Greenpeace New Zealand Weblog

Dave Walsh writes from on board the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise:

Greetings from Baffin Bay! As I write this from the campaign office on board our ship, the Arctic Sunrise, blue and white icebergs appear through the sea mist. We’re just south of the wonderfully named Disko Island, or Qeqertarsuaq, off the west coast of Greenland. A seal just popped its head up, to check out who is passing by. And we just crossed the Arctic Circle.

Read more , view the web cam, and follow the expedition on the international climate blog.

Guest blog from Sara Holden, our International whales campaign coordinator

Just a few minutes before the opening of the 61st International Whaling Commission meeting, a large rat was seen scuttling through the hotel and out the door. As metaphors go, it was a good one. The IWC meeting venue is another. Hosted at a casino hotel in Madeira, Portugal, it is fast becoming apparent that anyone betting on a good outcome for the whales is unlikely to win.

After 12 months of talking and achieving nothing of substance, the smart money says another 12 months of talking is the only thing on the cards.
Read more »

Extreme fisherman and star of the Ultimate Fishing Show Matt Watson talks about fishing, sustainability and the Greenpeace report: While Stocks.

Once again the release of some crazy genetic experiments have been foiled. A couple of weeks ago the High Court did what our so called ‘environmental risk’ management agency (ERMA) didn’t. The High Court effectively stopped the release of numerous genetic experiments involving genes from possums, goats and people – to name but a few.

And these experiments weren’t going to be kept in a lab (not that I’m advocating that either) but were going to be coming to a field near you!
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The final installment of a trilogy is out today. The last of the three Reasons to Believe films narrated by the charming and talented Ms Susan Sarandon has been released – ‘Reasons to Believe: Servers‘. These films give us three out of an endless list of reasons to believe that an International Energy [R]evolution is possible and necessary to change our energy habits and reduce emissions contributing to climate change.

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Sustainable pole and line tuna available in supermarkets in the UK. Currently the main New Zealand retailers have no policies in place to ensure the seafood they sell is sustainable, and many species fished and sold here are not sustainable.

Our fishing industry is doing us a disservice. As a small nation that relies on our primary industries and exports, we want to see New Zealand products flying off the shelves because they reflect genuinely sustainable practices that match our clean green reputation. Instead, we are seeing more and more New Zealand products being taken off shelves because they are failing to meet the sustainability demands of consumers and retailers in our export markets.
Recent announcements include that by Compass Group USA, the leading food service company in North America, of their sustainable seafood purchasing initiative. Over three years, Compass Group has taken 1.5 million pounds of unsustainable seafood off their catalogues – including orange roughy. This is a clear signal to the New Zealand fishing industry, which continues to catch and export orange roughy even though three of the eight stocks have collapsed and the Australian Government has declared it a threatened species.

This week Wegmans, a major US supermarket chain, has also taken orange roughy off their shelves. If our fishing industry had not yet got the message, Wegman’s statement should leave no room for doubt about the need to pick up our game: Read more »

The economic downturn in dairying is New Zealand’s best chance for a farming revolution.

Our ‘Tried and True’ dairy at the 2009 Fieldays worked a treat. We were able to communicate directly with the farming and rural sector about how Fonterra’s business strategy is contributing directly to the current economic, environmental and social demise of dairy farming – big issues that threaten to overwhelm New Zealand.

The situation was well summarised in the editorial in our “Better Times” newspaper, produced for Fieldays – ‘The Perfect Storm Threatens NZ Farming,’ Simply, the headlong rush by Fonterra into milk powder commodity markets has forced farmers down an intensification path, which is creating a huge rise in greenhouse gases and having negative impacts on New Zealand’s waterways.

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An update on UN Climate negotiations in Bonn, Germany brought to you by our very own Cindy Baxter who has been at the negotiations since the start.

Coming to the end of a hard two weeks here at the climate talks in Bonn, we were greeted yesterday by a very (VERY) loud siren on the back of a truck parked by our colleagues just down from the conference centre. Sounding the alarm for the climate. The siren went on for two hours before our 15 activists were arrested. The noise carried into the building and maybe it jolted some sense into at least some of the negotiators here.
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I have to confess, I haven’t achieved much today – illness and
tiredness have caught up with me. There’s a virus doing the rounds of
delegates at the negotiations as we have all become more tired and
it’s got me. So I’ve had a quiet day. When you’re at something like
this, you don’t want to waste a moment so it’s easy to overwork and
it’s also frustrating to feel less than 100%.

I missed the big event of the day when my Greenpeace colleagues set
off a large alarm outside the Maritim Hotel to highlight that failure
of countries, including New Zealand, to show the level of urgency
required to tackle climate change. There is no sense of urgency here whatsoever. Read more »

Free samples of value added dairy products

Well, it’s raining – and our dairy has turned into a ‘leaky building’. But, it’s only dripping on us and not the products or the punters, so all’s good.

Yesterday was busy – a sunny day combined with great free products and drawings by renowned cartoonist Malcolm Evans drew in over 1000 people to our site.

I managed to get away for a few minutes to watch the souped-up tractor racing. I have to admit that I find that stuff thrilling. And in a thoughtful moment I realised that although I’ve travelled and worked for Greenpeace in amazing places, from as far afield as Mexico and Indonesia, being here at the fieldays would have to be near the top of my list of most memorable Greenpeace moments. Read more »