50 Fun Facts About Greenpeace

In which New Zealand city did French secret agents bomb and sink Greenpeace's Rainbow Warrior in 1985?

Auckland became the scene of a scandal that cost the French defence minister his job. The ship had been about to lead a protest fleet toward a nuclear test site in the Pacific.

Which toy maker did a 2014 Greenpeace video target over its decades-old partnership with an Arctic oil driller?

Lego had put the oil firm's logo on toy sets since the 1960s. Greenpeace's parody film about the deal passed nine million views on YouTube.

In which Canadian city did a small anti-nuclear committee turn itself into Greenpeace in the early 1970s?

Vancouver locals joke that in any bar you can sit beside someone who claims to have founded Greenpeace. The organisation itself says there was no single founder.

Greenpeace's Greenfreeze technology of the 1990s removed ozone-harming gases from which common household appliance?

Refrigerators built the Greenfreeze way cool with hydrocarbons instead of CFCs. Greenpeace kept the design open for anyone to copy, and by 2011 more than 600 million units were in use.

Which oil company gave up dumping its Brent Spar platform in the Atlantic after Greenpeace occupied it in 1995?

Shell gave way after a boycott of its petrol stations spread across northern Europe. The giant storage buoy was later cut up and reused to build a quay in Norway.

Which ancient site in Peru did Greenpeace activists damage in 2014, laying a banner beside a hummingbird figure?

Nazca Lines visitors must wear special footwear, but the activists walked the fragile desert surface in ordinary shoes. Greenpeace apologised, and Peru's culture ministry called the harm irreparable.

Which rival anti-whaling group did Paul Watson found after Greenpeace voted him off its board in 1977?

Sea Shepherd grew out of Watson's belief in confrontation, which clashed with Greenpeace's strict nonviolence. Greenpeace has since criticised the way his crews tangle with whaling ships.

Thirty Greenpeace activists seized at an Arctic oil platform in 2013 were first charged with which crime?

Piracy carried a sentence of up to fifteen years. Prosecutors cut the charge to hooliganism a month later, then dropped the case, and the whole group, known as the Arctic 30, went free.

Greenpeace ran its own year-round base from 1987 to 1991 while campaigning to make which continent a World Park?

Antarctica's World Park Base was the only non-government station there, and it earned Greenpeace a seat at treaty meetings. A 1991 protocol then put the whole landmass off limits to mineral extraction.

Greenpeace's founding voyage in 1971 set out to stop a US nuclear test on an island in which state?

Alaska's remote Amchitka was the target. The bomb went off anyway, the largest underground blast the United States ever set off, but the remaining tests planned for the island were abandoned.

Which US president dropped further Amchitka nuclear tests months after the first Greenpeace protest voyage?

Richard Nixon called off the remaining hydrogen bomb tests in early 1972. The protest boat never reached the island, yet news of its voyage had stirred up public sympathy for the cause.

Which singer joined James Taylor and Phil Ochs at the 1970 benefit concert that paid for Greenpeace's first voyage?

Joni Mitchell asked her then boyfriend James Taylor to come along. Joan Baez could not appear herself but put the organiser, Irving Stowe, in touch with Mitchell.

Which newspaper columnist aboard the 1971 protest boat went on to become Greenpeace's first president?

Bob Hunter is the subject of the 2015 documentary How to Change the World. Time magazine named him one of the eco-heroes of the 20th century.

Who coined the word Greenpeace at a 1970 committee meeting by joining two ideas the group cared about?

Bill Darnell answered a parting wish for peace by suggesting they make it a green one. The phrase became the name of the first protest boat, then of the whole movement.

Which founding member first proposed taking a boat into a nuclear test zone, the plan that created Greenpeace?

Marie Bohlen took the idea from Albert Bigelow, who had tried to steer a small ketch toward a Pacific test site in 1958. Her suggestion reached the press almost at once.

Which pacifist faith did Greenpeace founders Irving and Dorothy Stowe belong to when they began their protest?

Quakers practise bearing witness, protesting a wrong simply by being present. Irving Stowe passed that idea on to the committee that grew into Greenpeace.

Greenpeace co-founder Paul Côté won an Olympic bronze medal in 1972, a year after the first voyage, in which sport?

Sailing brought Côté his bronze in the Soling keelboat class. He had been a law student and peace activist when he helped set up the founding committee in 1970.

Which ecologist from Greenpeace's first voyage left in 1986 and became one of its fiercest public critics?

Patrick Moore says the movement gave up science for sensationalism. Greenpeace answers that he trades on long-gone ties to speak for the nuclear and logging industries.

Greenpeace's first protest vessel in 1971 was a halibut boat called the Phyllis Cormack: who was Phyllis Cormack?

The skipper's wife gave her name to John Cormack's wooden boat, built in 1941. For the voyage the crew renamed it Greenpeace, a name the whole organisation later took.

What was the job of Fernando Pereira, the one person killed when Greenpeace's Rainbow Warrior was bombed in 1985?

Photographer Fernando Pereira went back below deck for his cameras after the first blast. A second bomb went off minutes later and he drowned as the ship flooded.

Which French president was revealed in 2005 to have personally approved the bombing of Greenpeace's Rainbow Warrior?

François Mitterrand gave the go-ahead to his spy chief, a report published twenty years after the attack showed. In 1985 an official French inquiry had declared the government innocent.

Two French agents caught after the Rainbow Warrior bombing posed as newlyweds carrying which country's passports?

Switzerland's passports, carried by the fake couple, helped police work out who the pair really were. Both pleaded guilty to manslaughter and were sentenced to ten years.

Greenpeace's Rainbow Warrior was named after a 1962 book describing a supposed prophecy of which peoples?

Native Americans never told such a prophecy: it comes from an evangelical tract. A copy was passed around on Greenpeace's first voyage and later inspired the ship's name.

What kind of vessel was the first Rainbow Warrior before Greenpeace bought and refitted it in the 1970s?

A fishing trawler named Sir William Hardy, it was built in Aberdeen in 1955 for the British fisheries ministry. The refit that turned it into a protest ship took four months.

The Rainbow Warrior's first Greenpeace mission in 1978 was to disrupt which country's whaling fleet?

Iceland's whalers were the first target of the newly refitted ship. Within a few years its crews were also confronting the dumping of radioactive waste and nuclear tests in the Pacific.

After Greenpeace retired the second Rainbow Warrior in 2011, what new role did the schooner take on in Bangladesh?

A hospital ship run by the charity Friendship, it was renamed Rongdhonu, the Bengali word for rainbow. It served until 2018, when it was sold for scrap.

Greenpeace's icebreaker Arctic Sunrise, bought in 1995, had spent its earlier life as a ship hunting which animals?

Seals were its quarry under the Norwegian name Polarbjørn, which means polar bear. Greenpeace had been campaigning against commercial sealing since the 1970s.

The Greenpeace ship Esperanza, named by visitors to its website, began life in 1984 as what kind of Soviet Navy vessel?

A fireboat in its first career, it was relaunched by Greenpeace in 2002 as the largest and fastest ship in its fleet. Its name is the Spanish word for hope.

Which chocolate bar did a viral Greenpeace video attack over palm oil linked to rainforest destruction?

Kit Kat maker Nestlé answered the video, watched more than a million times, with a public pledge to stop buying palm oil tied to deforestation.

Which ape stars in Greenpeace's 2018 animated short about palm oil, later refused clearance as a British TV advert?

Orangutan character Rang-tan was launched ahead of World Orangutan Day. The ad clearance body Clearcast turned down a supermarket's version of the film that November.

More than 100 Nobel laureates signed a 2016 letter urging Greenpeace to stop opposing which genetically modified crop?

Golden rice is engineered to make beta-carotene, which the body turns into vitamin A. Greenpeace argues that other ways of tackling malnutrition are already working.

Greenpeace's Detox campaign pressed brands in which industry to stop releasing hazardous chemicals into rivers in China?

Fashion and sportswear labels were named in the 2011 Dirty Laundry report, which traced hormone-disrupting chemicals to two textile plants. Several brands then promised to phase them out.

From 2006 to 2017 Greenpeace published a guide ranking the biggest firms in which industry on toxic materials?

Consumer electronics makers of phones and PCs were scored on hazardous substances and e-waste. The final edition judged 17 companies on energy use, resources and chemicals.

Which small craft did Greenpeace activists first steer between Soviet harpoons and whales off California in 1975?

Inflatables, the fast rubber Zodiacs, let crews dart in front of the harpoon ships. Film of a harpoon fired over their heads ran on all three US television networks the next evening.

To which Pacific atoll, a French nuclear test site, did David McTaggart sail his yacht as Greenpeace III in 1972?

Moruroa is where French commandos later boarded the yacht and beat McTaggart. A crew member's photographs of the assault went public, and France then ended its atmospheric tests.

Before he led Greenpeace International, David McTaggart was a three-time Canadian champion in which racket sport?

Badminton made McTaggart national singles champion from 1956 to 1958, and he played for Canada in the Thomas Cup. He then prospered as a builder before turning to protest.

Greenpeace climbers painted which British prime minister's first name on a Kingsnorth power station chimney in 2007?

Gordon Brown was in office when six climbers scaled the 200-metre stack. A jury cleared them after they argued they were preventing greater damage from climate change.

Greenpeace activists draped which British prime minister's Yorkshire home in black fabric in 2023 over new oil licences?

Rishi Sunak's house had its whole facade covered, a protest against his government's decision to grant fresh licences for oil exploration.

Greenpeace International, created in 1979 to unite its squabbling national offices, is based in which European city?

Amsterdam became the base after European branches paid off the debts of the founding Canadian office. Under the new structure every regional office got one vote.

Which country's prosecutors declared Greenpeace an 'undesirable organisation' in 2023, ending its work there?

Russia's Prosecutor-General accused Greenpeace of meddling in internal affairs and undermining the economy. The conservation charity WWF was banned there in the same year.

A US jury in 2025 ordered Greenpeace to pay hundreds of millions over protests against which oil pipeline?

Dakota Access builder Energy Transfer accused Greenpeace of backing the Standing Rock protests of 2016 and 2017. Greenpeace denied wrongdoing and appealed.

Which state energy giant runs Prirazlomnaya, the Arctic oil platform Greenpeace activists tried to climb in 2013?

Gazprom's rig had been the target of a similar Greenpeace protest a year earlier. This time coastguards seized the campaigners' ship and towed it 500 miles to port.

Which now-familiar way of recruiting donors did Greenpeace pioneer in the 1990s as its supporter numbers fell?

Street sign-ups, known as face-to-face fundraising, put recruiters in public places asking passers-by to commit to a monthly direct debit.

Greenpeace refuses money from governments and companies but accepts it from which kind of body in the Netherlands?

A national lottery, the Dutch Postcode Lottery, is the single exception. Greenpeace screens every large gift and turns away foundations that are bankrolled by governments or political parties.

Kumi Naidoo, who ran Greenpeace worldwide from 2009 to 2015, later became secretary general of which organisation?

Amnesty International appointed Naidoo in 2018. He had started out as a teenage organiser of school boycotts against apartheid in Durban and was expelled for it.

Under which obscure maritime law, last used successfully in 1890, did US prosecutors charge Greenpeace in 2003?

Sailormongering laws were written to stop people boarding ships to lure crews ashore with drink. Greenpeace was charged after activists boarded a cargo ship carrying mahogany, and the case was dismissed.

Greenpeace's founders split in 1970 from which older conservation group, unhappy at being linked to their voyage?

Sierra Club members themselves, the founders were frustrated by its inaction over the nuclear tests. When the press tied their boat plan to the organisation it objected, so they set up alone.

Which religious leader blessed the Greenpeace flag in 1972 during the campaign against French nuclear tests?

Pope Paul VI gave the blessing after Ben Metcalfe, the first Greenpeace chairman, was arrested in Paris and expelled to Italy.

Jennifer Morgan left the leadership of Greenpeace International in 2022 to become climate envoy for which country?

Germany's foreign ministry made the American-born campaigner its special representative for international climate policy, a post she held until 2025.

Greenpeace was fined in 2005 after its second Rainbow Warrior ran aground on Tubbataha Reef in which country?

Philippines officials fined Greenpeace US$7,000 after the crew, there to inspect the reef for coral bleaching, hit it. Greenpeace paid, saying the charts it had been given were out of date.