How To Change The World

How To Change The World

Image by |How To Change The World


How To Change The World

How To Change The World

Image by How To Change The World

Daniel Nelson

It wasn’t the picture of Earth from space that sparked the global environment movement: it was a photo of Greenpeace’s first confrontation with Russian whalers.

The picture showed a harpoon shooting over the heads of Greenpeace protesters and into the whale they were trying to protect: “That was the moment we launched the modern environmental movement.”

In addition, it changed the gang of long-haired buccaneers who came together in a bid to stop a United States underground nuclear test.

Putting themselves in harm’s way, whether the harm was an atomic explosion or angry hunters, was the main tactic in those heady, adrenaline-fuelled days that brought together the peace and environmental movements like tethered tectonic plates. (We had to wait until 1992 and the Earth Summit for a comparable colossal coming together, when the environmental movement was cajoled into linking up with the development movement). But it wasn’t just the derring-do of the Greenpeace adventurers, usually male and often psychedelic, that changed the world: it was their inspired use of photography and soundbites that enabled them not simply to channel the zeitgeist but to help create it.

Those images still shock: blood gushing from the portholes of a factory ship; the sea frothing red; huge, aggressively captained vessels bearing down on the rickety Greenpeace boats (“I just looked at it and said ‘Bob, we are all going to die’”); and, later, the soulful, staring eyes of a bloodily bludgeoned baby seal. 

The pictures and words didn’t go viral because there was no viral to go to in those days, but they reverberated around the globe: “You have to make an event that will impact millions of people everywhere in the world.”

They did make an impact, and they themselves were rock stars-wiry, hair-banded, risk-taking, mind-bomb-exploding action men, putting their bodies where their mouths were and utilising whatever was at hand, from synthesiser sounds to attract whales to consulting the I Ching to decide whether to return to the winter ice or to port (“I thought I had joined a ship of fools”).

It was groundbreaking, exciting, world-changing. With rarely seen footage, the documentary How To Change The World captures the moment, and then the moments the organisation started to tear itself apart – with Greenpeace offices suing other Greenpeace offices, amidst clashing egos, rows over tactics and management failures, before redemption comes with the creation of Greenpeace International.

“The weakest link is always going to be ourselves,” says one of the protagonists ruefully, “and that’s true of all social movements.”

Or as another old environmental fighter says despairingly, “How can we save the planet is we cannot solve ourselves?”

So as well as documenting the rise of environmental activism and of globally-minded NGOs, the film also puts on display what hundreds of thousands of activists have experienced about the organisations they work for: growth under a charismatic leader, the involvement of new people who have no allegiance to the leader and have ideas of their own, organisational chaos as the size and money goes beyond the idiosyncratic leader’s limited organisational ability, the emergence of managers to stabilise the organisation, the disillusion of the original activists, and breakaways and/or rows over central control versus decentralisation. If you are lucky, a compromise is found and the organisation settles into a new life, probably without the original drive but perhaps still doing useful work. Unlucky, and it dies or drifts into irrelevance, elbowed aside by newcomers with new fires in their bellies.

“How do you deal with power?” one of the early but now grizzled Greenpeacers recalls Beat poet Allen Ginsberg being asked. “Let it go before it freezes in your hand,” came the reply.

Both stories are fascinating – the campaigning stunts and the organisational shenanigans. So are the ruminations of the founders towards the end of the film as we see and hear how time has dealt with them. One, sadly, has become a paid spokesman for a host of anti-Green causes; another, the fearless Paul Watson (“You gotta keep angry”), splintered from Greenpeace to establish the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (“Bearing witness is cowardice. I never understood it.”)

As the film’s publicity says, “An intimate portrait of the group’s original members and of activism itself - idealism vs. pragmatism, principle vs. compromise. They agreed that a handful of people could change the world; they just couldn’t always agree on how to do it.”

How To Change the World launches in UK and Irish cinemas on 9 with screenings in selected cinemas followed by a satellite Q&A featuring fashion designer and longstanding Greenpeace supporter Vivienne Westwood, director Jerry Rothwell, and eco-hero Robert Hunter’s daughter Emily The film will then open nationwide on 11 September.

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