Greenpeace still accused of colonialism but outgoing South African head has overseen move towards more people-focused, people-powered movement

By Emma Howard and John Vidal, reposted from The Guardian, Dec 31, 2015

When Kumi Naidoo was approached to be head of Greenpeace in 2009 he was 19 days into a hunger strike, in an effort to draw attention to the plight of millions of Zimbabweans facing severe food shortages. The head of a South African community group, he was in pain, on liquids, and getting weaker by the hour. It was not the best time to think about moving to Amsterdam to run the world’s most recognised environmental organisation.

But it took a threat from his 16-year-old daughter to persuade him to go for the job. “She said, ‘Dad, I won’t talk to you ever again if you do not consider it.’ Ten days later, still on liquids, I relented,” says Naidoo. “Yes, the head of Greenpeaceneeded a kick from his daughter. She is my fiercest critic.”

Naidoo is now at the end of his six-year stint as head of Greenpeace and is preparing to head home to his native South Africa. His tenure has brought a very different focus to the group that had traditionally paid little attention to broader, cross-cutting issues such as human rights, health, development, peace and security.

“The struggle has never been about saving the planet. The planet does not need saving. If we warm it up to the point where we cannot exist we’ll be gone, the planet will still be here,” he says. “It will be bruised and scarred by humanity’s crimes on it but actually once human beings become extinct, the forests will recover, the oceans will replenish. This struggle is fundamentally about whether humanity can fashion a way of mutually coexisting with nature and protecting our children and their children’s future.”

When Naidoo took the job he was known not as an environmentalist but as a child, and enemy, of apartheid. Brought up in a township in Durban, he was expelled from school as a teenager and threw himself into the anti-apartheid movement. Several years later, accused of violating the state of emergency through his civil disobedience, he was forced to leave South Africa and sought refuge in a scholarship at the University of Oxford.

As the first outsider and African to take the top job at Greenpeace, his appointment took on a symbolic resonance. He was seen as a man who could save the organisation from itself, build bridges and shape the international NGO into a people-focused, people-powered movement, rather than a heroic stalwart fighting on behalf of others.

“The one thing that we wanted to shift is the idea that Greenpeace is going to save the world, that our activists – brave and courageous as we are – will come in, do an action, enrage public opinion and then changes will happen,” he says, “Today we want to campaign together with people, break the idea that people can outsource their conscience to us.” He says the green movement could learn a lot from the struggle against apartheid. “One of the great mistakes of the environment movement was to frame the climate debate as one about environment.

“I was two weeks into the job in 2009 when the Copenhagen climate summit took place. I picked up the communique. I said, ‘This is a death warrant for most vulnerable people in the world. So why is there a lack of urgency – or is it because of the colour of the people who are facing the impacts?’ Why we won the battle against apartheid is because we built the broadest possible alliances.

“We have to give a voice to people on the frontline. I do not believe that people like us of privilege should be given the greatest voice. We have to put our struggle on a war footing. Change became possible in South Africa when people believed change was possible. Today more and more people believe we can make the transition [to a carbon-free economy]. We haven’t reached that tipping point yet.”

But becoming a people-focused movement has required some apologies. Greenpeace had become the bitter enemy of indigenous peoples in the Arctic for its unconditional stand against whaling – a small-scale but vital industry in Greenland – and its campaign against seal hunting in Canada. The group has since offered apologies to indigenous peoples and drawn a distinction between commercial whaling and that practised by the Inuit.

In recent years, Greenpeace has kept its target firmly fixed on the Arctic, building a campaign that has attracted the support of 7 million people worldwide, including celebrities from the model Kate Moss to the actor Judi Dench. In September, it celebrated the its most significant victory to date when Shell abandoned drilling operations in the region, at a cost of $4bn (£2.7bn) to the oil company.

The campaign has not been without sacrifice. In 2013, the Russian coastguard boarded Greenpeace’s ship in the Arctic and arrested its crew at gunpoint. The group of activists who were held in jail for two months became known as theArctic 30, with the fight for their freedom set to be dramatised on the big screenby Lord Puttnam. Naidoo does not regret the decision to push ahead with the campaign in Russia, although on this occasion he stayed behind.

“I made a judgment call that it was probably going to be OK, but obviously the politics in Russia had shifted by then. I didn’t think the Russian state would respond. As a famous American grandmother once said, if you’re going to make an omelette you’re going to have to break some eggs … The sacrifice they [the activists] made contributed to the whole world knowing the Arctic has to be protected.”

Naidoo is to now bring together the two great struggles of his lifetime. He is determined to take the clean energy fight to South Africa, where the government is pushing ahead with an $85bn plan to replace its coal economy with a new generation of nuclear plants. Naidoo has described the challenge as one of the most pressing since the end of apartheid. Greenpeace has had a longstanding anti-nuclear stance.

This is not the end of Greenpeace for Naidoo. He will return to becoming a volunteer, “the most precious and honourable title within Greenpeace”, he says. It is a role he held for three years before becoming director and one that he refused to abandon during his tenure at the top, taking annual leave to volunteer on actions. He grins; he clearly enjoyed the role. In 2011, he defied water cannon and a court injunction to scale the oil rig owned by the Scottish drilling company Cairn Energy. He was arrested and spent four nights in a prison in Greenland. Not to be deterred, the following year he boarded an oil rig 600 miles east of Murmansk, north-west Russia, carrying a banner that read “Save the Arctic!” in Russian. The experiences made him reflect on the organisation’s narrative and its relevance to the people 8,700 miles (14,000km) away in South Africa.

He recalls travelling on a ship with other activists to the rig. “I think they saw that I was looking a bit shit scared … I was thinking if I died here, most of the people back home in Africa where I come from won’t understand that slogan. I was discussing with my daughter and some of the kids in my family and they said, ‘Uncle Kumi, a better slogan would have been “Save Santa Claus Now”’ – because that’s the only connection that ordinary people have with that part of the world.”

So if Greenpeace is determined to become more people centric, why all the polar bears?

Naidoo slaps the table, and says: “It is wrong for humanity to think that we can live in a way that shows no regard to animal and plant species … I don’t think Greenpeace should walk away from that idea. The Arctic is the refrigerator of the planet. As an African you might wonder where I am here – it’s a bloody cold place for an African to go to, but it’s because of the critical role that the sea ice plays in climate regulation … it should be a wake-up call to our leaders.”

Naidoo’s time at the top of Greenpeace has been bookended by landmark climate change negotiations. He started the job weeks before the opening of the doomed talks in Copenhagen, where Greenpeace activists were arrested on the final night for gatecrashing a banquet held by the Queen for heads of state. At the UN climate change talks in Paris earlier this month, Naidoo used his weight to praise the leadership of low-lying states such as Kiribati and the Philippines – and to call out developed countries for a lack of it. Although optimistic about the landmark global deal that emerged, he says that a subtle form of racism – “climate apartheid” – is at play in international negotiations.

“If you look at the dominant demography of the parts of the world that carry the historical responsibility for the problem and the parts of the world that are paying the first and most brutal price, it’s a very uncomfortable demography,” he says. “In these negotiations we will not be having a debate about 1.5 or 2 degrees or 2050 or 2100 if Europe was facing sea level rise as the people in the Pacific islands … If you are brutally honest, subliminal racism is at play in these negotiations.”

Yet Greenpeace still stands accused of cultural ignorance and colonialism. A year ago, the group again had to offer an apology after staging a protest on the Nazca lines in Peru, ancient geoglyphs considered sacred by many. Just weeks ago as world leaders arrived in Paris, thousands of people came out on to the cold streets of London for a march organised by a coalition of NGOs, including Greenpeace. A group representing indigenous people and those from countries in the global south have since claimed that they were pushed back from the front of the march, to be replaced by people in animal headgear and slogans such as #FortheLoveofSkiing.

“Neither the government nor the NGO liberal line will lead us to justice. This is a war of narratives and ours is ‘decolonial’,” activists from the Black Dissidents group said. Naidoo says that no Greenpeace activists were involved but accepts that all organisers share responsibility. He finds the complaints of indigenous peoples disturbing. “It was a conscious decision that we all made that the frontline communities, the people being impacted by climate change, would lead … I am surprised. I am still trying to find out the facts of what happened but I have to say it is something that distresses me a lot.”

There have also been accusations during his tenure of Greenpeace’s finances being in disarray. There was more pointed criticism of a senior executive being allowed to fly several times a month between his home in Luxembourg and group’s offices in Amsterdam. Naidoo defended the arrangement at the time, saying that the executive had a young family and was unable to move Amsterdam straight away. Perhaps referring to these incidents, in a farewell blog to supporters just before Christmas, Naidoo conceded: “The organisation is still licking its wounds from setbacks that have occurred on my watch – times when we have failed to live up to the values we champion.” He sadded that the organisation was learning from its mistakes.

But Naidoo says that he has been changed by his time leading Greenpeace. “I was dealing with climate change as if it is any other problem but climate change is a ‘game-changer’ … My biggest debt to Greenpeace is how much I’ve learned about how environmental justice and protection is about clean water, uncontaminated food, clothing that doesn’t have toxins in it, how poverty is an environmental issue.”

It is a message that he hopes will remain at the organisation’s core: “Imagine we are the last people on the planet and climate change has happened and we decided to write up the history of humanity and put it in a capsule so that if human life emerges again they won’t make the same mistakes, one of the things we would probably conclude is that those who historically deem themselves to be civilised and need to civilise the uncivilised – that is the indigenous peoples of the world – we would conclude that the people who were most civilised were the indigenous peoples of the world. ” SOURCE