Greenpeace's Biggest Operations March 21, 2025

Greenpeace´s boat photo Steve Sharp by Unsplash

Greenpeace's Biggest Operations

By Laurence COUSTAL, Raphaëlle PICARD

The environmental advocacy group Greenpeace, ordered by a US jury to pay more than $660 million in damages to an oil pipeline company, has built its reputation on often astonishing operations on land and at sea that captured headlines around the world.

Greenpeace was born with a bang on September 15, 1971, when a crew of 12 Canadians and Americans set out from Vancouver Island in an 80-foot boat called the Phyllis Cormack, which was renamed Greenpeace, to halt US nuclear tests.

Their mission was to steam to the Aleutian island of Amchitka and protest, or even prevent, the detonation of a test.

The boat didn't make it to Amchitka. US President Richard Nixon delayed the test and the crew was arrested in the Aleutian port of Akutan by the US Coastguard on a technicality. The following year Washington abandoned the site for nuclear testing.

Greenpeace's Rainbow Warrior ship was bombed by French agents in Auckland harbor on July 10, 1985.

The French secret service blew two holes in the Rainbow Warrior's hull, sinking the vessel and killing Greenpeace photographer Fernando Pereira.

Paris wanted to halt Greenpeace's plans to disrupt French nuclear tests in Polynesia.

The sinking of the original Warrior is seen as a key event in Pacific history, leading to the end of nuclear testing on the islands.

Greenpeace was a major player in the 1980s campaigns targeting Canada over the hunting of baby seals.

Its teams went to the ice floe in Newfoundland and tracked from a helicopter the icebreakers of baby seal hunters.

On March 2, 1983, the activists stopped before the bow of one of the ships carrying the youngest seals, whose white fur changed to grey-black after a few weeks.

The images worked: the then European Economic Community banned imports of the seal fur.

Greenpeace activists climbed onto the Prirazlomnaya oil rig in the Arctic on September 18, 2013 to protest against plans to drill for oil by Russian giant Gazprom in the region, which has particularly fragile ecosystems.

The 30 team members were detained in Russia. Only 100 days later were the foreign activists allowed to leave the country.

Before dawn on October 12, 2017, Greenpeace activists broke into a French nuclear power plant and set off fireworks at the foot of a spent fuel pool -- where nuclear plants store highly radioactive fuel rods that are removed from reactors after their use.

The stunt at the plant in Cattenom, near the border with Luxembourg, was intended to show the facility's vulnerability to attack.

Since the 2000s, Greenpeace has carried out numerous break-ins. An activist flew in 2012 over the plant at Bugey southern France in an ultralight plane.

Greenpeace said that the Cattenom break-in resulted in the first prison sentences against its activists, which on appeal were amended to fines.

Towards 6:00 am on October 29, 2019, around 50 Greenpeace activists wearing orange blocked the entrance to a refinery in La Mede in southern France, where oil giant Total used controversial palm oil to produce biofuel.

They placed two large orange containers in front of the entrance, with a protester chaining themselves to each.

lc-rap/jmy/yad