by Anne Summers
Greenpeace’s head office in Amsterdam was in a grand 1905 building, designated a national monument, on the corner of Keizersgracht, one of the three major canals that circle the city, and Leliegracht, a smaller feeder canal. The grey-stone building with its clock tower, steep slate roofs and a mural painted high-up on the front wall, was an architectural curiosity. Now it housed a group of people dedicated to peace and to saving the world’s environment. The building sprawled over six floors, around a magnificent central wooden staircase, with leaded-glass windows and dozens of tiny rooms that cascaded off passageways in all directions. It was a beautiful place, but totally impractical for modern office arrangements. I was sad, but could not make a plausible counter-argument, when the board had to agree to the organisation’s relocation to a soulless office block in the suburbs. It made sense to have everyone on just two floors, with open planning, everyone in sight of each other, constantly in contact and everyone aware of what was happening.
One of my first tasks as Board Chair had been to lead the search for a new IED. The organisation could have been severely disrupted by an unexpected turn of events, that resulted in the unprecedented situation of its two top leadership positions becoming vacant at the same time. With me being essentially an outside recruitment, it seemed important to try to fill the IED job from within Greenpeace, and fortunately in Gerd Leipold we had the ideal candidate. Although he was currently working outside the organisation, he had been the ED of the German office in the 1980s and had run the international disarmament campaign from 1987 to 1992. He had a deep knowledge of and was widely known and respected within Greenpeace, and thus could jump right in without a lengthy induction. During his six years in the job, among many other achievements, Leipold presided over the global expansion of Greenpeace, opening offices in India, China and the Amazon and began the first steps for a presence in Africa, a new frontier for Greenpeace.
Despite our very different backgrounds, Leipold and I got on immensely well. He was a scientist, a meteorologist and oceanographer, and a multilingual European. Both of us tried to shuck-off the stereotypes of our nationalities; I made sure to be extremely punctual and efficient, while Gerd allowed himself to relax and joke in ways that were in contrast to the usual seriousness of many of our German colleagues. In Crete in 2004, we had all been amazed at the extraordinary number of corpulent middle-aged German tourists sharing the hotel where we were having our AGM. ‘Which was worse,’ Gerd asked our bemused waiter. ‘The German invasion of 1941, or this one?’
In August 1983, Gerd and an Englishman John Sprange had flown a hot-air balloon over the Berlin Wall into East Germany, in an action for peace and disarmament. It was a very dangerous operation; they risked being shot out of the sky by the trigger-happy East German military. Fortunately, they were allowed to land, arrested and, after a five-hour detainment, expelled back to the West.3 Gerd told me later that during the 40-minute flight he had not had time to be frightened, because he and Sprange had been arguing about a girl they both liked.
I’d been surprised to discover that Greenpeace’s largest office was not Canada, where the organisation was founded, nor the United States, the world’s richest country. It was Germany that was the financial and political backbone of Greenpeace. The German office was the largest, the richest, the best organised, and it underwrote the rest of Greenpeace for the time I was there. There was tremendous support for Greenpeace among the German population, enabling them to be immensely innovative. They branched into service provision, opening an alternative power company and developing Greenfreeze, an ozone-friendly refrigerant that is in widespread use today. Germany was very into ‘green’—the world’s first Green Party had been started there—but it was also obsessed with peace. The anti-nuke sentiments were stronger in Germany than perhaps anywhere else. I found myself wondering what drove these German people, how much their activism and optimism was driven by an element of atonement. Most Germans I encountered were of an age to have parents who would have been involved in the war, but we never talked about it. Nor, it seems, did they. I began to understand why, when I came across the writings of W.G. Sebald, a German writer who had lived in England for most of his life until his premature death in a road accident in December 2001. I had read Sebald’s essay, ‘A Natural History of Destruction’, in the New Yorker4 in 2002, an excerpt from his book of the same name, about the carpet-bombing of Hamburg by the British. Sebald argued that the utter destruction of most German cities at the end of the war, causing more than 600,000 deaths, had brought about a kind of collective amnesia in the post-war population. The subject was simply not discussed, nor written about—even by writers like Heinrich Böll, who explored every other area of Germany’s wartime conduct.
‘There was a tacit agreement, equally binding on everyone, that the true state of material and moral ruin in which the country found itself was not to be described,’ Sebald wrote. ‘The darkest aspects of the final act of destruction, as experienced by the great majority of the German population, remained under a kind of taboo like a shameful family secret, a secret that perhaps could not even be privately acknowledged.’
I gave a copy of the essay to Gerd. I think we were in Hamburg at the time. We talked about the horrors of the firebombing where hundreds of people simply melted, and the rebuilding of the city from the rubble, but we did not talk about Sebald’s central proposition which, if I read him correctly, was that many Germans felt they deserved this retaliatory bombing, but it was not something that could be acknowledged publicly and, thus, it was ‘forgotten’, and never discussed. But the Germans in Greenpeace were addressing the subject by remaking their society, doing what they could to ensure history was not repeated.
I started my Greenpeace education in Hamburg. If Amsterdam was the head of global Greenpeace, the warehouse in Hamburg was, in many ways, its operational headquarters. Harald Zindler guided me around. He was a solid man with a big head of grey hair, who was even more legendary than the warehouse itself. He had been an original member of the German office in 1981 and his aphorism, ‘The optimism of the action is better than the pessimism of the thought’, adorned the title page of the official history of Greenpeace. He’d previously been an anti-nukes campaigner. Now he was custodian of the warehouse. It was located on an island in the middle of Hamburg harbour and was spread over several storeys with various rooms designated for particular activities. It was able to support and equip any Greenpeace action anywhere in the world. An enormous internal space at water level contained dozens of inflatable boats of every conceivable size; these were the workhorses of the organisation. We needed protective clothing just to go into the state-of-the-art hazmat facility. Greenpeace had the capability to assess the toxicity of any waste dump, any toxic spill, any nuclear mishap. Standing in that room in Hamburg, looking up at shelf-upon-shelf of the most toxic substances known to humankind, I shuddered. Greenpeace’s hazmat stockpile was easily the most comprehensive in the country, if not the whole of Europe. Zindler told me that the German police and fire department experts regularly came over to the warehouse to top up their knowledge.
My favourite part of the warehouse was the banner-making department. It occupied a huge space with natural light pouring in through large square windows. There were massive tables, able to take metres-long rolls of canvas, where banners were made using the same techniques as for sail-making. It was hardly surprising that a nautical organisation such as Greenpeace would have expertise in sail-making, but what fascinated me was the way they had adapted that process to serve a political end. Most of the smaller Greenpeace offices could not afford such facilities, so the Germans had designed a system to fulfill orders for banners from around the world. The designs and the required dimensions were emailed to the German warehouse. It was, of course, critical that there be no errors in the wording that was most often in a language other than German (or English, which most of the German office staff spoke fluently). They were now also having to accommodate themselves to differen
t scripts as our offices in Thailand and China started doing actions. I was shown the steps whereby the little design on the email would be blown up onto a large screen from which the banner would be printed. Some of these banners were many metres wide, or long. They would be shipped-off to their destination and, weeks later, their German creators, if they happened to be watching the television news, might see their handiwork draped over a building in Brazil, or hanging from a ship in the Indian Ocean. It was an impressive display of international cooperation and smart use of resources. I could see why the German warehouse was spoken of in awe almost everywhere in the Greenpeace world I visited.
I learned to appreciate that behind the romantic images of Greenpeace ships on the high seas, or the daring exploits of activists abseiling down high buildings, was a highly skilled and developed organisation. I came to respect the meticulous planning and the risk assessments that went into every activity. Of course, it would have been irresponsible, even murderous, to allow activists to engage in some of the dangerous actions that were the organisation’s signature, without taking every care to protect their lives. In 30 years, despite the extraordinary feats many of them undertook, for example, dangling a sign from the top of London’s Big Ben or Rio’s Christ the Redeemer, or playing chicken from a rubber inflatable with a US nuclear warship, no campaigner had been killed or disabled during an action. A couple of people had suffered serious injuries, however, and we had a duty of care towards helping with their recovery. And as a non-violent organisation, Greenpeace was committed to ensuring that no one else was harmed as a result of our actions. I was told about a staff member who had been disciplined for cutting the anchor chain of a boat moored in a European port harbour, potentially endangering the crew onboard. And during my time there was a fierce debate in the UK office about whether invading fields and ripping out GM crops was a violent act and therefore unjustifiable, or whether it was a legitimate destruction of plants that had the capacity to contaminate the food chain.
There were just two ships in the Greenpeace fleet when I started: the MV Arctic Sunrise as well as the flagship, the MV Rainbow Warrior. There were also a couple of smaller, European-based boats that did not count as part of the fleet, and some planes, including our helicopter, Tweety. The ships were easily identifiable, their hulls painted a deep green with the rainbow across their bows. They were a familiar and inspiring sight. The first time I saw the Rainbow Warrior was when it sailed into Sydney Harbour for the 2000 Olympics. I found myself feeling quite emotional as I watched the totemic boat passing the iconic Sydney Opera House. The Rainbow Warrior was as famous and, in its own way, as significant a force for peace as any human world figure.
The fleet expanded when the MV Esperanza, its refit completed, was launched in February 2002. It was a former Russian firefighting boat, previously named the Echo Fighter; the organisation had spent several million euro refitting it for Greenpeace purposes, installing cranes to lift the inflatables, and a helicopter landing-pad. There had been an internal competition to name this newest boat with the Spanish and Latin American offices waging a fierce fight to ensure the Spanish word for ‘hope’, would beat Gaia, the other contender. The Esperanza also had the advantage of being ice-class, which meant it could be deployed in Arctic or Antarctic waters. It was the largest ship in the Greenpeace fleet, with 33 berths, a speed of 16 knots and able to accommodate two large and four small inflatables.
The inflatables, often referred to disparagingly as Greenpeace’s ‘rubber boats’, but whose technical name is RHIBs, or rigid-hulled inflatable boats, were a critical element in any marine operation. The larger ships of the fleet would get the activists as close as possible to the whaling ship or the logging boat, the inflatables would then be lowered, and the actions crew would clamber down and roar off to undertake the planned action. The inflatables came in many sizes, able to accommodate from four to more than twenty people. What made them indispensable was their ability to travel at high speeds through rough seas. The only time I was on one, ferried from the Rainbow Warrior to the shore in New Zealand, I found the ride terrifying as we bumped hard across the waves, at what seemed like a dangerously fast speed.
I had worked hard and was now feeling relatively comfortable in my role as Chair of GPI. I had mastered the lingo, including a mind-numbing array of acronyms that people in Greenpeace used to talk to each other, I knew all the key people and was across most of the policy issues. I was now someone who could confidently chair a rambunctious meeting of Trustees and EDs. As with the board, I ran tight meetings that always got through the agenda and finished on time. I’d got rid of the three-sided table and the country nametags. Everyone now sat comfortably at round tables at what conference organisers call ‘cabaret-style’, and were free to move around during proceedings. I’d also started an internal newsletter to keep the organisation informed about what the board was up to, and created a ‘buddy system’ between board members and Trustees, as an induction and knowledge-sharing tool. Notionally, we liked to describe ourselves as ‘One Greenpeace’ but we needed to reduce geographic, cultural and language barriers. In 2001 we welcomed India’s new ED to his first international meeting. Ananthapadmanabhan Guruswamy, who insisted we simply called him Ananth, had been selected from 1000 applicants. He was a brilliant choice who would soon make an impact on the entire organisation. Our Beijing office opened the next year. Greenpeace was going to places it needed to be, and I felt proud to be there while it was happening. Sometimes, I had to ask myself, Am I really here? Doing this? I felt lucky, but I also knew that I would not be where I was without the lift I’d been given early in my life.
In December 1999, I had received an extraordinary handwritten letter from Wales, from a man called Roger Ellis. He had been sent Ducks on the Pond, he told me, by a former nun at Cabra Convent in Adelaide, where I had gone to school. He wanted me to know that for the past 30 years he had been happily married to the nun who had been my primary school teacher at Cabra, the woman who had changed my life. I’d recounted in the book how Sr Mary Vianney had pulled me aside after I’d been in trouble for some larrikinish behaviour, and spoken to me sharply. She’d told me to stop hanging-out with girls who were idiots, to stop behaving like an idiot myself, and to start using the brain that I so obviously had.
‘You do not have to accept the given,’ she had said to me. ‘You have the ability to be different, to shape the world to your liking.’
No one had ever spoken to me like that. Without her words, I doubt I would be the person I am today, so I was quite overwhelmed to get this letter. Two months later, during a Greenpeace trip to London, I took an extra day and in February 2000 I travelled to Wales by train to meet Kate Vianney. She had been Lillian Horgan before she entered the convent, and I wondered why she had retained her religious name. It was too much part of her to relinquish, I surmised, but I had no idea where Kate had come from. Roger had warned me that Kate had Alzheimer’s and probably would not remember me. It had been more than forty years. Her face was scarcely recognisable but those eyes that I remembered still flickered with the fierce intelligence she’d used to rescue this lost girl. She did not need to know I was there. I was the one who needed to honour and thank her. Just as I needed to make another pilgrimage, this time to Paris in the winter of 2001, in order to acknowledge another debt.
I was there to meet the French office and attend a local board meeting, but instead of the hotel recommended by Greenpeace, I’d booked myself into the Hotel la Louisiane at 60 rue du Seine, a few paces off Boulevard Saint Germaine on the Left Bank. It was a ratty little place, with maybe three stars, but it had a history. The Rolling Stones used to stay in the 1960s as did a number of black jazz musicians fleeing racism in 1950s America whose lives were depicted in the 1986 Bertrand Tavernier movie Round Midnight. But I was there because during World War II, Simone de Beauvoir had lived there and it was in Room 50, ‘a large round room with a kitchenette’, according to her biographer Deirdre Bair, that she had written
at least part of The Second Sex.5 I had booked myself into one of the hotel’s three ‘round rooms’, rooms that because they were at the apex of the v-shaped building were much larger than the hotel’s other mean-sized chambers. Although the room numbers were different now, I believed from a photograph in Hazel Rowley’s book6 that I was in the room in which de Beauvoir had begun the book that was the other major influence in starting me on the road to who I am today.
Despite all my travelling to Greenpeace offices, I had never managed to take part in an action until September 2002 when I travelled to Manaus, the city in the heart of the Amazon. Manaus is famous for its opulent Teatro Amazones Opera House, opened in 1897 and built from the rubber fortunes that had transformed this tiny hamlet into the thriving town it now was. Although we already had a longstanding office in Brazil, located in Sao Paulo, GPI decided we also needed a presence in the heart of the Amazon. It would serve as a base for campaigning against the destruction of the Amazon basin by deforestation through illegal logging and, an increasing threat, mass clearance of lands for agriculture, especially soya and cattle. Anne Dingwall, another Greenpeace veteran, was appointed Amazon Campaign Coordinator and it was her job to open the office, find the staff and get the operation underway. She was experienced at this, having already set up the Russian and Hong Kong offices. Anne was Canadian, rail thin, a bundle of nervous energy who seldom had a cigarette out of her hand, and who radiated a compelling aura of warmth and competence. I liked her immediately and she was an excellent guide as she took me around the multiple terrains of Greenpeace. She was almost as indispensable as Jenny Stannard was during my six years as Board Chair. Jenny was board assistant, responsible for all logistics around our meetings including producing, assembling, then dispatching our voluminous board papers—Greenpeace liked its paper—as well as keeping me on top of everything I needed to be doing. She was a vivacious and perpetually cheerful person, originally from England, but who had lived in the Netherlands for decades now. She had been McTaggart’s right-hand woman for years, which meant there was nothing about Greenpeace she did not know, and she had become a kind of unofficial guardian of the organisation’s history. She was always there, my beacon and my support. My enduring image of Jenny is her listening to Kind of Blue while she transcribed the minutes of an especially rambunctious session of an AGM meeting in Mexico. She could always find tranquillity in the heart of any turmoil. A truly excellent person to work with.