Back to index of Nerve 14 - Summer 2009

Greenpeace Actions

Another Ministry of Defence lorryload of plutonium is on its way from Sellafield to Aldermaston. Along the M6. Without any escort. At Stafford it leaves for a meal-break at the RAF station.
Two trailers pull in front and slam on the brakes. A bus pulls up behind and fifty white-suited Greenpeace volunteers get out. They sit in the road and it is two hours before the local police – who knew nothing about the convoy – can remove them.

At one stroke the protest exposed the link between nuclear power and nuclear weapons, and the state’s complacency in shipping hazardous material about the country. It wasn’t a mass event; you couldn’t just turn up for it. But it made great news and inspired further campaigning against ‘Bombing down the Motorway’.

Greenpeace was founded in 1971 by anti-war protesters sailing into an Alaskan harbour to protest against US underground nuclear weapons testing. It’s since grown to a worldwide organisation that combines the scientifically respectable with a network of local groups, petitions etc. But it is best known and loved - or hated - for the occasional eye-catching intervention.

One example close to home is the campaign against genetically modified foods. At one level there are papers to governments and conferences spelling out the dangers of GM experiments. But when the first cargo of GM maize was actually imported in November 1996, it was Greenpeace volunteers who scaled the cranes on the Liverpool docks and held the cargo up for four days. In February that year six climbers boarded the first ship to bring in GM soya beans. They chained themselves to the anchor and held the ship up by a week. Seventy-five ‘chicken activists’ also invaded the Cargill’s soya mill in Bootle and halted work for a day.

The protests are normally short, spectacular and unexpected, and for all those reasons the authorities find it hard to stop them. For much the same reasons they achieve little unless they fit into a wider campaign.

Photographs by Karen Robinson © Greenpeace

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Comment left by David Okutu on 12th April, 2010 at 19:02
Thanks

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