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TODAY Thursday 21 August 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: Free the Greenpeace One Million!

It is a reliable maxim in American politics that winners run from the center. Different times and constituencies will shift the location of the road of conventional wisdom, but you always need to be in the broad middle of it. When you have radical aims -- dramatic reduction of greenhouse gases, for example -- it is all the more important to appear "balanced." And to appear balanced, nothing helps so much as to have a bunch of crazies on your side, next to whom you can seem moderate and judicious.

Craziness is merely a political assignment. Nothing is implied by way of mental hygiene; today's crazies are famously converted into tomorrow's prophets. At their most effective, crazies attract attention, dramatize the cause, galvanize activists, frighten the comfortable, and strengthen the hand of the negotiators when the time arrives to cut the inevitable deal.

So the news about Greenpeace this week was both encouraging and sad. It was encouraging in that activists from both Britain and the US were waging a public campaign on global warming. A welcome wild card in the decorous poker game played by the climate change professionals. For eight days Greenpeacers occupied a North Atlantic oil-drilling platform belonging to British Petroleum. They said they were protesting all new oil drilling because burning more petroleum induced more greenhouse warming. The theme was echoed in an expensive advertisement taken out on the OpEd page of The New York Times by Greenpeace USA, wherein the group said it was dedicated to reversing climate change by opposing new drilling by anyone anywhere. To describe this position as simple-minded and impractical would be indulgent. It's completely, well, crazy. And therefore not unwelcome.

What's sad is that not much attention was paid, for the actions came amidst more dramatic news of the spectacular organizational misfortunes of Greenpeace USA. Membership down from 1,200,000 to 420,000. Budget (already cut big-time in recent years) reduced by an additional 30%. All offices closed but the one in Washington, with attendant staff layoffs. Headhunters are now looking for an Executive Director to "move the organization in new directions." One old don't-mention-my-name Greenpeacer demurs; the best thing the organization could do, he says, would be to collapse and let a younger, less bureaucratic movement rise from its ruins.

Well, maybe, but if we don't have Greenpeace, we better come up with a replacement pretty quick. Environmentalism would be well served by an American organization with a million members, a global consciousness, and deep reserves of chutzpah. Such an organization would have to figure out how to get more money from people born between 1945 and 1965 at the same time as it runs programs and stages actions that engage and mobilize more people born between 1965 and 1985. Both things have to happen within the context of a strategy, and the strategy probably has to be extremely unsentimental. But 420,000 members and $21 million isn't a bad start.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE:

Greenpeacers past and present are major contributors to Liberty Tree. Current staffer Gerald Leape describes the recent battle over changes in dolphin-safe tuna legislation (Greenpeace was on the winning side, by the way). Greenpeace USA's former Executive Director Peter Bahouth occupies our current OpEd slot with a piece on the devolution of environmental enforcement, former Antarctica specialist Kieran Mulvaney tells you about new stresses on that continent, and former kamikaze skyscraper climber D.J. LaChapelle tells you about great football websites when you get a little tired of all the high-mindedness.

 

Recent "Today" columns:

8/20: Cattle and Jet Skis
8/19: Not Dirty, but Bad
8/18: Thirty Glorious Years
8/15: We Span the Energy Globe
8/14: Up in Flames
8/13: Environmentalism for Grown-Ups
8/12: Right to No
8/11: Cleavage
8/08: The Monsters from 12,000 BC
8/07: A Little More Room
8/06: Big Victory, I Guess
8/05: Necessary Vulgarization

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