Cormack, renamed Greenpeace for the protest, from Vancouver to oppose United States testing of nuclear devices in Amchitka, Alaska. The Don't Make a Wave Committee subsequently adopted the name Greenpeace.
In a few years, Greenpeace spread to several countries and started to campaign on other environmental issues such as commercial whaling and toxic waste. In the late 1970s, the different regional Greenpeace groups formed Greenpeace International to oversee the goals and operations of the regional organizations globally.Greenpeace received international attention during the 1980s when the French intelligence agency bombed the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland's Waitemata Harbour, one of the most well-known vessels operated by Greenpeace, killing one individual. In the following years, Greenpeace evolved into one of the largest environmental organizations in the world.
Greenpeace is known for its direct actions and has been described as the most visible environmental organization in the world.Greenpeace has raised environmental issues to public knowledge,and influenced both the private and the public sector.Greenpeace has also been a source of controversy;its motives and methods have received criticismand the organization's direct actions have sparked legal actions against Greenpeace activists
First campaigns after AmchitkaAfter the nuclear tests at Amchitka were over, Greenpeace moved its focus to the French atmospheric nuclear weapons testing at the Moruroa Atoll in French Polynesia. The young organization needed help for their protests and were contacted by David McTaggart, a former businessman living in New Zealand. In 1972 the yacht Vega, a 12.5-metre (41 ft) ketch owned by David McTaggart, was renamed Greenpeace III and sailed in an anti-nuclear protest into the exclusion zone at Moruroa to attempt to disrupt French nuclear testing. This voyage was sponsored and organized by the New Zealand branch of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The French Navy tried to stop the protest in several ways, including assaulting David McTaggart. McTaggart was supposedly beaten to the point that he lost sight in one of his eyes. Luckily, one of McTaggart's crew members photographed the incident and went public. After the assault was publicized, France announced it would stop the atmospheric nuclear tests.
In the mid-1970s some Greenpeace members started an independent campaign, Project Ahab, against commercial whaling, since Irving Stowe was against Greenpeace focusing on other issues than nuclear weapons. After Irving Stowe died in 1975, Phyllis Cormack left from Vancouver to face Soviet whalers on the coast of California. Greenpeace activists disrupted the whaling by going between the harpoons and the whales, and the footage of the protests spread across the world. Later in the 1970s the organization widened its focus to include toxic waste and commercial seal hunting.
Organizational development
Greenpeace evolved from the peace movement and anti-nuclear protests in Vancouver, British Columbia, in the early 1970s. On September 15, 1971, the newly founded Don't Make a Wave Committee sent a chartered ship, Phyllis Cormack, renamed Greenpeace for the protest, from Vancouver to oppose United States testing of nuclear devices in Amchitka, Alaska. The Don't Make a Wave Committee subsequently adopted the name Greenpeace.
In a few years, Greenpeace spread to several countries and started to campaign on other environmental issues such as commercial whaling and toxic waste. In the late 1970s, the different regional Greenpeace groups formed Greenpeace International to oversee the goals and operations of the regional organizations globally.Greenpeace received international attention during the 1980s when the French intelligence agency bombed the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland's Waitemata Harbour, one of the most well-known vessels operated by Greenpeace, killing one individual. In the following years, Greenpeace evolved into one of the largest environmental organizations in the world.
Greenpeace is known for its direct actions and has been described as the most visible environmental organization in the world.Greenpeace has raised environmental issues to public knowledge,and influenced both the private and the public sector.Greenpeace has also been a source of controversy;its motives and methods have received criticismand the organization's direct actions have sparked legal actions against Greenpeace activists
First campaigns after AmchitkaAfter the nuclear tests at Amchitka were over, Greenpeace moved its focus to the French atmospheric nuclear weapons testing at the Moruroa Atoll in French Polynesia. The young organization needed help for their protests and were contacted by David McTaggart, a former businessman living in New Zealand. In 1972 the yacht Vega, a 12.5-metre (41 ft) ketch owned by David McTaggart, was renamed Greenpeace III and sailed in an anti-nuclear protest into the exclusion zone at Moruroa to attempt to disrupt French nuclear testing. This voyage was sponsored and organized by the New Zealand branch of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The French Navy tried to stop the protest in several ways, including assaulting David McTaggart. McTaggart was supposedly beaten to the point that he lost sight in one of his eyes. Luckily, one of McTaggart's crew members photographed the incident and went public. After the assault was publicized, France announced it would stop the atmospheric nuclear tests.
In the mid-1970s some Greenpeace members started an independent campaign, Project Ahab, against commercial whaling, since Irving Stowe was against Greenpeace focusing on other issues than nuclear weapons. After Irving Stowe died in 1975, Phyllis Cormack left from Vancouver to face Soviet whalers on the coast of California. Greenpeace activists disrupted the whaling by going between the harpoons and the whales, and the footage of the protests spread across the world. Later in the 1970s the organization widened its focus to include toxic waste and commercial seal hunting.
Organizational development
MV Esperanza, a former fire-fighter owned by the Russian Navy, was relaunched by Greenpeace in 2002Greenpeace evolved from a group of Canadian protesters in a sail boat, into a less conservative group of environmentalists who were more reflective of the counterculture and hippie youth movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The social and cultural background from which Greenpeace emerged heralded a period of de-conditioning away from old world antecedents and sought to develop new codes of social, environmental and political behavior. Historian Frank Zelko has commented that "unlike Friends of the Earth, for example, which sprung fully formed from the forehead of David Brower, Greenpeace developed in a more evolutionary manner."
In the mid-1970s independent groups using the name Greenpeace started springing up world wide. By 1977 there were 15 to 20 Greenpeace groups around the world. At the same time the Canadian Greenpeace office was heavily in debt. Disputes between offices over fund-raising and organizational direction split the global movement as the North American offices were reluctant to be under the authority of the Vancouver office and its president Patrick Moore.
After the incidents of Moruroa, David McTaggart had moved to France to battle in court with the French state and helped to develop the cooperation of European Greenpeace groups. David McTaggart lobbied the Canadian Greenpeace Foundation to accept a new structure which would bring the scattered Greenpeace offices under the auspices of a single global organization. The European Greenpeace paid the debt of the Canadian Greenpeace office and on October 14, 1979, Greenpeace International came into existence. Under the new structure, the local offices would contribute a percentage of their income to the international organization, which would take responsibility for setting the overall direction of the movement with each regional office having one vote. Some Greenpeace groups, namely London Greenpeace (dissolved in 2001) and the US-based Greenpeace Foundation (still operational) however decided to remain independent from Greenpeace International.
Climate and energy
An inflatable snow man conveying "Stop Global Warming!" at the G8 (2007)Greenpeace was one of the first parties to formulate a sustainable development scenario for climate change mitigation, which it did in 1993. According to sociologists Marc Mormont and Christine Dasnoy, Greenpeace played a significant role in raising public awareness of global warming in the 1990s.The organization has also focused on CFCs, because of both their global warming potential and their effect on the ozone layer. Greenpeace was one of the leading participants advocating early phase-out of ozone depleting substances in the Montreal Protocol.mass production together with the refrigerator industry. United Nations Environment Programme awarded Greenpeace for "outstanding contributions to the protection of the Earth's ozone layer" in 1997. In 2007 one third of the world's total production of refrigerators were based on Greenfreeze technology, with over 200 million units in use.
Currently Greenpeace considers global warming to be the greatest environmental problem facing the Earth.Greenpeace calls for global greenhouse gas emissions to peak in 2015 and to decrease as close to zero as possible by 2050. For this Greenpeace calls for the industrialized countries to cut their emissions at least 40% by 2020 (from 1990 levels) and to give substantial funding for developing countries to build a sustainable energy capacity, to adapt to the inevitable consequences of global warming, and to stop deforestation by 2020. Together with EREC, Greenpeace has formulated a global energy scenario, "Energy [R]evolution", where 80% of the world's total energy is produced with renewables, and the emissions of the energy sector are decreased by over 80% of the 1990 levels by 2050.
Using direct action, Greenpeace has protested several times against coal by occupying coal power plants and blocking coal shipments and mining operations, in places such as New Zealand,Svalbard, Australia,and the United Kingdom. Greenpeace is also critical of extracting petroleum from oil sands and has used direct action to block the oil sand operations at Athabasca, Canada.
The Kingsnorth court caseIn October 2007, six Greenpeace protesters were arrested for breaking in to the Kingsnorth power station, climbing the 200 metre smokestack, painting the name Gordon on the chimney, and causing an estimated £30,000 damage. At their subsequent trial they admitted trying to shut the station down, but argued that they were legally justified because they were trying to prevent climate change from causing greater damage to property elsewhere around the world. Evidence was heard from David Cameron's environment adviser Zac Goldsmith, climate scientist James E. Hansen and an Inuit leader from Greenland, all saying that climate change was already seriously affecting life around the world. The six activists were acquitted. It was the first case where preventing property damage caused by climate change has been used as part of a "lawful excuse" defence in court.The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian described the acquittal as embarrassment to the Brown Ministry. In December 2008 The New York Times listed the acquittal in its annual list of the most influential ideas of the year.
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