A year of action for the Earth.
Way back in January, two corporate villains where hogging
thelimelight. Star bad guy Monsanto
added bribery to their litany ofenvironmental crimes. Desperate
to get its dodgy GE cotton planted inIndonesia it paid bribes for
officials to 'forget' about pesky detailslike an environmental
impact assessment. Caught red handed thecorporation that claims
"integrity, honesty and decency" had to pay aUS$1.5m fine.
On the other side of the world we highlighted how Kimberly
Clark,makers of the famous Kleenex tissue,
makes millions from destroyingancient forests to make tissues
destined to be flushed down the toilet.Despite the absurdity of
turning thousand year old trees into toiletpaper and other tissue
products, Kimberly Clark continues to proudly boast that its
productscontains no recycled paper.
In February, the one and currently only, global effort to tackle
globalwarming, the
Kyoto Protocol became law, despite the best efforts of
thefossil fuel funded nay-sayers. They first claimed it wasn't
needed, thensaid it would never work and finally predicted not
enough countrieswould sign it into law. How wrong they were...
In March, Xerox showed that forests are best left as homes
forendangered animals and indigenous people by
promising not to turnancient Finnish forests into copy paper.
Shame Kimberly Clark
stillappears to have Kleenex stuffed in its ears to when such
common sensemoves are suggested.
Cleaning up
April brought more good news.
Sony Ericsson announced a commitment tophase out toxic
chemicals in its products after pressure from
ourcyberactivists. Later in the year other large electronic
companies like
LG and
Motorola followed suit in our campaign to
pull the plug on dirtyelectronics.
Also after four years of legal wrangling the French courts
agreed withus and declared the La Hague nuclear reprocessing plant
an
illegalnuclear waste dump. In the same month a huge leak at the
UK nuclearreprocessing plant in Sellafield was discovered, a mere
nine mothsafter it started!
Homer Simpson would be truly proud of such a level ofnuclear
ineptitude.
Whales in Danger
Japan chose April to announce it is
doubling the amount of whales itkills each year, allegedly for
'science'. Not content with only killingmore minke whales, it
announced plans to kill endangered humpback andfin whales. Imagine
China researching giant pandas with rifles orUganda chopping up
mountain gorilla's to discover what they eat. That'swhy we are out
now in the stormy seas of
the Southern Ocean to stop thehunt.
May started with the sad news of the passing
of Bob Hunter, who perhapsmore than anyone was the inventor of
Greenpeace in the early 70's.During that period his madcap
creativity, strategic smarts, andhard-nosed journalistic sense of
story would indelibly mark our brandof action. From the pack ice
of Newfoundland, where he dyed thewhitecoats of harp seal pups to
make them commercially worthless, tothe Pacific Ocean where he
stood between Russian harpoons and thewhales, he inspired a new
kind of personal environmental activism.
One of the first campaigns Bob was part of was the campaign
againstwhaling. Even now we need to defend the whales, and not just
from theJapanese. That's where our whale embassy in Korea comes in.
We were
taking action in May to head off moves within Korea to follow
Japan andreopen commercial whaling.
In June 55,000 people joined us on a virtual
march against theslaughter of whales at the annual meeting of
the International WhalingCommission. This strong show of public
opinion helped prevent
Japanesemoves to reopen the commercial slaughter, for now.
Foot in mouth
Sometimes you just have to wait for your enemies to make a fool
ofthemselves in public. Thousands of scientists are calling for a
ban ondestructive bottom trawling. But a New Zealand fisheries boss
knewbetter when he claimed bottom trawling nets never touched the
sea floorand
Greenpeace claims were "unsubstantiated claptrap". A few days
laterwe took shots of bottom trawling nets without many fish, but
plenty ofrare corals smashed off the sea bottom. That claptrap was
*substantiated,* mister.
In July, the European Union moved to
ban certain toxic chemicals fromchildren's toys, only seven
years after we first highlighted theproblem. But the battle
for wider controls on toxic chemicals in Europerages on.
Several large
book publishers joined our campaign to make
ancientforest friendly books helping to ensure
some editions of books likeHarry Potter, which features
fictional enchanted forests, doesn't meanpulping real life
endangered forests.
This year was also the
20th anniversary of the bombing for the RainbowWarrior by the
French Secret Service, murdering the photographerFernando
Pereira.
Silly fig leaves
In some countries August is known as the silly season for news.
Step upMonsanto (once again) for their
patent claim on that well-knownMonsanto invention, the pig. Not
content with attempting to control thefood chain it now seems to be
branching out into trying to controlanimal breeding as well.
In the news was the
US - Australian climate pact that was reallynothing more than a
tiny fig leaf that completely fails to cover theirenormous
inadequacies on tackling global warming.
September was dominated by the
strongest hurricane season on record,which wreaked havoc in the
Caribbean, Southern US and Central America.
Pandering to profit
In October, European politicians played along to the tune of
bigbusiness and ignored their own environmental advice by
failing to banglobal warming gases. Given some
politicians are so friendly with dirtyindustry we offered to
move them to new jobs with their best friends.
Flying jaguars prevail
November saw many Argentine celebrities enter stage right to add
theirvoice to our campaign against the bulldozing of pristine
forests. Alongwith a helping hand from a certain famous former
footballer the
jaguarsprevailed ensure a huge area of forest in Northern
Argentina is notturned in to soya farms.
In the UK in December we
gate crashed Tony Blair carefully craftedannouncement of his
rubber-stamping of nuclear power as the answer toglobal warming.
Although Tony has already made up his mind he's havingan 'energy
review' to make sure he is proved right. Even if he iscompletely
wrong. Sounds just a bit like the run up the Iraq war all
overagain.
While scientists announced 2005 was the warmest year in the
Northen Hemisphere sincerecords began, politicians were
discussing tackling global warming in adistinctly chilly
Montreal, Canada.
That seems like a good point to bringthe curtain down on our 2005. A little bit of everything, except maybea little love interest. Maybe in 2006.....
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