Greenpeace

Greenpeace is an international non-governmental organization for the protection and conservation of the environment. Greenpeace utilizes direct action, lobbying and research to achieve its goals. Greenpeace has a worldwide presence with national and regional offices in over 40 countries, which are affiliated to the Amsterdam-based Greenpeace International. The global organization receives its income through the individual contributions of an estimated 3 million financial supporters.

Greenpeace, originally known as the Greenpeace Foundation, was founded in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada in 1972. On September 15, 1971, the Don't Make a Wave Committee sent an eighty foot halibut seiner “Phyllis Cormack”, from Vancouver, to oppose the United States testing nuclear devices in Amchitka, Alaska.[1] While the boat never reached its destination and was turned back by the US military, this campaign was deemed the first using the name Greenpeace.

In 1972, the Greenpeace Foundation evolved in its own right to a less conservative and structured collective of environmentalists who were more reflective of the days counterculture and hippie youth movements who were spearheading the social revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. The social and cultural background from which Greenpeace emerged heralded a period of de-conditioning away from old world antecedents and sought to develop new codes of social, environmental and political behavior.

The focus of the organization later turned from anti-nuclear protest to other environmental issues: whaling, bottom trawling, global warming, old growth. nuclear power, and even genetically modified organisms.