An inside look at those arrested at the extinction rebellion protests
It was not until watching my previous work colleagues being arrested on national news that I began to reflect on my time working at Greenpeace.
Before starting my day, I walked past Goldman Sachs’ headquarters and saw that its entrance was full of police and people with placards. I had only recently finished writing a story on British hedge fund Astra busy taking Goldman to court for losing $70m to the bank, which (allegedly) broke established criteria around a synthetic CDO (the same kind of financial jiggery-pokery which was going on prior to the 2008 financial crisis), so I was not overly upset by the sight of Goldman being on the Extinction Rebellion hit list.
Goldman Sachs has cleverly employed stealth tactics in London by forgetting to post its name above the building, showing that the bank has come to terms with its own unpopularity in the UK.
The bank’s strategy of flying under the environmentalist radar did not seem to have worked well on that occasion, unfortunately, as Greenpeace’s own investigative journalism platform Unearthed is filled with ex-Guardian journalists worth their salt.
It was not until later in the day that I began to recognise several ex-colleagues of mine being arrested on live television. One of my friends Kitty Stewart was arrested on April 17 while playing the Ukulele at the Extinction Rebellion protest. Her photo was plastered on the front page of the Evening Standard, along with said Ukulele.
Kitty runs a music project in Bournemouth, mostly centred around Ukuleles, and returned to her role as a Greenpeace fundraiser at the door-to-door team in Norwich in 2017, of which I was a part at the time.
I was hired as a fundraiser in early 2017 after leaving a commission-only job in sales. I was very bad at selling charity subscriptions, but found that I was slightly better at listing random animal facts and talking about evil corporations on people's doorsteps.
After a small stint leading a team in Norwich, followed by a drop in my performance, I was allowed to stay on as a festivals fundraiser, which eventually put me in the circles of all kinds of Greenpeace supporters, including opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn, members of the Arctic 30, a volunteer group thrown in prison by the Russian government after a Greenpeace mission; and another fundraiser who had hijacked a train.
Two years later, with a real job, I was one of the lucky few able to walk to work in London and so avoided getting caught in hours of traffic caused by Extinction Rebellion. My journey was not interrupted by the selection of protesters who had glued themselves to trains and bank entrances in order to bring half of London to a halt until the government took action.
“Bankers are fathers and mothers, possibly grandparents as well as employees – I would encourage them to demand their employers stop financing companies that risk the safety of their children and grandchildren or they must consider themselves complicit,” said Andrew Medhurst, an XR representative who worked in the UK financial sector.
The bank itself declined to comment.
George Barda, a Greenpeace representative and fundraiser, who often appears on the BBC, can be seen in this Guardian video arguing with a commuter at about one minute into the video. I met Barda when fundraising in Glastonbury, with one vivid memory standing out of being offered a generous helping of cashew nuts after coming back late from the festival in time for work in the morning.
Glastonbury is Greenpeace's main recruiting ground and saw the largest number of sign-ups ever recorded in a single day in 2017. I know because I contributed to some of them, which, if they have not all cancelled by now, should be equalling a good £300 or so heading to the organisation’s monthly income.
I signed up Tory supporters, a Guardian photographer, a happy Vegan couple taking their new-born child to the festival for the first time, and a carpenter who offered me ketamine immediately after signing up. Some of them were even a little sober, I am pleased to say.
But out of all the fundraisers working that week, it was Barda who signed up the most. He was in talks with Greenpeace’s UK director John Sauven about launching a large scale protest across the country, as I remember him saying. Whether those were early plans for the Extinction Rebellion event, I have no way of being sure.
Director Sauven came out fundraising with us on the second last day of the festival, getting a sign up after a few hours in the field and then retiring back to his tent. It was about this time that Labour-party leader Jeremy Corbyn showed up, dropping in to see the director before his Glastonbury speech.
This was around the height of Corbyn’s popularity, which has somewhat drained away in recent times, and the crowd was predictably ecstatic. The Labour Party leader even gave us a smile and a wave before heading off to his podium.
The Job Itself
I did not agree with every position that Greenpeace holds. There was no environmentalist bible handed round which we had to adhere to, and so disagreements could and did occur. I bit my tongue on issues such as nuclear power around other environmentalists (my view on this being firmly in line with Steven Pinker’s), as well as social issues surrounding open borders and censorship.
GMOs were a constant bee in my bonnet, finding myself confronted on more than one occasion by Norwich farmers who relied on them daily.
But I never had to bite my tongue very hard. The organisation has campaigned extensively for free speech in India, where Greenpeace representatives are prevented from leaving the country. For every position the organisation took which gave me a twinge of anxiety there were a dozen more I would happily put money towards.
While working with the other fundraisers was one of the best parts of the job, the relationship to upper management was strained at best.
After a handful of months since I started, every fundraiser was summoned to London to undergo something best described as ‘diversity training’. The training focused on unconscious biases surrounding, mostly, how male fundraisers might treat or think about female fundraisers, as well as more wide-ranging issues around race and gender.
It felt condescending, to say the least, and opinion among staff was divided as to its necessity.
Whether such ‘institutional bias’ training is becoming the norm in leftist organisations around the world, I have no way of telling. I have seen smatterings of it in journalism, though only in manager whisperings of 'diversity policy' over my shoulder.
Greenpeace itself is structured into three main groups: Management, fundraisers, and volunteer activists. I myself was of the middle category, although I did once dip my toe into the latter.
Starting fundraisers are paid £10 per hour, not commission only like with most fundraising or sales roles, and need to make at least half a dozen £10 monthly sign-ups a week to stay in the job. (Sign-ups are made via Apple IPads. Take from that what you will.)
Fundraisers also receive a bonus if they make more than six sign-ups in a week. Every sign-up on top of the sixth equals £50, capped at some amount I never reached and therefore never had to worry about. On the other hand, the organisation expects consistent performance, with employees told they cannot come into work any longer if they fail to meet targets.
We were also banned for wearing labels, logos or company identifiers while campaigning for the group, as any photo posted online of a Greenpeace fundraiser drinking a can of coke would unsurprisingly result in a big headache for the pressure group. Even drinking water from plastic bottles was taboo (banned through social pressure if not through work policy); the organisation went to great lengths not to appear hypocritical.
The three campaigns which we pitched on in 2017 were: Palm oil, ocean plastics, and coral reefs. Air pollution, fracking and John West Tuna were also occasionally thrown into the mix.
Throughout my time there, we were never once encouraged to pitch on climate change itself. My strong suspicion is that people couldn't relate to it - whereas dying animals pull on a heart string which is already finely tuned.
Activism
Then we come to the activists, who are the people you likely read about on the news climbing buildings or jumping in front of harpoons to save whales. Greenpeace requires someone to go through months of training and a lengthy process of signing legal documents before you can even think about committing. These activists are not paid by Greenpeace for obvious legal reasons.
Greenpeace makes it very clear at the start of the process that you could obtain a criminal record and go to jail, something which quickly deterred me from putting my name forward. Thirty Greenpeace volunteers have spent time in a Russian jail because of an action gone wrong, and another friend of a friend was interrogated by British counter-terrorism police after climbing London’s tallest building to protest against Shell’s oil adventures in the Arctic.
The incident which attracted the most negative press in Greenpeace's long history of actions was the accidental damaging of one of the Nazca Lines in Peru. A fuck up, no doubt, but one would expect worse from a fifty-year career of organising such activities.
Having said all of that, no one has ever been killed on an action. Well, unless you count the one member blown up by the French government on board the Rainbow Warrior in New Zealand.
After meeting activists, I would say it is preferable to have them filtered through an organisation which can provide training and support as opposed to letting them have a go on their own.
My team leader, for example, whose name it would not be appropriate to reveal, spent months in training to block roads in London and place a plastic sculpture outside of Coca-Cola’s headquarters, made of plastic bottles that Coca-Cola had refused to recycle after breaking a promise to commit to producing 25% of plastic bottles from “recycled or renewable sources”.
My team leader was not allowed to tell me any of this, of course. They even kept it a secret from their parents until they saw it on the news the same day. The action worked, with Coca Cola later announcing it would increase recyclable-plastic production to 50%.
Political Leanings
The thing that surprised me more than anything while working at the organisation was that it did not see itself as political. While there is an obvious slant towards the left, I knew personally many fundraisers who voted for Brexit and others who were members of right-leaning parties across the UK.
They are not the same as the Green Party, a mistake many people make when thinking about the pressure group. Greenpeace is denied the status of charity in the UK, due to some governments viewing their activities as bordering on terrorism, and so do not receive gift aid or any kind of subsidiary from companies, governments or internationals.
Originally, it saw its mission as above political strife, something which I hope the organisation is able to continue. The ability of environmental issues to transcend political division is the best asset that Greenpeace has.
For a lot of environmentalists, the cause takes on a semi-religious sentiment. No sacrifice can ever be so great as to assuage the harm which we humans have unleashed upon the planet. This sentiment was, however, thankfully absent from Greenpeace, and was one of the reasons I enjoyed being with them for so long.
The organisation is not perfect, however. One particular low point was being told not to knock on doors with Union Jacks hanging from their windows as the owners were “probably racists”. Such ideological judgment usually came from the higher-ups in the organsiation but was mercifully absent among the people I had to work with on a regular basis.
My career as an environmentalist culminated in me being thrown to the ground by police in Blackpool after sleeping in a field to protest fracking in the North of England, my homestead. Cuadrilla, the company which had been intent on drilling in the area for the better part of a decade, continued on with the operation despite the activities being linked to mini-Earthquakes happening in the region.
An Extinct Rebellion
The Extinction Rebellion Protest itself culminated in the UK government declaring a ‘national emergency’ around climate change. A hollow victory? Absolutely, but better than nothing. Civil protest on a much smaller scale than the one seen last month has a history of evoking change unfelt until years after the incident, after all.
There are many good arguments about why blocking tube and train stations is not the best approach to dealing with climate change. Won't people who can't use the more environmentally-friendly tube be forced to take cars to get to work? Or, aren't you also blocking people who work in the environmental sector from getting to work? and, doesn't all of this cost a lot of money?
The answer is yes to all of those questions. Protesting doesn’t solve every problem with the environment. But the achievements of the environmentalist groups backing the movement should not be forgotten.
On the XR event listing on Greenwire (Greenpeace’s events page), the event manager posted: “This is not a Greenpeace action but a lot of us are involved and we are all working towards the same goals.” I think the same sentiment should be mirrored by those of us who agree with XR’s motives, if not its methods.
While knocking on doors, I never met a single person who wanted to see rainforests cut down, the oceans filled with plastic, nor hear about coral reefs bleaching beyond repair. If politics is left at the table, the group might continue some of the good that led it to achieve such success in the first place.
