Beyond Green CEO and former director of Greenpeace UK was recently interviewed for a feature in The Times on the charity.

Read on to see the whole story, courtesy of The Times, 13 May 2011

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Established 40 years ago, Greenpeace is now the world’s most powerful NGO. But some now question its anti-nuclear goal

As symbols of the nuclear age go, the imposing steel molecule of Brussels’ Atomium is pretty potent. Built for the 1958 World Fair, it’s a popular tourist attraction but today it has unexpected visitors.

Standing beneath the futuristic monument, David Verbist, an action co-ordinator for Greenpeace, directs a group of protesters perched 100m above on the highest of its metal spheres, glinting in the sunshine. As they pull down the Belgian tricolour and replace it with a flag bearing a No Nukes symbol, three police cars and two vans pull into the forecourt. “Good! Here comes the chief of police,” says Michel Peremans, the campaign director for Greenpeace Belgium.

The country gets around 60 per cent of its energy from its two nuclear plants, both of which are past their intended lifespan. In 2005, Verbist was one of a group who scaled the reactor in Tihange and painted a giant crack on its stack. A 36-year-old architect with a beard and a ponytail, he has overseen more than 50 similar actions since he joined Greenpeace. “I’m not doing this for the kicks, I’m doing this because I’m angry,” he says. “When I turned 30 I was frustrated about the way some things were. I wanted change and Greenpeace don’t just sit around complaining, they do something.”

This is the 40th year that Greenpeace has been engaging in dramatic publicity stunts, or “media mindbombs”, as founder Robert Hunter coined them — from locating illegal logging in the Amazon from the air to occupying oil rigs en route to the Arctic. Today, it is the largest environmental organisation in the world, with power and determination to take on the biggest governments and corporations. It employs 2,000 salaried staff, operating in more than 40 countries on behalf of 2.89 million supporters worldwide, each financed via donations ( money is not accepted from governments or companies). The UK office is one of the top five contributors to global fundraising — which totalled €195 million in 2009. Its fixed assets are put at €38 million, including property and marine vessels, such as its flagship Rainbow Warrior.

The successor to the original Rainbow Warrior, which was blown up by the French intelligence service while in harbour in New Zealand in 1985, the schooner is currently monitoring radiation levels near Fukushima, although the Japanese Government refused it permission to operate within its territorial waters.

With the shockwaves from the Japanese nuclear crisis still felt across the globe, Greenpeace has responded with protest actions. In France last week, 55 activists blockaded the site of a new pressurised reactor being built in Flamanville.

Despite the adverse publicity of Fukushima — yesterday, Rainbow Warrior’s crew recorded high radiation levels in seaweed samples up to 40 miles out to sea — many argue that if global warming is to be contained, nuclear energy is the only credible option.

With those such as Stephen Tindale, a former Greenpeace executive director, speaking up for atomic power, the green lobby seems to be caught between a rock and a hot place but Greenpeace remains dogmatic in its pursuit of a renewable energy solution.

“Our DNA is nuclear, that’s where our founding fathers began and it’s always been a core issue,” says John Sauven, the current UK executive director, “but climate change is now deeply tied in with it. It’s not enough to oppose nuclear power stations, you have to have a solution. We have to be seen to win the renewable argument.”

This is Greenpeace’s greatest challenge as it embarks on its fifth decade but it’s far from the only one. From controlling tuna fishing in Libya to taking on businesses such as Facebook and Apple for using “dirty data” in the form of coal energy, it campaigns in every environmental field and lays claim to many victories: bringing about the moratorium on whaling by the International Whaling Commission in 1982, the banning of large-scale driftnets in 1989, the official cessation of dumping of radioactive and industrial waste at sea through the 1993 London Dumping Convention, and forcing Shell to cancel plans to dispose of the Brent Spar storage buoy in the Atlantic following a 1995 occupation and the publication of damaging data about its contents.

Its impact on corporations and governments, however, has made the group deeply unpopular, and not solely with those it baits. In 1991, one Forbes magazine article declared that “Greenpeace has turned itself into a vigilante group … acting as judge and jury”, while its stance on GM food and biofuels — underlined by a 1999 attack on a six-acre crop of GM maize at Walnut Tree Farm near Norwich — led one founding member, Patrick Moore, to brand the organisation as having evolved “into a band of scientific illiterates”. Others seized on Greenpeace’s admission that it had got its sums wrong over the Brent Spar to attack it as ideologically driven and irresponsible.

“These are hugely complex things and you’re bound to make the odd error,” admits Jonathan Smales, a former director of UK Greenpeace, “but our general drift has been spot on and has been supported by an evidence base — unlike the opposition, which is wishful thinking.”

In the mid-Eighties the popularity of Greenpeace exploded in reaction to key historical events. “Rainbow Warrior’s sinking was a massive thing for us,” recalls Smales. “We thought ‘F***! Look what can happen with this stuff we’re dealing with!’. Chernobyl was another huge shock to the system. We were flying in those days. The world had shifted on its axis and it felt as if we could do no wrong, as if we were unimpeachable.”

Smales restructured the UK branch, moving to new eco-refitted offices in North London on the site of a former animal testing laboratory in 1989. From a handful of volunteers, it has grown to 84 employees, plus volunteers and unpaid interns. Salaries are generous by NGO standards but not outlandish — a direct marketing fundraiser job is currently on offer at £32,700; the UK executive director earns £70,000.

Support in Britain swelled to around 350,000 by the Nineties, when the movement’s green crusader image attracted celebrities to its cause. In June 1992 U2 took part in one of Greenpeace’s biggest coups, landing on the beach at Sellafield with several drums of toxic waste. GlastonburyFestival remains a key contributor, as demonstrated by a photocopied cheque from Michael Eavis for £600,000 pinned to a wall in the Islington office.

Two years ago UK Greenpeace scored a significant legal victory from an action when six activists scaled the 200m chimney at Kingsnorth power station in a protest against plans to build the first new coal plant in this country in 20 years. In October 2009 the protesters were acquitted of criminal damage in a landmark ruling on the grounds of “lawful excuse”. The judgment said that their actions were justified to prevent greater damage from climate change. In the wake of that decision, E.on Energy announced it was scrapping proposals to build the first new coal plant there in 30 years.

While traditional protests such as Kingsnorth continue to make their mark, Greenpeace is increasingly taking to the internet. Last March it targeted the food manufacturer Nestlé for buying palm oil from a company it claimed was causing devastation to the Indonesian rainforest. A spoof viral ad featuring a man unwrapping a Kit Kat bar and chewing on an orang-utan finger was posted on YouTube. When Nestlé had it removed it triggered a digital media backlash as supporters started mirroring it across the net, prompting millions of viewings.

“It was a phenomenon and it almost singlehandedly brought Nestlé to the negotiating table,” claims media director Ben Stewart, also one of the Kingsnorth Six. “A photograph of a guy on an inflatable is a bit tired.”

Greenpeace’s reliance on dramatic media coups has more than its share of critics, even within the organisation. Early activist Paul Watson left to found Sea Shepherd because of his frustration with images of inflatable protests that he claimed were designed not to save whales but to raise funds. Others have suggested that Greenpeace is better at organising protest than offering alternatives, an accusation that frustrates John Sauven.

“I spend most of my time promoting solutions and co-operating on policy work,” he tells me, “but because of the media work we do people only assume we are involved in protest. It’s a misconception. Much of my time is spent sitting round the table with some of the biggest businesses in the world, coming up with answers at boardroom level. It’s the iceberg effect, most of what we do goes on out of sight.

“After the Nestlé action I went to meet the board in Geneva and together we ended up transforming their whole supply policy and announced a commitment to end deforestation.”

Nestlé’s response to the incident suggests the issue was less black and white. “The company had already been working on the issue of environmental threat to rainforests and peat fields in South-East Asia long before the direct involvement of Mr Sauven,” says a spokesman, adding: “We are happy to be in a positive dialogue with Greenpeace and to show to many Greenpeace supporters that we engage in an open and serious debate.”

The casually attired Sauven and Stewart are typical of the liberal, white, educated middle-class European activists who replaced the North American hippies in beards and sandals, but now Greenpeace’s powerbase is shifting towards the southern hemisphere.

Its current executive director, Kumi Naidoo, is a black South African and the movement is expanding rapidly in India, Brazil, and China, whose massive hunger for resources is a major source of pollution. Greenpeace established a base in Hong Kong in 1997 and now has an office in Beijing. The organisation brings as much pressure as it can but inevitably has to tread very carefully.

“It’s very difficult to operate here but it’s not impossible because compared with things like human rights the environment is less sensitive,” says Sze Pang Cheung, campaign director of Greenpeace East Asia. “There are red-line issues that are a definite no-no but the Government is aware that there is a problem and that makes it possible for us to be critical. There is real concern at the top about pollution. The most basic level is that people are not happy, farmers and the middle-class have protested at polluted rivers and toxic emissions. It’s a concern for the party on a social and political level.”

Greenpeace China’s actions are tepid compared with Kingsnorth or even the Atomium. Last year protesters received coverage in the Chinese press when they unfurled a No Coal banner outside a Beijing coal plant. “There is always risk,” Cheung says. “Calculation is a big part of planning these actions. We want to push the limits but we don’t want people jailed or the offices shut down, which would be counter-productive.”

Coal is the No1 issue in China. The country gets only 4 per cent of its power from nuclear energy — a planned reactor programme is on hold in the wake of Fukushima. A new Rainbow Warrior is due to launch at the end of the year at a cost of £6 million; Beijing is its likely first port of call.

Greenpeace may not make the waves it once did in the Seventies and Eighties but that is because it helped to spawn an entire generation of environmental pressure groups, NGOs and green initiatives such as Friends of the Earth and even the Green Party. Support has hovered at just over 2½ million globally since the turn of the century, considerably down on the early Nineties when it could count on more than four million.

In the UK numbers now stand at 130,000 — nearly a third of its peak. Yet the drop in numbers has done nothing to slow its financial expansion. Ten years ago Greenpeace International’s income stood at $157 million; now it’s close to $200 million. Pressure groups do not come much more rich or powerful, which may explain why, in 2010, New Zealand’s Charities Commission ruled that its “objectionable activities” disqualified it from registering as a charity there.

“At the end of the day who do you trust?” asks Smales, who is now CEO of the SPACE eco-planning group Beyond Green. “When governments make spurious green claims someone needs to pick them up. You need an organisation prepared to speak out and it’s hard to think of another one that has Greenpeace’s level of trust.”

“We’re not going to shut up,” agrees Michel Peremans in Brussels. “There’s a Belgian expression, een luis in de pels — we’re the louse in their fur.”

It’s a description that will satisfy both supporters and opponents. Forty years on, Greenpeace remains a pest that can’t be controlled