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The Village Voice - August 26, 1997

SLASH AND BURN:
Greenpeace Undergoes A Little Corporate Restructuring
By Matthew Yeomans & Thomas Goetz

"We should have seen this coming." That s how longtime Greenpeace campaigner Pam Miller described the cutbacks America s most high profile and contentious environmental organization has implemented in a desperate attempt to remain in business. "We knew we were in financial trouble, but I, for one, certainly didn t know that it was as extensive as it turned out to be."

In a move described by the 26-year-old organization as restructuring, Greenpeace USA will reduce its $29 million budget to $21 million, cut its U.S. staff from 400 to 65, and close all of its offices with the exception of its Washington, D.C., headquarters. Greenpeace USA has decided to end the door-to-door canvassing that has become the hallmark of its fundraising efforts and narrow the scope of its protest campaigns. "It s a way to be more responsive to the public," says Greenpeace USA spokesperson Deborah Rephan of the cutbacks. "It's a way to sharpen our focus on a couple of major campaigns and put more of our resources into that".

Founded in Vancouver in 1971, Greenpeace has gained a fearless reputation for facing down oil tankers and blocking nuclear test blasts. At first, the nascent environmental group was identified with single issues such as the culling of baby harp seals and the fight to ban commercial whaling. By 1992 the international organization stood at the helm of a global green rebirth with offices in 30 countries and over 1300 employees. But since then, U.S. membership has plummeted from an all-time high of 1.2 million to just 400,000.

With the election of the green-friendly Clinton-Gore administration in 1992, environmentalism finally found a voice in the mainstream--or so it appeared. There seems to be a general perception that Clinton is green, says Greenpeace International s John Woodluff. And if the president is green, organizations like Greenpeace are less important.

Although they were aware that GP USA was not in good financial shape, Greenpeace employees were completely unprepared for the cutbacks. Word came via a companywide conference call: on one end was the board bearing the bad news; on the other, some 300 staffers gathered around speaker phones from Seattle to Boston. Since that phone call, shock has turned into anger for many Greenpeace staffers, who have called an emergency general meeting in Washington September 13 to confront the executive board. "I risked my life for Greenpeace. I've been shot at, I've been jailed," says Bradley Angel, a San Francisco campaigner whose job is threatened by the cutbacks. "It is not acceptable for the board to exclude the staff from this decision. We are Greenpeace."

Angel, like other staffers, puts the blame for the sudden upheaval on Greenpeace International's preference for global high-profile campaigns over regional activism as practiced in the U.S. Greenpeace International, he says, is attempting to impose a strictly Eurocentric view of what Greenpeace should be.

Since 1994, GPI has required that each of its major international branches be self-funding--and leveling the boom on those that failed. In January of this year, GPI threatened to close down Greenpeace Ireland for failing to meet this standard. When the decision to restructure the U.S. operation was taken, GP USA was running a projected 1997 deficit of $2.7 million. With total reserves of just some $3 million, GP USA would not be in a position to cover its necessary cash flow at the beginning of 1998. Faced with bailing out the U.S. branch, GPI chief Thilo Bode attacked GP USA and its fundraising procedures in this May's Greenpeace International monthly report.

On June 3, longtime GP USA executive director Barbara Dudley resigned. In her resignation memo, Dudley wrote "If this was a style of leadership that the broader organization would continue to tolerate, there was little more I could do".

Nevertheless, Dudley's memo assured the staff that the worst is behind us in terms of internal reorganizations and financial struggles. Another memo sent out the same day by Greenpeace USA chair Joanne Kliejunas also attempted to calm staff fears by making clear that the GP USA board has no dream of eliminating the canvass --the organization's primary strategy for fundraising and maintaining grassroots contact with local communities. However, less than two months later Greenpeace had overhauled its operations and abandoned the canvass. Greenpeace USA was the only one to have offices outside the capital city, says GPI s Woodluff. "Arguably that was a luxury for an organization that should be spending money on campaigning rather than on overhead. I don t think we can justify those things when the money isn t there."

Rephan, meanwhile, rejects the notion that GP International forced the board into these widespread cuts. The decision, she says, was made solely by Greenpeace USA. According to Pam Miller, tensions arose because GPI "Doesn't quite get the way of working here in the U.S.," for example, community-based, environmental justice work. "They felt we should be doing a lot more hard-hitting actions."

Whoever was responsible for the cutbacks, it seems clear that Greenpeace International had tired of carrying its underachieving U.S. cousin at a time when other parts of the movement were flourishing. Greenpeace Canada's fundraising actually grew last year, while in Germany and Holland, one citizen in seven is a member of the organization. And Greenpeace, following its high-profile protests of Shell in Nigeria, is once again grabbing world headlines, this time with a daring action in the North Atlantic against British Petroleum s Stena Dee oil exploration rig.

In the U.S., while Greenpeace suffers through change, other groups have embraced it--for better or worse. The World Wildlife Fund has boosted its bottom line by accepting cash from corporate donors--a step Greenpeace vows never to do. This past May, WWF took this appeasement strategy one step further by nominating Shell and three other oil companies for the British Columbia Minister's Environmental Award. The move earned WWF heaps of derision in the environmental community.

The Sierra Club, too, has modified its strategy in the 90s, avoiding full-fledged upheaval by focusing on a few national campaigns such as clean water and endangered species. The shift has allowed it to build on its membership base, which has grown to 600,000--its highest ever. For Greenpeace USA, however, the question now is how to make its presence felt--and raise money in the process. Having abandoned canvassing, the organization has decided to rely solely on direct mail and major donors.

But even as Greenpeace moves away from the canvass model, other insurgent groups have turned it to their advantage. Playing on fervent anti-Washington sentiments and using aggressive grassroots campaigning, the Wise Use movement s neo-environmentalism is growing as a force both in the U.S. and abroad.

Greenpeace staffers, though, aren't yet ready to concede the common touch that their board seems to have relinquished. "Their plan will clearly involve breaking of solemn commitments with communities," laments Angel. "Reorganizing is just an Orwellian word for wiping out the work for environmental justice that Greenpeace should be about".