Greenpeace
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50 free Greenpeace trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Greenpeace has no single founder. It grew out of a handful of pacifists, journalists and sailors who chartered a creaky boat in 1971 to get in the way of a nuclear test, and people have argued ever since about who counts as a founder. That argument is part of the fun, and this quiz walks through the names that matter and what each one actually did. The questions cover the founding committee and its first voyage, the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior, the fleet, and the campaigns that made headlines, from whaling and nuclear testing to oil rigs, palm oil and genetically modified crops. The lawsuits and the missteps are here too. It is written for curious players, students and quiz hosts. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you finish knowing more than when you started.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which New Zealand city did French secret agents bomb and sink Greenpeace's Rainbow Warrior in 1985?
Auckland
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.
Q 02Which toy maker did a 2014 Greenpeace video target over its decades-old partnership with an Arctic oil driller?
Lego
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.
Q 03In which Canadian city did a small anti-nuclear committee turn itself into Greenpeace in the early 1970s?
Vancouver
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.
Q 04Greenpeace's Greenfreeze technology of the 1990s removed ozone-harming gases from which common household appliance?
Refrigerators
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.
Q 05Which oil company gave up dumping its Brent Spar platform in the Atlantic after Greenpeace occupied it in 1995?
Shell
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.
Q 06Which ancient site in Peru did Greenpeace activists damage in 2014, laying a banner beside a hummingbird figure?
Nazca Lines
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.
Q 07Which rival anti-whaling group did Paul Watson found after Greenpeace voted him off its board in 1977?
Sea Shepherd
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.
Q 08Thirty Greenpeace activists seized at an Arctic oil platform in 2013 were first charged with which crime?
Piracy
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.
Q 09Greenpeace ran its own year-round base from 1987 to 1991 while campaigning to make which continent a World Park?
Antarctica
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.
Q 10Greenpeace's founding voyage in 1971 set out to stop a US nuclear test on an island in which state?
Alaska
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.
Q 11Which US president dropped further Amchitka nuclear tests months after the first Greenpeace protest voyage?
Richard Nixon
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.
Q 12Which singer joined James Taylor and Phil Ochs at the 1970 benefit concert that paid for Greenpeace's first voyage?
Joni Mitchell
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.
Q 13Which newspaper columnist aboard the 1971 protest boat went on to become Greenpeace's first president?
Bob Hunter
Q 21Which French president was revealed in 2005 to have personally approved the bombing of Greenpeace's Rainbow Warrior?
François Mitterrand
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.
Q 22Two French agents caught after the Rainbow Warrior bombing posed as newlyweds carrying which country's passports?
Switzerland
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.
Q 23Greenpeace's Rainbow Warrior was named after a 1962 book describing a supposed prophecy of which peoples?
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.
Q 14Who coined the word Greenpeace at a 1970 committee meeting by joining two ideas the group cared about?
Bill Darnell
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.
Q 15Which founding member first proposed taking a boat into a nuclear test zone, the plan that created Greenpeace?
Marie Bohlen
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.
Q 16Which pacifist faith did Greenpeace founders Irving and Dorothy Stowe belong to when they began their protest?
Quakers
Quakers practise bearing witness, protesting a wrong simply by being present. Irving Stowe passed that idea on to the committee that grew into Greenpeace.
Q 17Greenpeace co-founder Paul Côté won an Olympic bronze medal in 1972, a year after the first voyage, in which sport?
Sailing
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.
Q 18Which ecologist from Greenpeace's first voyage left in 1986 and became one of its fiercest public critics?
Patrick Moore
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.
Q 19Greenpeace's first protest vessel in 1971 was a halibut boat called the Phyllis Cormack: who was Phyllis Cormack?
The skipper's wife
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.
Q 20What was the job of Fernando Pereira, the one person killed when Greenpeace's Rainbow Warrior was bombed in 1985?
Photographer
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.
Native Americans
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.
Q 24What kind of vessel was the first Rainbow Warrior before Greenpeace bought and refitted it in the 1970s?
A fishing trawler
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.
Q 25The Rainbow Warrior's first Greenpeace mission in 1978 was to disrupt which country's whaling fleet?
Iceland
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.
Q 26After Greenpeace retired the second Rainbow Warrior in 2011, what new role did the schooner take on in Bangladesh?
A hospital ship
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.
Q 27Greenpeace's icebreaker Arctic Sunrise, bought in 1995, had spent its earlier life as a ship hunting which animals?
Seals
Seals were its quarry under the Norwegian name Polarbjørn, which means polar bear. Greenpeace had been campaigning against commercial sealing since the 1970s.
Q 28The Greenpeace ship Esperanza, named by visitors to its website, began life in 1984 as what kind of Soviet Navy vessel?
A fireboat
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.
Q 29Which chocolate bar did a viral Greenpeace video attack over palm oil linked to rainforest destruction?
Kit Kat
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.
Q 30Which ape stars in Greenpeace's 2018 animated short about palm oil, later refused clearance as a British TV advert?
Orangutan
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.