2005 Rewound and the year in pictures

Way back in January, two corporate villains where hogging the limelight. Star bad guy Monsanto added bribery to their litany of environmental crimes. Desperate to get its dodgy GE cotton planted in Indonesia it paid bribes for officials to 'forget' about pesky details like an environmental impact assessment. Caught red handed the corporation that claims "integrity, honesty and decency" had to pay a US$1.5m fine.

On the other side of the world we highlighted how Kimberly Clark, makers of the famous Kleenex tissue, makes millions from destroying ancient forests to make tissues destined to be flushed down the toilet. Despite the absurdity of turning thousand year old trees into toilet paper and other tissue products, Kimberly Clark continues to proudly boast that its products contains no recycled paper.

In February, the one and currently only, global effort to tackle global warming, the Kyoto Protocol became law, despite the best efforts of the fossil fuel funded nay-sayers. They first claimed it wasn't needed, then said it would never work and finally predicted not enough countries would sign it into law. How wrong they were...
 
In March, Xerox showed that forests are best left as homes for endangered animals and indigenous people by promising not to turn ancient Finnish forests into copy paper. Shame Kimberly Clark still appears to have Kleenex stuffed in its ears to when such common sense moves are suggested.

Cleaning up

April brought more good news. Sony Ericsson announced a commitment to phase out toxic chemicals in its products after pressure from our cyberactivists. Later in the year other large electronic companies like LG and Motorola followed suit in our campaign to pull the plug on dirty electronics.

Also after four years of legal wrangling the French courts agreed with us and declared the La Hague nuclear reprocessing plant an illegal nuclear waste dump. In the same month a huge leak at the UK nuclear reprocessing plant in Sellafield was discovered, a mere nine moths after it started! Homer Simpson would be truly proud of such a level of nuclear ineptitude.

Whales in Danger

Japan chose April to announce it is doubling the amount of whales it kills each year, allegedly for 'science'. Not content with only killing more minke whales, it announced plans to kill endangered humpback and fin whales. Imagine China researching giant pandas with rifles or Uganda chopping up mountain gorilla's to discover what they eat. That's why we are out now in the stormy seas of the Southern Ocean to stop the hunt.

May started with the sad news of the passing of Bob Hunter, who perhaps more than anyone was the inventor of Greenpeace in the early 70's. During that period his madcap creativity, strategic smarts, and hard-nosed journalistic sense of story would indelibly mark our brand of action.  From the pack ice of Newfoundland, where he dyed the whitecoats of harp seal pups to make them commercially worthless, to the Pacific Ocean where he stood between Russian harpoons and the whales, he inspired a new kind of personal environmental activism.

One of the first campaigns Bob was part of was the campaign against whaling. Even now we need to defend the whales, and not just from the Japanese. 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 and reopen commercial whaling.

In June 55,000 people joined us on a virtual march against the slaughter of whales at the annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission. This strong show of public opinion helped prevent Japanese moves to reopen the commercial slaughter, for now.

Foot in mouth

Sometimes you just have to wait for your enemies to make a fool of themselves in public. Thousands of scientists are calling for a ban on destructive bottom trawling. But a New Zealand fisheries boss knew better when he claimed bottom trawling nets never touched the sea floor and Greenpeace claims were "unsubstantiated claptrap". A few days later we took shots of bottom trawling nets without many fish, but plenty of rare corals smashed off the sea bottom. That claptrap was *substantiated,* mister.

In July, the European Union moved to ban certain toxic chemicals from children's toys, only seven years after we first highlighted the problem. But the battle for wider controls on toxic chemicals in Europe rages on.

Several large book publishers joined our campaign to make ancient forest friendly books helping to ensure some editions of books like Harry Potter, which features fictional enchanted forests, doesn't mean pulping real life endangered forests.

This year was also the 20th anniversary of the bombing for the Rainbow Warrior by the French Secret Service, murdering the photographer Fernando Pereira.

Silly fig leaves

In some countries August is known as the silly season for news. Step up Monsanto (once again) for their patent claim on that well-known Monsanto invention, the pig. Not content with attempting to control the food chain it now seems to be branching out into trying to control animal breeding as well.

In the news was the US - Australian climate pact that was really nothing more than a tiny fig leaf that completely fails to cover their enormous 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 big business and ignored their own environmental advice by failing to ban global warming gases. Given some politicians are so friendly with dirty industry 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 their voice to our campaign against the bulldozing of pristine forests. Along with a helping hand from a certain famous former footballer the jaguars prevailed ensure a huge area of forest in Northern Argentina is not turned in to soya farms.

In the UK in December we gate crashed Tony Blair carefully crafted announcement of his rubber-stamping of nuclear power as the answer to global warming. Although Tony has already made up his mind he's having an 'energy review' to make sure he is proved right. Even if he is completely wrong. Sounds just a bit like the run up the Iraq war all over again.

While scientists announced 2005 was the warmest year in the Northen Hemisphere since records began, politicians were discussing tackling global warming in a distinctly chilly Montreal, Canada.

That seems like a good point to bring the curtain down on our 2005. A little bit of everything, except maybe a little love interest. Maybe in 2006.....