Greenpeace looking to public

by Alexey Eremenko at 20/08/2012

The Moscow news

Saving the environment is a vital necessity, not a privilege, and Greenpeace is looking for a way to convince the Russian public about it, said the head of Greenpeace International, Kumi Naidoo.

“The way environmental protection has been presented – if you’ve food in your stomach and a roof over your head, you get to worry about the environment, so it’s a luxury,” he said last week. “And that needs to change.”

“Take the Arctic. We can talk about it purely in terms of saving polar bears…But one has to go beyond that. Say, if you live in a coastal town – what’s happening in the Arctic is going to screw you up,” Naidoo said, with an energetic wave of ink-stained hands to drive the point home.

Saving the Arctic from oil

The Arctic was not brought up incidentally: environmental groups are mounting a drive to save the region’s fragile ecosystems from commercial exploration by oil and gas companies.

“The Arctic is the refrigerator of the planet, and the defining environmental challenge of our time,” Naidoo said in Moscow, where he co-presented a study on the risks of northern oil exploration commissioned jointly by the Russian branches of Greenpeace and the World Wide Fund for Nature, or WWF.

The study showed that a potential oil spill off Russia in the northern Pechora Sea could cover an area the size of Greece. Moreover, there are no technologies to clean up such a spill, WWF Russia head Igor Chestin said at the conference.

The study modeled consequences of a spill of 10,000 tons of oil, minuscule compared to recordbreakers such as the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the United States in 2010, where some 680,000 tons of oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico. The smaller spill would still pollute much of the Pechora Sea and its coastal areas, including at least one nature reserve, for decades, experts said.

Official run-arounds

Russia lacks the technologies to clean up major oil spills

Getting officials to discuss environmental matters is tricky: Naidoo, who met with President Vladimir Putin during his last visit to Moscow in 2006, said that this time, he was given polite runarounds by all ministers contacted by Greenpeace.

Greenpeace will not give up reaching out to the Russian authorities, but its primary focus will be on the general population, Naidoo said.

“Right now, we’re on our way to get the Russian people informed about the issue, active about the issue,” he said.

He admitted the group is still working out a strategy to hook the Russian public, which is indifferent toward the environment. During the presidential elections earlier this year, only 20 percent of respondents in a nationwide survey by the Levada Center named ecology among their prime concerns. The poll covered 1,600 respondents and had a margin of error of 3.4 percentage points.

But Naidoo has a better chance of reaching out to the general public than many others, given his background in civil activism, starting with his participation in anti-apartheid campaigning in his native South Africa in the 1980s.

Naidoo was coy about the group’s plans, but on Monday he held a 2 1/2-hour Q&A session in downtown Moscow with the creme de la creme of Russia’s “creative class” – young educated urbanites who formed the backbone of recent anti-Kremlin street protests.

A dash of direct action

But there may be more. Naidoo dodged the question about the possibility of direct protest action by Greenpeace in Russia, but conceded with a sly smile that the group “would make no apologies about acts of peaceful civil disobedience.”

He would know: in 2011, the South African-born activist personally braved Arctic waves twice his height in a light inf latable boat to storm an oil rig by British company Cairn Energy, ascending to the platform while sprayed by freezing water from a pump to hand over a petition to stop oil drilling in the region.

“Cold!” Naidoo blurts out when asked about his impressions from the trip. “But there was also the mind-blowing landscape, like something out of a fairytale.”

Naidoo spent several days in a Greenland prison with a severe cold after the stunt, but Cairn caved in to public pressure and wrapped up its Arctic operations – though now another company, Shell, is on its way drill for oil in Alaska and threatens legal action against environmentalists trying to throw a monkey-wrench into its operations.

The campaign is only picking up steam, Naidoo said, even though he conceded that the Arctic is not an easy place to mobilize the global movement around.

“When we were starting the campaign, my daughter told me, just call it ‘Save Santa Claus Now,’” he said. “It’s the only association people have with the place.”

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