Greenpeace was, from the start, something akin to a single-interest media organisation—one that specialised in a new mass-mediated risk politics.
by Nils Lindahl Elliot
On September 15, 1971, an old halibut trawler sailed from Vancouver to the Aleutian Islands with several members of a group that originally called itself the ‘Don’t Make a Wave Committee’. The trawler’s voyage was intended to prevent the U.S. government from testing hydrogen bombs on the island of Amtchitka. The group’s name was a reference to fears that the nuclear tests might trigger an earthquake and then a tsunami in an area with a geology that was prone to earthquakes. The plan was to employ the Quaker principle of ‘bearing witness’ to shame the Nixon administration into giving up the tests.
Shortly before the group set off, it became apparent that the name of the group was too unwieldy. According to Jim Bohlen, one of the group’s founding members, ‘The “Don’t Make A Wave Committee” was a lot of words that didn’t mean very much. People didn’t really relate to it, didn’t know what it meant. So the group was trying to think of something that was more generic, that people could understand’ (1). The group came up with a new name that merged the symbols of pacificism and environmentalism: ‘Greenpeace’. The name was used to rechristen the trawler, and the group set off to try to reach Amchitka before the bomb was set off.
The campaign initially appeared to fail inasmuch as the U.S. government went ahead and tested a nuclear device on November 6. However, the fledgling organisation was so successful in mobilizing the media and its public opinion that the Nixon administration was forced to call off further tests. Amchitka was declared an environmental sanctuary, and Greenpeace went on to become the symbol of a new generation of environmental direct action.
Greenpeace is once again in the news thanks to its campaign to stop Japanese whaling in the Antarctic Ocean. However, in the 37 or so years that have passed since the group first seized the news agenda, the organisation appears to have lost much of its power to mobilize the media. In this post I would like to consider the nature of that power, and some of the reasons why Greenpeace may have lost it.
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The success of Greenpeace’s Amchitka campaign hinged on the imaginative, if paradoxical manner in which the organization set out to ‘victimize’ itself. In Amchitka as in other future campaigns, Greenpeace incurred the wrath of the authorities by making themselves present in areas, or in activities that were off-limits, and/or which posed an often considerable degree of risk. This strategy can be better understood by considering the logic of the Quaker practice of ‘bearing witness’. ‘Bearing witness’ is a form of pacifist protest that suggests that, whatever an individual’s disempowerment, the individual always has the option to express public, but peaceful disapproval of bellicose action; this by making her/himself present at the scene of the action, and by ‘bearing witness’ to whatever act of violence is being perpetrated. Greenpeace activists adapted this principle for the purposes of environmental protest, but also, and crucially, in order to engage with the media of mass communication.
As I suggested in Mediating Nature (2), in the context of the kind of globalization made possible by the media of mass communication in the second half of the 20th century, ‘bearing witness’ involved a rather more complex politics than the Quaker principle suggests. The efficacy of Greenpeace depended not so much on ‘bearing witness’, but on ‘being witnessed bearing witness’. Put simply, Greenpeace needed to be seen to oppose the nuclear test on Amchitka. However, it needed to be seen not by the U.S. military, who attempted to interdict the old halibut trawler, but by the members of the media of mass communication—in particular, the news media.
This may seem like a rather obvious point. Less obvious is the politics of representation that such a strategy entailed. The news media are frequently regarded as a ‘fourth estate’ that keeps an eye on governments, and acts as a de facto representative of ‘the public’. Indeed, reporters routinely confer upon themselves a kind of mandate to ask questions on behalf of that same ‘public’, and to use expressions such as ‘what the public wants to know’ when conducting interviews. However, if by ‘the public’ one means a kind of homogeneous mass of people, a unified group whose members have conferred such powers of representation upon the media, then clearly no such public exists. From this perspective, Greenpeace needed to be seen not so much by that fictional ‘public’ but by the news organizations that claimed to represent that public during the Amchitka campaign. The point is not to deny that many people did see, hear or read about the campaign, and that some went on to become advocates of Greenpeace policies—the organization now has a reported 250,000 members worldwide. Instead, the point is to suggest that Greenpeace needed to persuade the U.S. government that ‘the public’—i.e. the vast majority if not all of the people included in this generalizing term—not only agreed with its protest, but conferred upon Greenpeace the right to represent their moral outrage at the events on Amchitka.
A somewhat more technical way of explaining this process suggests that Greenpeace exploited the logic of mediated quasi-interaction in order to transform absent publics into a virtual presence at the scene of what might (or might not) be imminent environmental destruction. The notion of mediated quasi-interaction refers to a situation in which individuals communicate from a distance to others who may respond to them in certain ways, and perhaps even form bonds of friendship, affection or loyalty. However, it is a ‘quasi’ interaction insofar as the flow of communication tends to be one way, and the channels by means of which the recipients can communicate back are very limited (3). From this perspective, ‘being witnessed bearing witness’ involved a kind of ‘double’ or ‘two-tiered’ form of mediated quasi-interaction. If Greenpeace encouraged distant audiences to identify with its activists, and gave the impression that it was acting on behalf of those audiences—as Greenpeace itself put it in its promotional literature, it was ‘acting for us all’ (4)—the news media did the same again by giving the impression that they were covering the events ‘on behalf’ of those same audiences.
Now it might be assumed that Greenpeace’s actions constituted something akin to a radical or ‘direct’ form of environmental democracy. An alternative interpretation is that Greenpeace, like the news media, engaged in a form of what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has described as symbolic domination, if not a symbolic violence; that is to say, a form of domination with no explicit act of intimidation, and which depends on a kind of ‘active acceptance’ or proactive involvement on the part of those who are disempowered (5). Bourdieu suggests, for example, that indirect democracies involve this kind of domination insofar as the voter effectively gives up her/his power as soon as s/he has voted for a representative. A similar point might be made with respect to the practices of Greenpeace supporters in so far as Greenpeace is an organization whose governance has historically relied on a team of unaccountable managers who decide what campaigns to engage, when.
Greenpeace’s claims to representation were thus arguably constructed on the back of a silent, and perhaps not an entirely unselfconscious pact with the media: no ‘public’, in the sense defined earlier, gave Greenpeace, or indeed the news media, anything like an explicit mandate to ‘act on our behalf’; but like the news media themselves, Greenpeace was more than happy to act—and happy to encourage ‘us’ to respond—as if such a mandate was given.
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It is perhaps a matter of some interest to consider how Greenpeace was successful in securing the mentioned ‘pact’. One answer must be that some of the most effective Greenpeace campaigns succeeded in invoking a sense of the sacred when it came to nature and the environment. Put differently, Greenpeace was extraordinarily effective in mobilizing the news media’s public opinion with respect to what it represented as a sublime nature, i.e. a nature involving Edenic isles such as the Muroroa Atoll (the infamous site of the French nuclear testing programme) or creatures such as the humpback whale.
I am suggesting then that the choice of nature was a key ingredient. However, Greenpeace also managed to narrativize this nature in remarkably effective ways. (To ‘narrativize’ is to give something that is not itself a story, the form of a story.) Greenpeace’s stories frequently involved a David vs. Goliath plot, and produced what might be described as a visual parable. A good example of this may be found in the mock (and not-so-mock) sea ‘battles’ fought between large ships, and Greenpeace’s relatively small inflatable dinghies—vessels that were actually first used against Greenpeace by French commandos. Images of these battles arguably helped to frame whatever environmental issue was at stake by way of a series of moralistic dualisms: the weak-but-audacious vs. the strong-but-dumb, the green vs. the gray, the good vs. the bad). This strategy fit like a hand in the glove especially of a televised news media whose time constraints, and dumbed-down conception of its own audiences’ capacity to deal with complexity made it particularly susceptible to such parables. No doubt aware of this, Greenpeace made sure that their campaigns lent themselves to a 30-seconds-or-less ‘visual bite’ that showed the ‘outrageous’ actions of ‘despotic’ governments or ‘corrupt’ corporations. While the targeted actions may well have been outrageous, despotic, or corrupt, it is little wonder that so many journalists were willing to devote acres of media space to Greenpeace; Greenpeace helped the news organizations to ‘deliver’ the audiences required by advertisers even as it appeared to attack the principles that many of the advertisers stood for.
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If this was such a successful strategy, why and how did Greenpeace eventually lose much of its power to mobilize the media? As John Gummer, the former Conservative secretary of state for the environment put it in 2003, ‘The old ways of campaigning aren’t working… Greenpeace’s stunts have to be ever more audacious if they are to catch the headlines. The media is much more cynical about these things than they were’(6).
Whether the media are indeed more cynical or not, it would appear that a turning point in Greenpeace’s fortunes occurred during the Brent Spar campaign of 1995. Shell wanted to dispose of a massive decommissioned oil storage and tanker loading buoy by scuttling it in the deep waters of the North Atlantic. Greenpeace landed its activists on the rig, and a remarkable stand-off ensued; sectors of the northern European publics (I use the plural quite deliberately) responded strongly to the campaign by boycotting Shell petrol stations and demanding that their governments take action against the planned disposal. Shell was forced to opt for the on-shore dismantling of the rig, and some observers even suggest that the battle may have had a bearing on John Major’s disastrous 1997 campaign for re-election. (The Conservative government, which had recently passed draconian legislation in an attempt to stop environmental and other forms of protest, strongly backed Shell.)
But in something of an inversion of Greenpeace’s fortunes in Amchitka, this initial success may have concealed what was perhaps lasting damage to the organisation’s image. First, Shell’s counter-campaign succeeded in rendering more complex the issues that Greenpeace moralized. In response to this strategy, Greenpeace attempted to strengthen its position by making what proved to be false claims about the amount of toxic waste in the Brent Spar. Second, and perhaps more importantly, the ‘pact’ that I alluded to earlier between Greenpeace and the media was exposed. The BBC and other media came under attack from the Major government when it was revealed that, in addition to helping Greenpeace to ‘bear witness’ (as per the logic I have explained), they were actually using images produced by Greenpeace.
This aspect of the Greenpeace strategy bears some consideration. An article published in 1995 by the magazine Business Video (7) illustrated how far Greenpeace had gone to secure control over the representation of its campaigns. If the organisation once staged dramas for the media, it was now determined to provide the images of the drama as well. Business Video described how the Greenpeace Communications centre in London provided press, stills, video and internet services to Greenpeace International. During the 1995 Moruroa campaign, the centre provided JPEG stills of French commandos storming the SV Rainbow Warrior for the front pages of the Sydney Morning Herald, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. The pictures were also uploaded to a Greenpeace website as a QuickTime movie, but there was such demand for the clip that the site was overloaded, and ‘the BBC, which has an advanced web site, saw how frantic the demand [was] for the material …. and offered to take the QuickTime clip and hold it on their own system to be accessed’ (8). When the BBC was ‘caught’ using Greenpeace images during the Brent Spar campaign, John Major’s government leapt at the Corporation, which was forced to revise its guidelines for the use of such images.
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There are undoubtedly other factors that also played a role in Greenpeace’s diminishing capacity to mobilize the media. The 1990s were a time when, in Britain at least, a number of new, and more radical environmentalist organisations emerged which captured the imagination of the news media, and did so in new ways. The loosely-knit organisations emerged as an alliance of groups determined to stop first the Tory, and then the New Labour governments from transforming places of outstanding natural beauty into motorways. While these protests engaged in a politics of representation that was not entirely dissimilar to the one employed by Greenpeace, more often than not they included a significant local participation which transformed the process of mass mediation. The protests eventually moved from the countryside to the cities, where groups such as Reclaim the Streets combined anarchist forms of organisation (or dis-organisation), with a situationist aesthetics. The success of these and other forms of protest led the Conservative and then the New Labour governments to use increasingly draconian laws to curtail the right to protest. After 9/11, the New Labour government passed laws that effectively transformed environmental activists into criminals if they did so much as shout the same protest more than once at a government minister, at the head of a corporation, or indeed at anyone that might be inclined to file suit against ‘harassment’(9).
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If Greenpeace is once again making headlines, it is perhaps because it’s gone ‘back to basics’ with a campaign involving humpback whales. There is, however, a new context for the campaign. On the one hand, the fact that Japan has felt able to even try to start hunting the humpback whales is arguably a sign of how much ground environmentalists have lost. On the other hand, concerns over climate change—not least over the impact of climate change in the Arctic and the the Antarctic—mean that groups such as Greenpeace may recover some of the agency that they have lost. The challenge for environmentalist activists is now to find ways of engaging in environmental action in a manner that addresses the issues I have raised vis-à-vis mass mediated forms of representation. Friends of the Earth, for example, has a form of governance that is democratic within in its own ranks. However, I suggest that what is needed is nothing less than a complete reinterpretation of the way in which environmental groups relate not just to the news media, but to the society beyond. Cmcee.org hopes to be able to play a constructive role in this process.
References
(1) Jim Bohlen in M. Brown and J. May (1991) The Greenpeace Story. London: Dorling Kindersley, p. 9.
(2) Lindahl Elliot, N. (2006) Mediating Nature. London & New York: Routledge International Library of Sociology.
(3) Thompson, J. B. (1990) Ideology and Modern Culture. Cambridge: Polity. Today it is common for the media to try to suggest that this asymmetry has come to an end thanks to a variety of channels for audience feedback; call-ins, blogs, the reading out of emails on the news, and so forth. But most forms of mass communication continue to be structured by a significant division between the principal communicators, and their respondents.
(4) Brown and May (1991), p. 5
(5) Bourdieu, P. (1991) ‘The production and reproduction of legitimate language’, in Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity, p. 51.
(6) in ‘No news is bad news’, Guardian, October 1, 2003, http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2003/oct/01/internationalaidanddevelopment.comment, accessed January 21, 2007.
(7) Curtis, H. (1995) ‘Greenpeace Mobilises DTV Action’, in Business Video, 2(4):18-21.
[8] Curtis (1995), p. 19.
(9) See for example George Monbiot’s analysis of this issue at http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2005/10/04/protesters-are-criminals/, accessed November 12, 2007.
Copyright © 2008 Nils Lindahl Elliot All Rights Reserved
