Greenpeace New Zealand Weblog

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 now has reached legendary status globally for capturing the final seconds of Zhang’s life, continued to cover the very emotional moments of this oil spill disaster.

Colleagues described how over 30,000 people lined the streets of Dalian to honor Zhang. And judging from Jiang He’s photos, there were many outpourings of grief for his untimely death, at the age of 25. People talked about whispers of anger from Dalian residents and firefighters against the corporations responsible for this tragic human and environmental disaster. And of their utter callousness: in the evening of the same day, a fancy celebratory dinner was held in one of Dalian’s classiest hotels for the leaders of Dalian PetroChina. A large banner with grammatically incorrect Chinese welcomed them to the “fire rescue live event.” Read more »

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 size off the New Zealand coast would be no worse. But then imagine your favourite beach covered in crude … not just immediately after a spill, but years later – because it’s a myth that you can properly clean up spilt oil.

It would be like the difference between reading the death notices, and actually having a loved one die. Read more »

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. He cared about justice not only for Jewish people, but for everyone.” Dorothy’s mother, Rebecca Miller, taught Hebrew and inspired Dorothy to pursue an education.

Dorothy attended Pembroke College in the U.S., majored in English and philosophy, became a psychiatric social worker, and served as the first president of her local civic employees union. During the repressive McCarthy era, when she threated a strike, the state governor erroneously called her a “communist,” but she stood her ground and won a pay raise for her union.

In 1953 Dorothy married civil rights lawyer Irving Strasmich. They celebrated their wedding dinner at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the organization that launched the U.S. civil rights movement.

They changed their family name to Stowe in honour of Harriet Beecher Stowe – pioneering feminist and abolitionist, who helped end slavery in the U.S. The Stowes had two children, Robert, born in 1955 and Barbara in 1956, both now living in Vancouver.

In the 1950s, Dorothy and Irving Stowe began campaigning against nuclear weapons, adopting the Quaker ideas of “bearing witness” to wrong-doing and “speaking truth to power.” The Quaker boats, Golden Rule and Phoenix in 1958 influenced the Stowes’ decision twelve years later to sail a boat to Amchitka Island nuclear test zone in Alaska, the first Greenpeace campaign.

In 1961, to avoid supporting the Vietnam War with their taxes, Dorothy and Irving immigrated to New Zealand, where they led demonstrations at the U.S. embassy and protested French nuclear weapons tests in Polynesia. However, when New Zealand sent troops to Vietnam in 1965, the Stowes moved their family to Canada. Read more »

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 100 percent renewable instead.

“This is an important milestone for all of you who have helped spread Facebook around the world,” Mark Zu

ckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, said in a blog post to celebrate his company’s latest figures this week. The data also shows that of its half a billion users, 250 million use Facebook every single day.

Impressive? For sure. But how much more impressive would it be if all that social networking going on via Facebook across this planet was powered by renewable energy – and not by the dirtiest source of energy and the largest single source of global warming pollution in the world: coal. Read more »

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 of our visit to the Marshall Islands is to reconnect with the Rongelap community and check how they doing, particularly in the face of US pressure to return to their nuclear fallout contaminated homeland. Unfortunately organising anything in the Marshall Islands takes a great deal of patience and flexibility. It’s a great learning experience and exercise for two such people as Bunny and I who always try and squeeze every productive moment out of the day and do 5 things all at once.

The Islands in the Marshalls are really quite far apart, there are, surprisingly, very few boats here and no ferrys to get from island to island. Like many things here fuel is exorbitantly expensive and so most people who did have boats have given them up. Sailing being another skill that seems to be have all but disappeared.  Air Marshall Islands the national carrier has 2 planes but it seems that most of the time at least one and very often two of them are not working. Stories abound of the airline not having enough money to pay for the parts to have the planes fixed, or to pay for landing fees or to pay the pilots so it really is a lottery whether your flight will go or not. The Marshallese have nicknamed the airline Air Maybe and it’s definitely apt.
Read more »

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 protest in a generation and an avalanche of submissions. It goes to show that people power works, that when enough of us act together – we are unstoppable.

The Government’s turnaround is a heartening example of people power in action. This is a historic victory for the record number of New Zealanders who stood up to protect our most treasured places and for a vision of a truly sustainable and progressive 21^st century economy for New ZealandThis is a hugely significant victory and shows the Government in no uncertain terms that New Zealanders want a better vision for the future.  We value our environment and its importance to our economy.  We don’t want it sacrificed for short-term corporate profit. Read more »

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 National park, no mining in the Coromandel, no mining on Great Barrier Island and no mining in any National Parks either now or in the future. There will be a legislative change introduced that will mean any crown land that becomes a national park will automatically be put into Schedule 4 and protected from mining.”

I won’t celebrate until I hear it confirmed by the Government but it’s looking hopeful.

Watch this space.

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 and a flashing dot on the map in the place it was detonated. There’s a running tally at the top and bottom bars of the screen. Hashimoto, who began the project in 2003, says that he created it with the goal of showing”the fear and folly of nuclear weapons.” It starts really slow — if you want to see real action, skip ahead to 1962 or so — but the buildup becomes overwhelming.

Video below:

Via Geekosystem

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 better to keep quiet and let these lovely people think they were talking to a hard core activist from the front lines or admit that most of my day is spent in front of a computer or in the boardroom and that my finest achievement was the creation of an uber-spreadsheet for income forecasting? It’s all essential work to make sure the campaigning work we do can happen, but it’s not exactly the sexy side of the business. After 10 years of managing fundraising programmes it is definitely time for me to improve my credibility, and I am lucky enough to be able to take time out from my spreadsheets to get involved in something that feels a little more real.

Along with Bunny McDiarmid, our Executive Director, I have come to the Marshall Islands. For those that don’t know, the Marshalls are half way between Hawaii and PNG, basically a long way from anywhere. We’re catching up with the latest chapter in a very long story about nuclear testing in the Pacific and its lasting legacy. I’ll try and give a brief synopsis of the story so far…..

In 1954 the US military detonated “Bravo”, a 15-megaton Hydrogen bomb, 1000 times the explosive power of the Hiroshima bomb. They did so not in the US, but at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The inhabitants of Bikini Atoll had moved off their island to allow the testing to occur having been told the testing was for “the good of all mankind and to end all world wars”.  The Marshall Islands were a UN Trust territory administered by the US at the time. Read more »

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 for those who missed the email hack brouhaha: Late last year, emails were leaked from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in England. The emails were between scientists at the university and their colleagues and peers around the world. At first glance they were disturbing, seeming to show that the scientists had manipulated or hidden data. Or, as last night’s chairman George Monbiot put it, they were heavily suggestive of “grubby behaviour”. Climate sceptics rejoiced, jumping on the emails as proof anthropogenic global warming wasn’t happening. There have since been four independent reviews/ investigations into exactly what the emails meant and whether they have any bearing on the efficacy of global climate science. All have cleared the university and scientists of the more serious allegations, but heavily criticise both for lack of openness and transparency. Read more »