It took two years of relentless campaigning and nearly 700,000 concerned people from around the world, but today we are sharing the good news that together we convinced the world’s largest tuna company to clean up its act!

Tuna giant Thai Union, which owns brands such as John West, Chicken of the Sea, Petit Navire, Mareblu, and Sealect, has committed to a series of changes to its business that will help to protect seafood workers, reduce destructive fishing practices, and increase support for more sustainable fishing. This marks a major shift for the corporation, and sends a signal to the entire fishing industry to do better for the oceans and seafood industry workers

How did this happen?

As the world’s biggest tuna producer, one in five cans of tuna sold globally are canned by Thai Unio... Read more >

Today at the UN Headquarters in New York, a global treaty banning nuclear weapons has been adopted. 

This is an historic moment: according to the treaty, to possess and develop nuclear weapons is now illegal under international law.

Activists release peace doves during the Hiroshima atomic bombing 60th anniversary. (2005)

The treaty will be open for signature by states on September 20th.

Over the last three weeks, 140 countries have engaged in final negotiations of the new treaty.  The nine states with nuclear weapons (US, Russia, China, France, UK, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea) have been boycotting the meeting in an attempt to rob the process of its legitimacy. NATO members have also stayed outside of the negotiations, and on the wrong side of history. Their absence is sadly...

BP are at it again. 

The company that devastated the Gulf of Mexico with its Deepwater Horizon disaster wants to drill for oil near the pristine Amazon Reef. What could possibly go wrong?  🤔

Home to pink corals, sunset-coloured fish and over 60 species of sea sponge, the Reef has been described as an ‘underwater rainforest’ near the mouth of the Amazon River - and we’re only just discovering how special it is.

But if BP’s extreme drilling causes a spill, it could spell disaster for the Reef and the wider area. We can’t let this happen.

So starting today, we’re turning up the pressure on BP - working together to defend the Reef from risky, spill-prone oil drilling.

And now we’ve got some help from an unlikely source. The Amazon Reef has a new champion - a celebrity advocate who’ll stan...

The first message I sent home from New Zealand was about tap water.

Sounds weird. True story.

Having spent the previous five years drinking London water (you know, the kind of hard water that means endless scrubbing to get crusty, yellowy limescale off your appliances; that leaves floating little flakes of yuckiness on the surface of your cuppa), I just couldn’t get enough of soft, clean NZ water.

Together with the obligatory ‘I love how they say thanks to the bus driver’ and ‘why am I getting sunburned when it’s cloudy?’, it featured front and centre in my earliest observations of my new home.

In my first few months in NZ, I sent back envy-inducing photos of turquoise beaches, alpine glaciers, clear blue lakes and streams you’d be rude not to swim in. I’m a terrible photog... Read more >

“OMG - Dairy Bosses discover climate change - 20 years too late”

Hot on the heels of Greenpeace’s parody video about Pure Dairy, the industry leadership has countered with a parody of its own.

The Dairy Action plan 2017-2018, released Wednesday afternoon, in which Fonterra, Dairy NZ, Piglet and Pooh discover Climate Change.

It’s like AA Milne does PR.

Walking through the 100 acre wood one day, the friends notice a set of melted footsteps in the snow.

It could be a Woozle says Pooh. Or a Heffalump says Piglet. No, say their new friends Fonterra and DairyNZ. It’s something even scarier. That’s your environmental footprint. The earth is heating up. It’s melting the snow.

This report reads like Fonterra stumbled across an old press release written by a marketing intern in the 1990’s. Bin... Read more >

How Greenpeace is using satire to call out NZ Dairy Bosses on their outrageous billboard.

You can't miss it. Even at night. The Fonterra billboard bores down through your windscreen with sunny insistence. It strikes you the moment you leave Auckland airport and head into the city. A bold statement designed to make New Zealanders proud and put overseas visitors on notice about the clean green nature of the country they’ve just landed in.

Welcome it says, to the home of pure dairy. Kind of sickening.

A visceral reaction to this blunt force PR is the motivation for the latest film from Greenpeace. It’s a parody that’s been visited upon the New Zealand Dairy Leadership over the last two weeks. We felt we had to act on the yawning disconnect between the billboard and the lived (and swimmed) r... Read more >

When farming organisations start using children as human shields you know they’ve reached a new level of desperation. I think we might have arrived at despo-con3.
 
Achieved when DairyNZ decided to employ school kids as a new line of defence against public criticism over the freshwater crisis.
 
“Dairy hate campaign hits farmer’s kids” trumpeted the headline in Rural News.
 
On the 27th of May it reported DairyNZ director Ben Allomes saying children of dairy farmers “Are being bullied at school just because of the work that their parents do.”
 
He’d been addressing a farmers’ forum in Manawatu.
 
Critics asked Mr Allomes to prove it, or at the very least confirm that he’d reported the bullying to the schools concerned.

DairyNZ decided to employ school kids as a new line of defence

At this point i... Read more >